Claire Vaughan

Pretty crazy how important the blockade of a trade route is right now

sometimes, if you’re up early enough, you can hear them turn the birds on

A flyer for a livestreaming webinar introduced by the words "Bylines Network, Making Sense of our times: power, people and democracy in America. It is running at 6pm on 12 March and is free to friends of Bylines, or a one-off event fee of £3.50 can be paid. Booking is at http://bit.ly/bookBN The guests are Mike Galsworthy, Alexandra Hall Hall, Aaron Rupar, Anouska de Georgiou and Ben Meiselas.

Here's a reminder that the Bylines Network is running a special event on power, people and democracy in the US tomorrow. It's aimed primarily at a non-US audience who want to better understand what's happening there, and it's now open to the public on payment of a one-time £3.50 fee.

The US bombing of schoolchildren in Iran is the biggest single US massacre of civilians since My Lai. The Israeli bombing of Tehran’s oil storage constitutes the biggest single act of chemical warfare against a civilian population in history. Grotesque new depths of barbarism.

The Crawlers from Mickey 17

The super pigs from Okja

Some thoughts on Okja (Bong Joon Ho, 2017), which we watched as the final film in Representing Animals today. It's an obvious predecessor to Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025), both of which use animal alterity and oppression as a lens to critique capitalism. Both also have a similar cartoonish tone.

March 11, 2011 tsunami washing ashore on the Sendai coastal plain, sweeping into a coastal village. I visited this spot a few months later in August, 2011.

15 years ago right about this time of day, the Tohoku-oki earthquake was unleashed, with as much as 100 meters of fault slip documented at the Japan Trench. The resulting tsunami rocked Japan and the world, claiming ~18,000 lives. It was one of only 5 M9 quakes ever recorded. ⚒️

The Broligarchy's First World War? AI-guided weapons, two out-of-control authoritarians, no legal authority and a toxic mess of masculinity: welcome to the manosphere's first major conflict

"Forget Andrew Tate, this is the real manosphere. One whose edges we can’t even see because we’re living inside it," @carolecadwalla

As Nick Clegg’s in the spotlight again, here’s a short thread of the time I took his bizarre 2020 Politico photo shoot and turned them into Edinburgh posters. 1/4

Political will.

a neil gaiman defender contests a response of 'no' to a link to a substack, and is told 'I see that like Neil Gaiman, you don't understand that no is a complete sentence'

you want to see a murder

Seeing people deriding The Bride! for being too heavy-handed in its feminist messaging on the same day The Hollywood Reporter releases an interview with Harvey Weinstein from prison is giving me whiplash.

Quote posting with a proof of concept. tubitv.com/movies/10000...

They need to stop trying to make everything television. Podcasts are now filmed to be talk shows. Tiktok is leaning on their creators to have television-like sets. Movies are bursting the scope runtime and would often work better as mini-series... Different platforms suit different forms.

Exactly! Look at this shit. The Washington Post doesn't exist anymore. Bezos killed it. This is why we need to throw these pubs in the garbage and stop referencing them. They're not real anymore. You learn nothing and get fed shit.

Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra in Stable Condition After Stroke: 'I Still Have a Lot of Great Stuff in Me' Jello Biafra, formerly of the punk-rock group Dead Kennedys, said he’s in stable condition after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke Saturday night.

Nay, Reaper, you bony motherfucker! Ye shall not claim Jello just yet!

Go hit up Pennsylvania Avenue instead. A few folks there are seriously overdue for a visit.

www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

New grad students often adopt a stance of hypercriticism as a shortcut to seeming savvy.

When I was one, Nick Salvatore told us he didn't like "shit-on-the-book seminars" so we would instead spend our time talking about what *worked* in various texts to see what we could learn from other authors.

129 Years Later, The First-Ever Sci-Fi Film Has Finally Been Found Considered lost for over a century, Georges Méliès' 'Gugusse and the Automaton' features cinema’s earliest robot.

On Georges Méliès’s re-discovered 1897 sci-fi short, and the enduring anxiety of technological replacement:
www.inverse.com/entertainmen...

Are you back in Spain? I was talking to Marc about European festivals so there's a good chance.

Most accurate portrait of modern culture currently available

Effi o Blaenau review – Greek myth retelling Iphigenia in Splott becomes blistering Welsh-language film Leisa Gwenllian is a force of nature as working-class heroine Effi in this big screen version of Gary Owen’s one-woman play

Effi o Blaenau hits screens in June. Beautifully shot, a fierce central performance. Marc Evans has been prolific in Welsh filmmaking, but this is closest to House of America, a film that made me and my friends feel seen amongst Cool Cymru bluster. Go see it!

www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ma...

Yay! Allan yn Mehefin

Glynn Viv is great! Indoor market is pretty brilliant too.

Matt is a wonderful writer, he's really supportive to the community and he runs a fantastic bookshop. If you live stateside get some treasures from there mzs.press

Yeah, can you imagine being actually upset by the idea that your girlfriend was being flirted with by the John Cale??? I'd be crowing about it for weeks. He was very insecure and it was a stupid relationship.

I love John Cale. I went to see him with an ex once in Cardiff and was down the front and entranced and the ex told me that John Cale was flirting with me and I was encouraging it and that's the reason he is now an ex.

Yes! Cannot wait!

Would you like to swing on a star?

I remember. Being able to stop time is still the one superpower I crave.

maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing here but this is the wildest shit I've ever heard a white South African say and I study racism for a living

‘The Most Dangerous Man in the World’ Mojtaba Khamenei, a candidate to succeed his father as Iran’s supreme leader, is no reformer.

"One acquaintance of Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of Ali Khamenei, told me that he was the most dangerous man in the world and considerably more violent and ideological than his father. One thing Mojtaba is not is a religious scholar."
#EpsteinWar

Happy International Women's Day! Go watch a movie directed by a woman like:

TITANE, RAW - Julia Ducournau
LUCKY, 12 HOUR SHIFT - Brea Grant
A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT - Ana Lily Amirpour
THE SUBSTANCE - Coralie Fargeat
TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID - Issa López
SLASH/BACK - Nyla Innuksuk

#filmsky