Danny van Read

The Long Neolithic lives as call to mystery, call to wonder. Whether we respond to those calls as archaeologists, ley hunters or stone pilgrims – we respond with stories. The Long Neolithic tithes in narrative. With typology or folklore, we all pay our dues. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

The contrast between the utterly sycophantic coverage this week of Kemi Badenoch, whose party has a truly atrocious electoral record under her leadership, and the utterly dismissive coverage of the Greens, tells you everything you need to know about media bias in the UK

This a million times. People of colour being dragged on to debate maniacs about imaginary labels & race science is an abomination. proper ‘how German are you’ Nazi shit Note that people like me with white migrant parentage never asked to defend our identity Englishness. Is. A. Made. Up. Thing

60% of those who responded to the Bank of England consultation called for pictures of wildlife on bank notes. Does he think the British people are conducting a "slow, steady and relentless attack" on themselves?

Traitor.

over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say

Exactly what “standards” are those, Robert? You collude with pornographers over property deals. You take dodgy donations. You whore for racists and christofascists for personal gain. You betray your political allies, friends and your country to sniff at power. You have no standards. You’re poison.

Autumn comes to the alleys with a crowding of ghosts. Schoolboy firework anticipation triggered by the smoke of every garden bonfire. Comes with half-heard voices full of leaf-rasp and branch-stretch. It comes with waking shadows. – #DAKilory, 1982 #Autumn

If you don't know what folic acid does when added to flour, do look it up, and marvel at the fact Restore has decided to campaign against it.

If I ever used cash…

It’s been so long since I’ve seen a fifty, I’d forgotten Alan Turing was on in. For some reason the frothing nationalist fuckwits complaining about the changes neglected to mention him. 🤔

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

Being a sentient person in 2026 means arguing in public for issues you never thought you would have to articulate out loud: "Read to your children yourself instead of outsourcing it to a robot!" "Don't televise executions!" Things like that.

My suspicion about this live-streamed execution, as someone who has watched a lot of Ukrainian drone footage and strongly suspects that's had an impact on his psyche, is that even MAGA Americans are going to find that they don't enjoy seeing someone killed nearly as much as they think they will.

"Does the UK want to reopen the bitter Brexit debate?" asks Vicki Young. There is a way of reviewing our relationship with Europe that does not reopen "the bitter Brexit debate", which I think is underpriced. We could all be honest and agree that Brexit was a shit idea.

God. We wasted an entire season of Origin Story telling the story of this word, when we could've just checked in with James here.

“Every member of this ethnic group is a criminal who needs to be imprisoned by the state” is just pure uncut Nazi shit

The collapse of the US empire is now too bleak to satirise.

Ossoff is going to win this race by 15 points, one of the biggest candidate disparities I’ve ever seen on top of a D+12 environment

Cyberpunke ys a cautionarye tale not a businesse planne

For 14yrs, the Tories cratered our economy, added thousands to our cost of living, melted down public services and brexited us into decades of eye-watering expense and lost opportunity. That’s still their plan. With tax breaks for the super rich paid for by welfare cuts. So what TF is this headline?

MOST CRITICALLY THIS.

This does in fact seem obvious to everyone apart from the people who came up with the policy.

Absolutely 👇 This.......

No, we should not be worried about pneumonic plague. We should worry instead about lack of transparency in public health crises from authoritarian governments and persistent undervaluing of public health resources and public health education in democracies.

A member of the Lyme Disease UK community, Deborah Bircham recently joined Cassie on the EpiccaTalks podcast to talk about her decades-long experience of living with invisible illness. Listen on Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6dBR... #LymeDisease #ChronicIllness #LymeCommunity

Something that i dont see talked about regarding the famous Laverne Cox trans tipping point cover is that the trans representation that was being celebrated and “normalised“ was the depiction of a trans woman abused in prison Dunno looking back im a bit like, oh, yeah

Folklore likes to travel ... #FolkloreThursday

Our representative in the city that invented ethics, you say? How about we send the most farcically venal person imaginable? A sort of corruption miasma, into the cradle of democracy.

Excellent front page here

Life

Unlike the British press, coverage that’s not uttery deranged.

I swear: on present showing, if an actual asteroid is detected on course to wipe out the UK in fifteen years, our governing apparat will spend the entire time blathering on about immigration, then proudly unveil a largely nominal affordable housing scheme at the projected impact site.

Trying to appease the racists over immigration for the last thirty years (I include Blair here) has led us up shit creek without even a stump of a paddle.

The party is polling, on aggregate, nine points lower than the day she took over, even with every right-wing media shoulder to the Badenoch wheel for several months now, and Reform in free fall, they have managed a one-point improvement since their party conference last year.

finally trying Andor and if you told me some old imperial guy was saying to juke the crime stats within 20 minutes i would have been here sooner

just think: boycotting the Harry Potter show means hurting JK Rowling AND the Ellisons now

This post has not gone viral and it deserves to. It needs to. This is the physics, that combined with dumb, white, male privilege, has lead to Trump, to neoliberalism, to Christian ethnofascism, to Ukraine, to fighting the existence of marginalised groups - from women to trans persons to minorities.

Nothing makes me want to move permanently to the woods more than receiving endless 10-paragraph e-mails made entirely of sentences like "You have built a framework that is both intimately grounded in your own research and universally applicable."

I wonder if de-slopping the internet will ever be possible. Maybe old paper copies of Encyclopaedia Britannica will become sacred texts.