Scottsbifh original @fuzzynotfurry - Tumblr Blog

Put a ring on it

Thieves Steal 4 Priceless Renaissance Artworks from Sicilian Museum

The missing works include three panels from a 15th-century altarpiece by Antonello da Messina, as well as a two-sided devotional painting by the artist.

Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Messina, in Italy’s Sicily region, this past weekend for the Procession of the Vara, an annual religious festival featuring floats and fanfare. As they celebrated, something sinister unfolded behind closed doors: a museum heist.

Using the large crowds as a distraction, an unknown number of thieves slipped into the Regional Museum of Messina without tripping any alarms. Once inside, they targeted Antonello da Messina’s Polyptych of San Gregorio, a 1473 altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary and Jesus, flanked by saints on either side.

The thieves removed the artwork’s five surviving panels and escaped with three. The other two were found leaning against a fence outside, perhaps abandoned in the rush to escape. A small devotional painting by Antonello, depicting the Madonna and Child with a Franciscan monk on one side and an adult Christ on the other, was also stolen, with the criminals smashing a display case to access it.

Thieves stole three panels (one of which is pictured at left) from Antonello da Messina’s Polyptych of San Gregorio. They also took a small devotional painting (seen at right).

“It is an extremely serious and significant loss,” Marisa Mercurio, the museum’s director, tells the Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo. “They have stolen works of enormous cultural, artistic and symbolic importance, not only for Messina but for Sicily as a whole. All we can do now is hope they are recovered as soon as possible.”

This isn’t the altarpiece’s first brush with destruction. It originally consisted of six panels, but one was destroyed in the 1908 earthquake that devastated Sicily and killed more than 40 percent of Messina’s population at the time.

Around 40 works by Antonello are known to survive today. The artist is regarded as one of the most important southern Italian painters of the Renaissance. His importance to Messina is undeniable.

“Antonello is the greatest ambassador of our city because he has Messina in his name,” Vincenzo Caruso, the city’s chief cultural official, tells the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo.

The Polyptych of San Gregorio (c. 1473).

Antonello has long been credited with introducing Flemish oil painting techniques and influences to Italy, although more recent research disputes this narrative. He was probably trained in Naples, where works by Netherlandish painters including Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden would have been available for study.

The artist “made a crucial contribution to the Renaissance by unifying two very important aspects of Renaissance art: the work of Flemish artists and Italian art,” art historian Grazia Musolino tells the Times.

The stolen polyptych panels and double-sided devotional painting were the only works by Antonello that remained on display in his native city. The altarpiece, painted six years before the artist’s death in 1479, had never left Messina before.

Earlier this year, the Italian government demonstrated the high esteem in which it holds Antonello and his work, paying $14.9 million for his painting Ecce Homo just before it was set to be auctioned in New York. In 2003, the small devotional sold at auction for roughly $410,000.

Antonello's Portrait of a Man (1475), which might be a self-portrait by the artist.

The theft comes just days after Italian officials celebrated welcome news: the recovery of three paintings that were stolen in March from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, a private museum outside the city of Parma. Painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, the artworks are collectively worth more than $10 million.

Police have opened an investigation into the Antonello heist and are hopeful that passers-by on the street, some of whom noticed a commotion inside the museum, might have taken photographs that could lead to arrests.

“A heritage belonging to all the people of Messina has been violated,” says Federico Basile, the city’s mayor, per Aleks Phillips. “Messina will not let its history be stolen.”

By Christian Thorsberg.

blondebrainpowered

The Muppet Show - 417: Star Wars - Pigs in Space: Star Wars cast aboard the Swinetrek, 1980

dreamilypurpleoutcast

mrmousetolliver

Harvey Milk (c.1958) probably by Joe Campbell Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk was born and raised in New York. He acknowledged his homosexuality in adolescence, but secretly pursued sexual relationships well into adulthood. Milk moved to San Francisco in 1972 and opened a camera store. After holding an assortment of jobs and frequently changing addresses, he settled in the Castro, a neighborhood that was experiencing a mass immigration of gay men and lesbians. He ran for city supervisor in 1973, but the existing gay political establishment resisted him. Milk's campaign was compared to theater due to his personality, earning media attention and votes, although not enough to be elected. He campaigned again in the next two supervisor elections, dubbing himself the "Mayor of Castro Street". The voter response caused him to also run for the California State Assembly. Due to his growing popularity, he led the gay rights movement in battles against anti-gay initiatives. Milk was elected city supervisor in 1977 after San Francisco began to choose neighborhood representatives rather than city-wide ones. During Milk's almost eleven months in office, he sponsored a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodations, housing, and employment. The supervisors passed the bill by a vote of 11–1, and Mayor George Moscone signed it into law.

On November 27, 1978, Milk and Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, a disgruntled former city supervisor who cast the sole vote against Milk's bill.

Despite his short political career, Milk became an icon in San Francisco and a martyr in the LGBTQ community. In 2002, Milk was called "the most famous and most significant openly LGB official ever elected in the United States". Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us." Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 (Source:Wikipedia)

brf-rumortrackinganon

Churchill War Rooms

⬆️Andrew (the tour guide from Westminster Abbey) telling us about the Churchill War Rooms (formerly the Cabinet War Rooms). The public entrance to the space is the domed roof near the center of the photo, next to the Treasury Building.

⬇️The map of the Churchill war rooms (left) and (right) the location of the rooms under the building. I did not know it was this big. I thought it was maybe four or five rooms at most.

⬆️The meeting room. Churchill's chair is in the center behind the red box. Still with gouges and scratches from his ring when he pounded the arm.

⬇️The weather station. "Fine & Warm" meant the staff could go out for air. "Windy" meant bombs expected, stay inside.

⬆️Churchill's liquor cabinet. I didn't know he was a functioning alcoholic. I really ought to read more about him.

⬇️A map of the area - the red dots are sites where bombs fell. The guide is pointing to where Churchill's bedroom was in the rooms, telling us how a bomb had fallen right outside the bedroom and, had it been live and exploded, Churchill and the staff in the war rooms likely wouldn't have survived. Thankfully it was a dud.

⬆️Some of the rooms, left in the same condition.

⬇️The Map Room, where staff tracked troop movements. August 16, 1944, is the last day the room was used - the calendar is still on the date. Evidently, the staff left the rooms, locked the door, and no one went in for 40 years till they decided to make it a museum. (I'm a little skeptical of that story...but at the same time it is believable because I've been in the basement of US government buildings and it really doesn't look like people have been there in decades either.)

⬆️Churchill's bedroom. He had large-scale maps posted on the walls and installed curtains so that whenever there were visitors, he could simply draw the curtains over the maps to hide troop movements. He did make a few BBC broadcast speeches from that desk.

⬇️The very exclusive Room 63, a water closet that came with its own watchman. But not really a water closet, that's just what they told everyone - it's actually the secure telephone room from which Churchill and FDR would speak.

As the story goes, the telephone line ran from here in the war rooms underground to Selfridge's, which was owned - at the time - by an American. The unit at Selfridge's scrambled the line, sent it overseas to the White House and FDR.

⬆️The War Rooms is also home to the Churchill Museum, which tells the life story of Winston Churchill and has many artifacts and objects from throughout his life - including his hat collection and many of the honors he received.

⬇️Those of you who've been around for awhile may remember that I'm deaf and have hearing aids/cochlear implant. So for me, this was absolutely fascinating: Winston Churchill's hearing aid. It's huge by today's standards, but incredibly compact for 1960s technology!

On the right, one of Churchill's paintings and his painting smock.

The bedroom for Churchill's protection officer and the Churchill dining room, mostly used by Mrs. Churchill.

I thought I had photos of these, but I either lost them or didn't get them. This is my favorite story from the tour.

When the Queen Mother was either doing work on one of her homes or had bought a new home and was getting ready to move into it, she wanted a stove/oven she was familiar with so she took one of the two stove/ovens from the kitchen in the War Rooms when the rooms were no longer in use. Fast forward 25-30ish years later, they've decided to open the Cabinet War Rooms as a public history museum and they're scouring Britain for period pieces to furnish and make up the rooms. The Queen Mother heard about this and gave them the stove/oven - the original stove/oven she had taken from the rooms all that time ago.

brf-rumortrackinganon

Changing of the Guard

I had no idea Changing of the Guard was as "much" as it was. I thought it was a simple march - the "going on duty" guards march to the palace, the "going off duty" guards march back to the barracks.

Nope. It's a little more complex than that. And two sets of guards. And it's not every day, it's Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, in most types of weather. The guide said the ceremony will be cancelled in extreme weather and it actually happened - one of the days I was in London, they cancelled the Changing of the Guard because it was too hot.

First the guards of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment (⬇️) who are coming off duty march out of St. James's Palace. These are the mounted guards in position at the formal entrance to Horse Guards Parade from Whitehall (the ones that people take photos of and who'll yell at you if you get too close to them). They come out of the palace to the Mall, then walk up the Mall to Buckingham Palace and gather in the forecourt.

Then the guards of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment who are coming onto duty process down the Mall to Horse Guards Parade (⬇️). They are on horseback.

These photos are showing the crowds at Buckingham Palace that turn out to watch. Rick Steves said once that "you can find every tourist in London here" and that's very much true.

Then Part 3 begins. The King's Guard - the ones in the bearskin hats who stand on duty at the entrance to the BP courtyard - who are coming on duty march to Buckingham Palace from Wellington Barracks.

(I don't remember if it was The Queen's funeral or Charles's coronation, but one of the broadcasts showed all the troops gathered near a white building before the proceedings began for rehearsals and inspections - that building is Wellington Barracks.)

You can hear the band performing as they march up Birdcage Walk to Buckingham. In the last photo above, you can see all the crowds around the gates - those are the gates the guards will process through.

Part 4: The guards march to Buckingham, there's a small handover ceremony in the palace forecourt, then (Part 5) the guards coming off duty march out of the palace, back down Birdcage Walk, to Wellington Barracks. ⬇️

Part 6 is an inspection (I guess, I don't know what it's called) at Wellington Barracks before they're dismissed.

(These photos are from two different days - the first photoset, from St. James's Palace to Buckingham Palace, is from one day and the second photoset (all the Wellington Barracks photos) is from the day I went to the Queen Elizabeth II exhibit and I left as the ceremony was ending.

Some advice if anyone's interested in going to the Changing of the Guard:

Don't go to Buckingham Palace. Way too many people. Pickpockets and thieves are there too (all the guides were telling us). Watch from the Mall around St. James's Palace or Clarence House for the mounted cavalry parts, then hurry up to Buckingham and watch the second part from the back gardens. (I'll put a map at the end.)

If you do want to go to Buckingham to watch the forecourt ceremony, definitely go early and definitely plan to stay there for a good long while. Go at least an hour before to get a good spot.

If you'd like to see just part of the ceremony and don't really want to be anywhere close to a crowd, go over to Wellington Barracks along Birdcage Walk and get a spot at the fence there. Watch the warm-ups and the inspection, and when they leave for BP, stay there. They'll come back like 20 minutes later. (also it's shady there...lots of trees.)

I saw the ceremony as part of a guided tour of Westminster Abbey.

This ⬇️ is the tour I did but there are tons of companies and tour guides at all kinds of price points that have a variation of this tour or that will take you to view the Changing of the Guard.

Experience the Changing of the Guard and Westminster Abbey with a Blue Badge guide, skip-the-line entry, and royal history at every step.

(the middle star with "go here to listen to the band" and "large sidewalks" is where my tour stopped to watch everything and the middle pics of BP and the Victoria Memorial are taken from. It was a really good vantage point - close enough that you could see everything, but a bit farther back to be away from the heavy crowds. one thing you might catch onto from my photos is, as a solo female traveler, I don't do crowds - I will "rope drop" a popular museum at opening time to avoid the madness, take the long route away from a busy shopping area, or wait till the next subway train if it's too packed.)

Also if you're taking kids or you go with a group of family/friends to Changing of the Guard - something I noticed on the day of and again when looking through my photos: dress in very bright, very obnoxious, very day-glo colors like hot pink or highlighter yellow. Your pictures will look atrocious but you'll be able to track your people a bit more easily through the crowds.

skyofsapphires

Craigowan Lodge

Balmoral Estate

It is located in the countryside of Aberdeenshire and is part of the Balmoral Estate, private property of the monarch.

Queen Elizabeth II has spent some of her Scottish summer breaks at the lodge rather than at Balmora Castle.

The Garden Cottage

Tam-Na-Ghar

Located not far from Balmoral, this cottage was built with stone and wood from the property and it was completed in 1895.

👆here on the left is the cottage position to the Castle. On the right there are the kitchen gardens created by Prince Philip, the greenhouse and the conservatory. In the middle, the Water Garden and the Thistle Maze (the latter created by King Charles III).

The Honka Hut

The Honka Hut overlooks Glenbeg burn on the Balmoral Estate in Ballochbuie Forest, near Braemar. The wood cabin was gifted to HM Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip by the Finnish Forest Industry as a 25th wedding anniversary gift in the 1970s.

Photo taken by The Princess of Wales and shared as a tribute to Prince Philip on the occasion of his death.

mugiwara-lucy

More people should be talking about this.

Because for the gun touting MAGAs that love yelling about “muh freedumbs!”? This is NOT freedom. That is fascism.

justinspoliticalcorner

US immigration has ramped up operations against Haitians, whose temporary protected status was removed by Trump

Stephen Starr at The Guardian:

When Monsanto Maler walked out of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Blue Ash, Ohio, at 9.15am on Sunday with an ankle monitor freshly attached to his left leg, he put his hand over his face, burst into tears and fell to the ground. He had come to the US in June 2023, fleeing gangs in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, where he had been hit over the right side of his head, leaving a large, visible scar. Grief-stricken and unable to hold himself up, he collapsed on the ground, his dozens of immigration documents, which a moment before had been carefully packed under his arm, strewn across the concrete. His face was full of confusion, his eyes bewildered. His American dream had ended in humiliation and despondency, with a metal box tied around his ankle. “I feel depressed, physically, mentally. I feel dizzy,” he said through an interpreter.

Four hours earlier, 75 miles (120km) to the north in Springfield, Viles Dorsainvil, who heads the Haitian Support Center, and Pastor Carl Ruby loaded into a sedan on a humid, foggy morning at 5.30am. They were about to embark on the drive south to the Blue Ash facility to help Haitians such as Maler in any way they could. On the drive, the pair talked about their efforts to help a family from Ruby’s church in Springfield emigrate to Quebec City, one of the thousands of Haitians forced to leave the US due to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. “I was helping them pack. The dad had all this patriotic stuff with him,” said Ruby, who knows at least two Haitians from his congregation who have been called to Blue Ash to be fitted with ankle monitors.

“It makes me sad that what he’s going to remember from the United States is that he had to leave.” Dorsainvil talked about a Haitian man who worked at a local Amazon warehouse, had temporary protected status (TPS) until 2029 and had come to his center last Friday seeking help. “When he got that letter [requiring him the come to the Blue Ash facility], he was terrified, he got sick,” Dorsainvil said. Dorsainvil, himself a TPS holder, and Ruby chatted about what was happening in Haiti right now – that a burger there cost $16 and how the absence of opportunity was pushing people into gangs or to flee the country for their lives.

On 5 August, the Washington DC district judge Ana Reyes, whose ruling had previously prevented the Trump administration from lifting TPS for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, was forced to remove her stay, following a decision from the supreme court backing the Trump administration’s efforts. It means that for about 350,000 Haitians in the US on TPS, it’s an end for their lives in the US. Over the last decade, more than 12,000 Haitians moved to the Rust belt town of Springfield, where they worked in labor-intensive jobs in manufacturing and food packaging, jobs that local companies struggled to fill. But in September 2024, then presidential candidate Donald Trump falsely claimed that immigrants in Springfield were eating pets, setting off a firestorm of unrest that fueled neo-Nazi marches, bomb threats and school closures in Springfield, and the national immigration debate centered on the town of 60,000 people.

The Trump Regime’s war on TPS has come for Haitian-Americans in Ohio, thanks to the radical right-wing SCOTUS’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe.

mangetoutschangertous

Heated Rivalry fandom in a song, sounds like Pink Pony Club, is in fact: "A GAY HOCKEY SHOW" or A LOVE LETTER 🏒

Elisa B, this is amazing! May your pillow always be cool and your cup always full

lingthusiasm

101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics

In honour of Lingthusiasm's 100th episodiversary, we've compiled this list of 101 public-facing places where linguists and linguistics nerds hang out and learn things!

17 podcasts about linguistics

Lingthusiasm — A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

The Vocal Fries — Language discrimination and how to fight it

The History of English — From Proto-Indo-European to Shakespeare in 180 episodes (and still running!)

A Language I Love Is — Guests (some linguists, some not) talk about languages they love and why

En Clair — Forensic linguistics and literary detection

Because Language — New guests every episode discuss their linguistic interests

The Allusionist — Stories about language and the people who use it

Subtitle — A podcast about languages and the people who speak them

Field Notes — Five seasons on linguistic fieldwork

Tomayto Tomahto — Language meets cog sci, politics, history, law, anthropology, and more

Word of Mouth — A long-running and wide-ranging linguistics program on BBC 4.

Words Unravelled - A new and very well edited etymology podcast with popular creators RobWords and Jess Zafarris

Something Rhymes with Purple — Learn the background behind another word or phrase each episode

Lexitecture — A classic etymology podcast with a huge back catalogue

A Way with Words — A "lively and upbeat" public radio call-in show about language and culture

Språket — A radio program in Swedish answering listener questions about language. We don't speak Swedish, but this was the most-mentioned non-English content in our listener survey!

Living Voices — A podcast in Spanish about endangered languages of the Amazon

12 nonfiction books about linguistics

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch (Amazon; Bookshop) — A linguist shows how the internet is transforming the way we communicate

How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning and Languages Live or Die (Amazon; Bookshop) by David Crystal — A journey through the different subsystems of language

That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships by Deborah Tannen (Amazon; Bookshop) — A pioneering researcher on conversations gives advice on how they can go wrong

Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy (Amazon; Bookshop) — Scientific and personal reflections on nostalgia, forgetting, and language loss

The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building by David J Peterson (Amazon; Bookshop) — an accessible guide to making your own conlang

Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent (Amazon; Bookshop) — The history behind English's many oddities

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell (Amazon; Bookshop) — A well-researched pushback on sexist language ideology

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper (Amazon; Bookshop) — A lifelong lexicographer discusses the job and the things she's learned along the way

Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren (Amazon; Bookshop) — A quick, funny tour of the quirks of 60 European languages

Bina: First Nations Languages, Old and New by Felicity Meakins, Gari Tudor-Smith, and Paul Williams (Amazon; Bookshop) — The story of Australian indigenous languages' resistance and survival

Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words by Anne Curzan (Amazon; Bookshop) — A writers' style and grammar guide focused on real usage, not made-up rules

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book: A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles by Alex Bellos (Amazon; Bookshop) — Solve puzzles about writing, grammar, and meaning drawn from real and fictional languages

Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (Amazon; Bookshop) — An anthology of poems in endangered languages, with commentary

6 linguistically-inspired novels

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang (Amazon; Bookshop) — Imagine a world where linguistics was as vital — and as ethically compromised — as engineering is in ours

True Biz by Sara Nović (Amazon; Bookshop) — Love, friendship, and struggle at a residential high school for the Deaf

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by by Mark Dunn (Amazon; Bookshop) — "A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable" full of wordplay and weirdness

Semiosis by Sue Burke (Amazon; Bookshop) — Human space colonists communicate with sentient plants

Translation State by Ann Leckie (Amazon; Bookshop) — What does life look like for a perfectly genetically engineered alien–human translator? (Spoiler: weird, that's what.)

Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (Amazon; Bookshop) — Includes the long short story that became Arrival, plus other reflections on humanity and change

13 linguistics youtube channels

Crash Course Linguistics — A whole linguistics course in 16 videos

Tom Scott's Language Files — Pithy language facts explained quickly and clearly

NativLang — Language reconstruction and the history of writing

Geoff Lindsay — Facts (and some scholarly opinions) about regional English pronunciation

The Ling Space — An educational channel all about linguistics

langfocus — A language factoid channel that digs deeper than many

K Klein — Language quirks, spelling reform, and a little conlanging

biblaridion — Teaching about conlanging and worldbuilding, with lots of linguistics along the way

RobWords — "A channel for lovers and learners of English"

Otherwords — "the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted"

LingoLizard — Widely spoken languages and their quirks, comparisons, and history

linguriosa — Spanish linguistics (in Spanish), including learning tips and linguistic history

human1011 — Quick accessible facts about linguistics (and sometimes other things)

Simon Roper — Language evolution and historical English pronunciation

10 shortform video channels about linguistics (tiktok/reels)

etymologynerd — Internet speak, etymologies and more! (reels)

linguisticdiscovery — Writing systems, language families, and more (reels)

jesszafaris — Fun facts about words, etymologies, and more (reels)

cmfvoices — An audiobook director talks about the linguistics of voice acting (eels)

mixedlinguist — A linguistics professor comments on the language of place, identity, politics, technology, and more (reels)

landontalks — Linguistic quirks of the US South (reels)

sunnmcheaux — Language and culture from Harvard's first and only professor of Gullah (reels)

dexter.mp4 — Talks about many branches of science, but loves linguistics enough to have a linguisticsy tattoo (reels)

danniesbrain — Linguistics and psychology from a researcher who studies both (reels)

wordsatwork — Quick facts on languages, families, and linguistic concepts (reels)

the_language — The Ojibwe language — plus food, dancing, and more

lingthusiasm

101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics

In honour of Lingthusiasm's 100th episodiversary, we've compiled this list of 101 public-facing places where linguists and linguistics nerds hang out and learn things!

8 linguistically-inspired videogames and board games

Heaven’s Vault (video game) — Decode a mystery hieroglyphic language as a space archeologist traveling with her trusty robot sidekick

Chants of Sennaar (video game) — puzzle your way through uncoding the language and world of The Tower

Tunic (video game) — You don’t need to decode the writing system to enjoy exploring this video game as an anthropomorphic fox, but some people have enjoyed the additional challenge of cracking the writing system

Cypher & Epigraph (video game) — Test and grow your cryptographic skills with these increasingly feendish puzzles

Wavelength (board game) — A relaxed and silly party game featuring comparatives and scales. Very fun for a flexible-sized group.

Xenolanguage (board game) — An ethereal storytelling game about communicating with aliens featuring a unique ouija-board inspired gameplay mechanic

The Gostak (interactive fiction) — A classic text adventure you need to decipher a secret language to play

IPA Scrabble (board game) — Do-it-yourself instructions for making your own International Phonetic Alphabet Scrabble tiles

7 blogs, newsletters, and magazines about linguistics

Nancy Friedman's substack — A professional name developer (that's a thing!) weighs in on trends

Language Log — One of the longest running linguistics blogs: a few professors discuss their interests

Separated by a Common Language — "Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK"

Sesquiotica — Riffs on etymology and meaning

Language Hat — Another longtime classic, featuring literature, translation, and lexical curiosities

@official-linguistics-post — Sharing posts and conversations of linguistic interest from around Tumblr

Babelzine — A print magazine of language and linguistics, great for school libraries to subscribe to

9 linguistically-inspired movies and tv shows

Atlantis: The Lost Empire — A linguist protagonist meets a conlang plot device

Arrival — The most linguistic fieldwork you'll ever see in a sci-fi blockbuster

Darmok — The Star Trek episode that launched a thousand linguistics memes

CODA — The biggest names in ASL theatre in a multilingual movie

Avatar — The sci-fi epic that gave us Na'vi, one of the best loved conlangs

We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân — A documentary about the Wampanoag scholar who revived her nation's language

My Fair Lady — A classic musical about dialect, social class, and (of course) love

The King's Speech — Based on a true story: a speech-language pathologist helps King George VI overcome his stammer

Talking Black in America — A documentary series on African American English, Black ASL, and more

6 linguistics-related events and physical spaces

Planet Word (Washington, DC, USA) — An immersive language museum

Mundolingua (Paris, France) — A hands-on museum with exhibits on many branches of linguistics

The COSI language pod (Columbus, OH, USA) — Participate in linguistics experiments inside this science museum

The SLIYS summer camp (Columbus, OH, USA) — The Summer Linguistic Institute for Youth Scholars introduces high school students to linguistics

Kletskoppen Festival (Nijmegen, Netherlands) — A festival about language and language development for children, and their adults

International Linguistics Olympiad (2025 in Taipei, Taiwan) — An annual puzzle-solving competition for secondary school students, with many national editions in various countries

10 places to get even more

r/linguistics — A subreddit for discussing linguistics; check out their reading list (Note that we singled out this one for being a big, public, high-traffic community — but if you'd prefer a closed Discord server or a Facebook meme group or any other platform-specific thing, ask other linguistics nerds on that platform and you'll probably find one.)

Bluesky linguistics starter pack — Some linguists who post actively about linguistics, several of which have also made starter packs for specific subfields

conlang.org's community list — Pointers to the many places conlangs are discussed

Superlinguo's list of linguistics podcasts — Many more podcasts than we had room for

A very long list of pop linguistics books on All Things Linguistics — Many more books, too…

Linguistic Discovery's list of books — …and even more!

High School Linguistics' books list for teens — Get started early…

Superlinguo's list for kids — …and even earlier!

Mutual Intelligibility's resource directory — Links on a wide range of subjects

linguistics humor tag on All Things Linguistic — Just the funny stuff

We've been doing lingcomm since 2011 and we're astounded by how many more pop linguistics resources have come into existences since we started and how many difficult decisions we had to make to get it down to just 101 places

If you’re more on the lingcomm creator side, check out the lingcomm website — we'd love to hang out with you at the LingComm Conference (it's online!).

Many thanks to the people who filled out the Lingthusiasm survey over the past 3 years for suggesting over 1000 places where you get enthusiastic about linguistics! Please feel free to highlight your favourites from this list or add further suggestions for the benefit of other people reading!

allthingslinguistic

Here's your back-to-school list of resources for nerding out about linguistics, whether you're currently enrolled anywhere or not!

juicetrump2

Federal officials acknowledged in a recent lawsuit what we all suspected: Trump is targeting Democratic states.

quakerjoe

justinspoliticalcorner

On top of his self-dealing, taxpayers are spending billions on his vanity projects.

Justin Glawe and Ava Shook at Public Notice:

On the same day his company won a $1.6 billion contract with the US military, Elon Musk’s political action committee announced it would spend $100 million to help Republicans win the November midterms. In previous eras of American politics, such a development might have caused even some Republicans to question whether the billion dollar taxpayer payout to Musk’s SpaceX and the surge of campaign cash to help their party win an election was a quid pro quo. In the waning years of the Trump era, however, it was simply a Wednesday. Musk needs government money to keep his company afloat. Donald Trump needs Republicans to win in November so they can retain power in Congress and stop Democrats from impeaching him. This is the very simple anatomy of how government operates under Trump: give him money and he will help you. Don’t give him money and he will harm you.

The nation’s largest companies are dumping cash into Trump’s various political action committees and helping to fund his ever-increasing portfolio of renovation projects in and around Washington DC. In return, those companies are benefitting from massive government contracts, favorable policy decisions from the Trump administration and the federal agencies it controls, and even Trump’s public pumping of stocks that he himself is invested in. The line from giving Trump money to receiving favorable treatment from his administration is straight and short, according to the Wall Street Journal. “If a company encounters an issue with the federal government that comes to Trump’s attention, he will want to know how much money the company gave, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the Journal reported on July 30. The private sector money flowing into Trump’s vanity projects is also costing taxpayers. His ballroom is funded by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as well as private donations. In this way, we’re all forced to fund Trump’s corruption.

[...]

Trump’s ballroom (which suffered a setback in court yesterday) is costing taxpayers the most out of his many projects. Estimates vary, but taxpayers could be on the hook for as much as $800 million to complete the ballroom, bunker, and “drone port” that Trump says will be part of the complex. Combined with other construction and vanity projects, our analysis shows Trump is spending as much as $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars. Trump’s spending includes:

$250 million on the Kennedy Center

$60 million for his White House UFC event

$58 million for city fountains

$40 million for a planned “Garden of American Heroes” at the West Potomac Park

$17 million for renovations to Lafayette Park near the White House

$16 million for the reflecting pool

$7.5 million for Eisenhower Executive Office building

$26 million for new exhibits and upgrades at the Lincoln Memorial

$5.1 million for re-gilding of Washington statues

$2 million for renovations to the Rose Garden

$1.3 million for renovations to the White House West Colonnade, including $689,000 to import and install African granite

$400 million to retrofit the new Air Force One, gifted from the Qatari government, with even more spent on pilot training equipment as well as an unknown amount of taxpayer funding from classified budgets

This $1.8 billion is simply the known cost to taxpayers for projects to feed Trump’s ego. The cost of the proposed Arc de Trump, the East Potomac Golf Course renovations, gold gilding and glued-on gold wall accents all over the Oval Office, as well as renovations to multiple rooms at the White House and columns there are not currently known.

[...]

Private profits from public money

As Trump has blown $1.8 billion on construction projects, he’s also been busy profiting off the presidency through stock purchases that reek of insider trading, foreign licensing deals, crypto sales, and even the stocking of Trump wine and cider in stores run by the Coast Guard. While it’s not known how much Trump has truly made during his second term, Democrats estimate the range of profits to be from $2.25 billion to nearly $10 billion. Trump’s foreign licensing business also reportedly made $61 million in 2025, a 900 percent growth since 2023. Trump began this year by purchasing as much as $5 million in Dell Computer stock. In May, the Department of Defense awarded the company a $9.7 billion contract to provide software to the military — directly benefitting Trump’s sprawling investment portfolio. Trump has repeatedly urged Americans to buy stock in Dell, occasionally causing the company’s value to spike.

Trump’s investments in Dell are among a stunning 21,000 individual trades made by him during his first year in office. Trump and White House officials regularly claim that his investment portfolio is managed by a “blind trust,” but that’s not the case. Instead, Trump’s sons have control over his investments. [...] One of Trump’s brokerage accounts also purchased between $15 and $50 million worth of stock in TKO Holdings, UFC’s parent company. The purchase was made in March, two weeks after the fight card was revealed for the UFC Freedom 250 fights on the White House lawn, and three months before the event took place. TKO president and COO Mark Shapiro called the event “the greatest earned marketing tool of all time.” Purchasing and pumping stocks for companies that have business with or are regulated by the federal government is par for the course in Trump’s White House. Immigration hardliner and senior White House official Stephen Miller is directly profiting off the massive expansion of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdowns through his investment in Palantir. Miller, who constantly pushes to make life harder for immigrants, owns as much as $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, which in 2025 was awarded a $30 million contract with ICE. Trump is also making money off his draconian immigration policies, owning stock in both GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s two largest private prison companies who have seen profits soar thanks to contracts with ICE and other immigration agencies. Trump’s sons are also profiting from the public money that funds government contracts. Companies that the Trump boys have invested in have, within a short time of those investments, been awarded government contracts worth more than $6 billion. Trump himself has been helping out his sons with their schemes, intervening to ensure that a company in which Eric and Don Jr. are invested was awarded a $620 million Pentagon loan.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, has also been busy making incredibly well-timed investments in AI and defense sector stocks whose value has tripled in mere months, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial, the crypto company run by Eric and Don Jr., pocketed $187 million after selling a 49 percent stake to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a UAE government official and brother of the country’s president. The sale took place just days before Trump’s inauguration, raising ethics concerns among both Republicans and Democrats. The deal also scored $31 million for the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who are co-founders of World Liberty.

Great column on why everyday Americans are forced to pay for Donald Trump and his crime family’s corruption.

blueiscoool

Very Rare 2,500-Year-Old Syracusan Gold Coin Unearthed in Ancient Necropolis in Sicily

Archaeologists have uncovered a rare fifth-century BC Syracusan gold coin during an emergency excavation at the Maddalusa necropolis near Agrigento, Sicily.

The discovery was made during the recovery of a Greek tile-covered burial, known as a cappuccina tomb, in the coastal dunes west of the mouth of the Akragas River. The excavation, carried out under the direction of the Agrigento Superintendency, revealed an exceptionally well-preserved gold coin dating to the final decades of the fifth century BC.

The obverse depicts the head of Heracles facing left, wearing the leontè—the skin of the Nemean Lion, which the Greek hero defeated during his first labour. The reverse features a quadripartite incuse square enclosing a small female head, accompanied by the inscription Syra, identifying the coin as an issue from Syracuse.

According to archaeologists, the coin belongs to an extraordinary series of gold issues struck by Syracuse during the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily at the end of the fifth century BC. The city minted these coins to help finance its military campaign as it allied with Akragas against the advancing Carthaginian forces.

The find is closely linked to one of the most turbulent periods in Sicilian history. In 406 BC, Carthaginian armies captured and destroyed Akragas after a prolonged siege, marking the end of the city’s Golden Age as one of the leading Greek colonies in the western Mediterranean.

The Maddalusa necropolis has long been recognised as one of the primary burial sites of ancient Akragas. Archaeological investigations since the nineteenth century have shown that the cemetery spans over three kilometres along the coastline and was in use from the city’s foundation in the early sixth century BC to the end of the fifth century BC.

Excavations at the site have revealed a wide variety of burial types, such as marble and calcarenite sarcophagi, tile-built tombs, stone-lined graves, cremation burials, and infants buried inside ceramic vessels. Many of these discoveries are now in the Pietro Griffo Regional Archaeological Museum in Agrigento.

The newly recovered coin is important not only because it is so rare and so well preserved but also because it is a testament to the political and military turbulence that occurred in the last years of the fifth century BC that transformed Greek Sicily.

By Mark Milligan.

alovelywaytospendanevening

Gay Men in Regency England

Men who wanted to have casual sex with other men had many opportunities to do so in Regency London, either by picking up male prostitutes (who were reputedly often soldiers in the Guards, earning extra money) at recognised venues such as the city’s parks, or at ‘molly houses’, which catered specifically to their tastes. Such molly houses had been a discreet feature of the capital throughout the eighteenth century, and their patrons ranged across the social classes, while their activities included organising mock weddings. There were fewer opportunities outside London, although we know of a group of men from across the north west of England who met regularly at the village of Great Sankey, near Warrington in Cheshire, and who copied many of the forms of the Freemasons in an endeavour to ensure their secrecy. Probably there were many other, similar groups, while the larger towns and cities probably had established places of rendezvous, although the surviving evidence is thin and patchy.

It seems likely that it was much harder for a gay man to have a serious long-term relationship with another man than to have casual sex. Unrelated women could choose to live together without raising an eyebrow, but it was more difficult for two gentlemen to form a household together. It was a little easier if one was, or appeared to be, the domestic chaplain, secretary or servant of the other, but even in this case the household would usually have female servants to cook, clean and make the beds, and they would certainly notice what was going on and would probably disapprove. This was also relevant to officers, let alone ordinary soldiers and sailors in the army and navy, who seldom had much privacy; and social historians of the navy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century have found little evidence that sodomy was widespread or tolerated, let alone an established tradition.

Male homosexuality of any kind, and particularly sodomy, was viewed with repugnance by society as a whole and was illegal. Prosecutions, which had been rare at the beginning of the eighteenth century, increased markedly from the 1780s, while between 1806 and 1861 no fewer than 404 men were sentenced to death for sodomy of whom 56 were executed (all before 1836). In 1810 a molly house in Clerkenwell, the White Swan, was raided and a group of men were arrested. Two were hanged and six sentenced to stand in the pillory, where a large crowd pelted them with rotten eggs and vegetables, stones, dead cats and buckets filled with blood, offal, dung and other filth, treatment which left them with significant injuries. A few years later Percy Jocelyn, the Anglican Bishop of Clogher, was arrested after being caught in a compromising position in the back room of a tavern in St James with a soldier named Moverley. The case attracted a great deal of publicity, including a number of satirical prints and pamphlets which sold in large numbers. Jocelyn was released on bail and disappeared, but was then stripped of his see, and is reported to have lived for the remainder of his life (another twenty years) under a false name in Scotland, working as a butler. He was buried in Edinburgh, but it appears that his body was re-interred in the family vault in Ireland, suggesting either that his family did not totally disown him or at least reclaimed him in death.

Not everyone accepted the prevailing view without question. A Yorkshire farmer, Matthew Tomlinson, wondered in his diary in 1810 whether it was right to punish men for urges and desires that were innate, although he was uncertain of the answer; and the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed that homosexuality should be decriminalised, although he never dared to publish these views in his lifetime. Some occupations, such as trades connected with women’s hair and clothes, attracted effeminate men whose presence did nothing to harm the business, even if some writers felt obliged to deplore them as ‘delicate, contemptible beings’ unworthy of ‘the masculine character’. And for everyone who went along to jeer and pelt the men in the pillory there were many more who stayed at home or went about their business, feeling either indifference or even pity for the ‘criminals’.

Nonetheless there was little if any open disagreement with the public condemnation and abhorrence of sodomy, which was buttressed by biblical prohibitions. This made it a powerful accusation in the hurly-burly of political debate on the hustings. For example, in 1801, Sir Thomas Turton, Member of Parliament for Southwark, was attacked in a squib with the claim that he did not love women. The charge resurfaced as late as 1820 when, The Times reported, he defended himself by entering into an account of his youthful adventures with the opposite sex ‘a little more explicitly than we can decently report’. Given that Turton was not only married with seven children but had also gained notoriety by his affair with Mrs Dunnage, the wife of a City merchant, which is reported to have cost him £5,000 in ‘criminal conversation’ (crim. con.) damages, it is clear that such attacks were not restricted to bachelors or other obvious targets.

These attitudes created a tempting opportunity for blackmail, whether or not the victim was actually homosexual. In one case, in the 1790s, a soldier alleged that Sir John Riddle had tried to pick him up, while Riddle countered by accusing the soldier of attempting to blackmail him. As the evidence was ambiguous the law sided with the man in the more powerful position, and the soldier was tried, convicted and sentenced to death as a warning to others. But cases where the blackmail succeeded leave fewer traces. The most famous, but also ambiguous, example is that of Castlereagh, by then Lord Londonderry, who, in 1822, told the King that he was being blackmailed for committing the same crime as the Bishop of Clogher, having been lured into a house of ill repute by a man dressed as a woman. However, Londonderry was suffering from mental illness at the time and committed suicide soon after, and we do not know whether this was precipitated by something that actually happened or if the whole story was a delusion.

Some gay men felt obliged to live abroad in order to escape the expectations of British society. Lord Deskford, the son of Earl Findlater, was an early suitor of Lady Anne Lindsay. Tall, stiff, resembling ‘a young Van Dyke lord with a Roman nose’, he was considered a good match, but before the courtship progressed to a conclusion he left Scotland for the Continent, officially to recover from an illness in a warmer climate, but in fact to escape a scandal caused by his homosexual activities. Henry Grey Bennet, the fourth son of Lord Tankerville, resigned his seat in parliament and retired to the Continent, where he remained for the rest of his life, following accusations that he had ‘mistaken a boy for a girl at Brussels’. For men from a humbler background it was often sufficient to move to London or another part of the country, just as a young woman who had ‘lost her reputation’ might do. On the other hand, Lord George Germain (previously Lord George Sackville) rose to high office in Lord North’s Cabinet, despite the widespread belief that he was a sodomite and that he had behaved in a cowardly fashion at the Battle of Minden in 1759. However, it is possible that attitudes had hardened in the aftermath of the loss of America, and that he might not have been so successful a generation later.

— Rory Muir, Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen (2024)

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Scottsbifh original