#the telegraph

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Saw this on Reddit today. Things just keep getting worse.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/27/nhs-to-test-all-gender-questioning-children-for-autism/

[anelimvix]

What she said: “biological men shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports”

What The Telegraph said:

[eretzyisrael]

Why Some Academics Are Told Not To Acknowledge Jewish Holidays

A lot of effort goes into finding creative ways to discriminate against Jews on college campuses, but this is a new one. The Telegraph has i

by Seth Mandel

A lot of effort goes into finding creative ways to discriminate against Jews on college campuses, but this is a new one. The Telegraph has interviewed several Jewish professors in Britain, and one of them tells the paper that her school’s diversity team sends out greetings on Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh holidays, but not Jewish ones. When she asked them to include Jewish holidays as well, she got a pretty incredible response:

“I was told that Jews could only be mentioned when marking a religious festival that makes no reference to the land of Israel—which possibly leaves one, a minor festival called Purim.”

The article chronicles several other recent incidents, most notably the ongoing harassment of Michael Ben-Gad, an economics professor at a University of London-affiliated school, including activists storming his class and threatening to behead him for the crime of being Israeli.

Ben-Gad is standing his ground quite well and keeping his sense of humor throughout this ordeal. But it is an illustration of a counterintuitive new reality: The pro-Hamas demonstrations have been much reduced (though not eliminated entirely) but the bigotry itself has accelerated.

Take for example what happened recently at Pomona College in California. Pro-Hamas protesters stormed an event commemorating the October 7 attacks featuring a survivor of those attacks, Yoni Viloga. A group calling itself Claremont Undercurrents then took credit for the attack with an open letter that, the Algemeiner reports, appears to threaten Viloga with murder.

[and-yetitmoves]

Great article. I am so glad I'm not alone in this. I've been having the exact same thoughts lately.

Who would want to be associated with rape deniers, indeed?

I will never trust them again, even if they completely changed. It will never be the same again.

[telegraf228]

Я СДЕЛАЛ ЕГО!!! 😝🤘

[richardarmitagefanpage]

Richard spoke to The Telegraph about his upcoming role as King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar.

[sgiandubh]

Behold the hunkiest Macbeth you’ll ever see

This is a popular/tabloid press review. As such, it is surprisingly decent, at least to me:

[Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/macbeth-the-other-place-review/ - posted October 22, 2025]

Behold the hunkiest Macbeth you’ll ever see

Sam Heughan, the Scottish star of Outlander, amply proves his mettle in his RSC debut

4/5

Dominic Cavendish

Chief Theatre Critic

22 October 2025 2:05pm BST

Sam Heughan, the rugged Scottish star of Outlander, amply proves his mettle in his RSC debut as Macbeth, even if he and Lia Williams’s Lady M make an odd couple – thick as thieves yet strangely incompatible. 

Heughan grew up in the grounds of Kenmure Castle, but there are no battlements in Daniel Raggett’s darkly thrilling in-the-round production. He plants Shakespeare’s horror show in a shady Glasgow gangland boozer. It’s best to be glass half full about his approach: what it lacks in coherence, it makes up for in heady atmosphere.

It’s a bold move to reactivate Stratford’s The Other Place as a regular performance space with Macbeth. This, after all, was the scene of Trevor Nunn’s landmark 1976 production starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. While not in that league, Raggett’s staging seizes every opportunity to achieve a sense of infernal intimacy. It often plunges the auditorium into total darkness, and attains the aura of a nightmare lock-in. Naturalistic logic steadily bleeds away – so that every location appears to be housed in the same claustrophobic space (the drawback, of course, is that this may confuse those unfamiliar with the work).

The witches perturb in their ordinariness: they’re a trio of conspiratorial gossips, with Alison Peebles’s older crone, on crutches, ciggie in hand, almost like a figure out of EastEnders. They talk their peculiar pub-talk, and cover their mouths in eerie synchronicity. Later, they whip up their noxious brew using a tabletop cooker.

Into their lair bursts a brutal, male world. With his black leather jacket and blood-spattered t-shirt, Heughan is, initially, machismo incarnate. The 45-year-old heartthrob handles the verse well, making it more flinty than flowery. There’s no sentimentality about ‘king’ Duncan: he’s an old capo who has the gagged and bound Thane of Cawdor executed in plain sight, his son Malcolm doing the honours, like a grisly initiation ceremony. Boys are being inducted into toxicity.

For all the initial complicity of Williams’s Lady Macbeth – strikingly angular, with searching eyes and a tough-edged spirit – she emphasises the character’s outsider status and gathering inner conflict. Her faded glamour-puss dabs on lippy even as she says “unsex me here” and – amid a slew of textual rejigs – intervenes to try and save first young Fleance and, later, Lady Macduff’s offspring, who’s dragged off to be hammered to death by Macbeth himself. After her own visceral death by hanging, he intones “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” while creepily slow-dancing with her corpse, a sickening pièce de résistance. For once, a content advisory seems like shrewd policy.

***

4 out of 5 is a very good score, considering: a) The Telegraph's reach/print run and b) its own audience, who needs less elaborate gravitas than The Guardian's readers (more on this, immediately, even if I could never compete with Marple's manic, frantic copy/paste skills).

I predicted, after a very nourishing conversation with a well-versed friend (thank you, sweetheart, always) that mixed bag of reviews. As you will see, the reviews can be brutally opposed, which makes perfect sense once you take your Mommie pink glasses off and see things in their own cultural context.

Again, the forced chemistry with Lia Williams seems to be detected by a very different commentator than the one at The Times. Makes you ponder - no, it really doesn't, does it?

This is the right moment to tell you I am not going to post and comment every single shred of a review. And also that, with all due respect, I consider whatever we (as fans) can comment on this to be rather some cursory 'impressions', not reviews that can make or break someone's theatrical prospects.

Onwards.