If I could have one wish, it would be to outlive the rest of humanity, and watch the world recover.

Trump said he demanded unconditional surrender, we just didn’t know he meant America’s.

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

people need to understand that using tax money to fund programmes that support the community is LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT OF HAVING A GOVERNMENT

You can be repulsed by the general idea that there's a trillionaire while also being repulsed by the specific idea that it's Elon Musk.

Joni Mitchell and David Hockney holding hands

"childless woman" is such an 19th-century-ass insult. what else you got. do I render inferior tallow? do my cabbages grow pale and blemished? does the quality of my sock-darning bring shame upon my father's name?

Honestly, i don't understand this economy when nursing homes are so expensive they bankrupt our grandparents but nursing home aides need to use food banks. daycare is so expensive it eats up one parent's entire paycheck and yet daycare providers only make $10/hr and need second jobs. college costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and puts students into debt for life and yet we have thousands of professors living in their cars. everything we need is astronomically expensive and yet almost none of the money we pay is going towards the people actually doing the work and providing the services.

I just signed a @MarineLife_Aus petition: Ban bottom trawling in Australian marine parks . Sign here: saveourmarinelife.org.au/act…

No one earns a billion dollars. Billionaires exist because millions of workers are paid far less than the value they create. Nobody works a billion times harder than a nurse, a farmer, or a teacher. Stop glorifying wealth hoarders. They’re just professional wage thieves.

“If we wish to diminish the love of money which, we are told, is the root of all evil, the first step must be the creation of a system in which everyone has enough and no one has too much.” — Bertrand Russell

Just a friendly reminder: Minimum wage exists because they would pay you less if they could

My children are locked in the house afraid to go to school because of racists Anselme has been living in Northern Ireland since 2013 He and his family - including his two sons aged 9 and 8 years old, and his 2 year old daughter - were forced to flee their home last night

This is biblical. A woman in her eighties. Ten years into Alzheimer's. Hadn't spoken a full sentence in five years. Takes one, 5 gram dose of psilocybin. She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life, recognized family and held real conversations. She regained bladder control after five years, walked on her own. and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks.

Hundreds of excavators arrive by barge. Soldiers plant stakes in customary land. Communities are told after the bulldozing begins. Indonesia’s Merauke project is the world’s largest deforestation event in progress blakandblack.com/2026/06/10/…

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PREACH THIS! Tree hollows take DECADES to form, flowers take years to begin. Mature trees are 100x more important to wildlife and once they’re gone species can go extinct before you even reforest! 👊🌳

There’s a straw…man, waiting in the sky.

People have been asking for images of the flesh-eating screwworm that's been threatening livestock

Knicks fans are currently going viral for burning sage outside Madison Square Garden following Trump's presence in the arena.

It’s tummy-o’clock and Wangalla is making her feelings known. She was rescued as a days-old newborn, so we feed her a specialist milk formula on demand. Over time, she’ll transition to hand-fed bottles of milk on a schedule – every three hours, day and night. We suspect that, then as now, she’ll chivvy the Keepers along if they’re even a minute late, and she’ll make sure to watch over and inspect the milk-making process too! You can adopt Wangalla today and help provide the milk, round-the-clock care and expert support she needs to grow strong and be ready for the wild: sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/o…