There’a cult of ignorance in the US & there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political & cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

She was 57 years old. White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject. She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home. The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene. Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it. The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her. Most people would have gone quiet. Mary Beard went further in. She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation. And she found it had always been there. In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men. She goes. Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately. Not as ancient history. As a pattern. In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts. In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches. Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country. The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life. Mary Beard had found something important. In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening. Her argument was precise and devastating. The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years. The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like. She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it. The threats continued. But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked. They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them. The room had been designed without them in mind. That is not a personal failing. That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision. And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it. Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men. He was wrong then. He is still wrong now. And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it. via The Inspireist #FeministFriday #HERstory

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature.” — Hubert Reeves

CNN's Laura Paddison explains how a new study links this "cold blob" in the Atlantic Ocean to the weakening and potential collapse of a critical system of ocean currents that would have catastrophic consequences worldwide. Read more: cnn.it/447P6P6

“I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.” - John Lennon

“Dear migrants, before I say any other word to you, I want to bow before your dignity. “You are not numbers or case files. “You are people — with a family and a home left behind, with dreams that no one has the right to scorn.” — Pope Leo XIV

Speaking as the journalist who broke the Beatles' (posthumous) reunion story in The New Yorker and published a respected book on the band, it's rare I come across an original take on The Beatles. But this one is. And wise and beautiful too. Well done, @MrPitbull07

There were multiple times where my son said to me throughout the game “dad, get up, the game is not over.” He saw me dejected and in shock. Knicks fans were facing the thought of dropping 2 at home and our Championship dreams thrown out the window. These Knicks are teaching young kids what it means to fight. Older Knicks fans have memories of disappointment, the younger Knicks fans have seen no lead too big to comeback from. Jalen Brunson, I have never seen anything like it in my life. The ultimate role model. A humble fighter, with no fear of the moment. He is teaching millions of kids the way. Never stop fighting. Constant reminders throughout this Playoffs. Just incredible what Sports can teach you.

Seinfeld episode 2026: Jerry gets tickets courtside and brings George, who decides, with the Knicks down 20 with 10 minutes left, he will leave the game early to beat the rush out of MSG. As the Knicks mount a comeback he tries to get back into the Garden. He waves his ticket, name drops James Dolan, but nothing works and he ends up getting arrested. Meantime, Kramer sneaks into the Garden and helps Mike Brown draw up the game winning play.

Excellent brief explainer by @WeatherProf of what the likely most powerful El Nino in many years will mean for weather in the months ahead. @CoveringClimate can help journalists who want to make the climate connection in their reporting of all this.

Fans caught Zohran Mamdani (@NYCMayor) out at the bar in NYC watching the Knicks game last night. He looked like every Knicks fan in New York after that wild win. Inside Peg’s Cavalier in Queens, the mayor and a packed crowd erupted as the Knicks pulled off a historic NBA playoff comeback as NYC comes together.

Any other player in the league does this would be ejected. The fact this has now happened in back to back games and hasn’t been called for it is egregious.

"It's real. It's us. And we have to ... deal with reality, rather than ... hoping it goes away." Well said,@WeatherProf! @CoveringClimate is here to help journalists tell the climate story with the accuracy and urgency it requires.

Must read piece on climate inequalities and how to solve them, by @jonathanwatts theguardian.com/environment/…

I wrote about balcony solar, California's clean energy future and tomorrow's gubernatorial primary, which is swimming in oil and utility money. One of the leading Democrats says balcony solar is amazing. The other one is staying quiet. climatecoloredgoggles.com/p/…

D'accordo!

Hear, hear to "Let's all read more books." It's especially important for journalists, so we can look beyond the froth of daily events to see the larger forces at work and tell more insightful, useful stories. That's why @CoveringClimate often reviews climate books. Join us!

RT @KHayhoe: This article says climate change is “believed to have played a role” in the UK's extreme heat this week. As a climate scienti…

The summer is a time for young people to enjoy the city, have new experiences, get a job or simply rest. It’s not a time for violence. I sat down with violence interrupters and young men directly impacted by gun violence to talk about what this administration is doing to keep New Yorkers safe.   Real public safety means investing in people before tragedy strikes: summer jobs, mental health support, community programs, safe streets, and trusted messengers who grew up in our neighborhoods.