Rachel McCormack

Quotas on women going to Yooni abolished when I was 12 Women got the right to buy drinks in pubs when I was 20 Women got Piss Equality when I was 29 (didn't need to have women's toilets before) Marital rape abolished when I was 41

A haunting dispatch from Margaret Atwood on the Steven Galloway affair, and why she insisted on standing up for due process in the face of ostracism. “If you’ve ever tut-tutted about Mao’s Red Guards and said “It can’t happen here,” take a look.” www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

I have made my very own Andy Warhol film

I have made my very own Andy Warhol film

The framing of this issue has annoyed me for years. The SG is not using *general* planning powers to block new nuclear, but *specific* consenting powers in the Electricity Act 1989. This isn't an abuse of power or an unintended consequence, but a deliberate choice made in the Scotland Act 1999.

@danrebellato.bsky.social there you are!

We're very sad to hear of the death of Peter May, he was a wonderful writer and a generous and gracious presence at the festival over the years. Here he is, at the most recent of six appearances in 2024 - Sending love to Janice and the rest of his family. He will be missed.

It's never "AI agent breaks containment, cures cancer, does a bit of tidying up and puts the kettle on", is it?

‘In an age of statue-toppling, it is jaw-dropping to see the words “Mussolini Dux” still carved into the 17.5-metre marble obelisk that fronts the sports complex of the Foro Italico in Rome.’ @danigaravelli.bsky.social on the cult of Mussolini. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Edinburgh people: I'm in your town this coming weekend, with a matinee performance on Sunday of my Nights Out In The Kitchen show. It's funny. I answer some very big questions, like "am I a bastard?" Then I answer your questions. Tickets at the link below. cultureedinburgh.com/events/jay-r...

#MyNameIsMacKenzieBly Thought for the Day:

To all my Edinburgh friends, please do come along to my talk on Thursday 29 October at The Edinburgh Bookshop where I'll be in conversation with James Naughtie about my new book #Battle. Tickets available here: www.tickettailor.com/events/theed...

Can we just ban men in public for a wee* while? *maybe a decade or so

the modern banking service really is the prime example of enshitifaction. Am beginning to understand why so many right wing Americans lost money to bitcoin as they didn’t trust banks.

A set of headlines which would have been astonishing just a few years ago.

Always a sign the right in Argentina is presiding over failure when they roll out the Falklands discourse.

France Culture radio is currently broadcasting a programme titled ‘Is the end of a book always a failure?’ My French comprehension isn’t good enough to take questions on the content. I can tell you the opener is about Proust and reading the end of his books.

Genuinely can't believe we're supposed to have a debate about whether DEI has reduced the quality of academic output whilst you have some of the critics writing entire papers on why women evolved to use a Dyson?

So many people in this wretched affair are incapable of registering the idea that the black people involved are in fact real people, rather than being rhetorical props for whatever unrelated point they wish to make.

"MEN ARE SLAVES TO THE WOMEN HERE!!" Fascinating to read Chinese, Turkish, Moroccan, Persian men's travelogues and diaries of Europe. I wager you will learn more from their accounts than many Western histories of the West!! www.ggd.world/p/men-are-sl...

Hey folks. My author tour for this autumn is now live. Please do let me know if you're coming to any of the talks. Tickets available from my website listed.

Am sitting in a pub garden and looking suspiciously at three people with sunglasses who are looking at me with mine. We really don’t need even more mistrust and assumptions of bad faith around us.

Me (complacently SNP): you know Infantino built his power base by pandering to small and insignificant football associations You (in disbelief):

So US publishers are running scared of the AI accusations and taking it out on black people?

Why are the young team listening to INCREDIBLY bad early 90s style techo? It’s like the 1994 Valencian ruta del bacalao outside my house atm and I don’t have the drugs for this.

Is it just me or are a lot of the critiques of Emily Wilson on here just <uppity wumman>? She really is the bird that launched a thousand tweets, innit?

Scotland has fire season now. I can’t emphasise enough just how much more severe this will become in the next few decades.

From Thank You For Not Reading. Borges turns into Paulo Coehlo.

This guy who shows straight men on dating sights is incredible. Why are there no basic courses for men on ‘how to get a date from a dating app’?This stuff is wild www.instagram.com/reel/DYbfJqU...

That moment when we have to recognise the gap between the Glasgow we pretend we are and the Glasgow we actually are.

Am really enjoying Misha Glenny on In Our Time. He is really making it his own rather than a Melvyn tribute act.

Opportunity for the UK to expand it's higher ed research sector.... which we won't take

I travelled back in time and had food from Bergamo in 1995 tonight

If Claudia Winkelman had hosted a fight between Alan Hollinghurst and Ian McEwan her show would have survived.

Nice to see Just a Minute is back on Monday.

@lucyfishwife.bsky.social just seen the novel news. AMAZING!! HUGE CONGRATULATIONS! 🥳

Oh dear

Obviously, there are other big stories around today. But, as far as I can make out, the Indy is the only paper that splashes this morning on the Covid Inquiry's tale of billions wasted. Can only imagine the field-day the right-wing press would have had had it happened under a different government.

Hats off to whoever created this.

In Scotland-is-a-poorly-governed-hell-hole news:

I see we are now dying of twee in Scotland now that our politics are back to business as usual and mostly looking at England in a dumbfounded manner

I really do not care.

In the olden days children, Scotland’s finest legal academic minds merely photoshopped each others faces onto zoo animals.