Will Pooley

In the bestselling book by ‘Iris Starling’, The Killer Isn’t Alice, readers are given eighteen clues to whittle down a list of 46,600 suspects and identify the killer of ‘Alice Starling’.

Magic never went away.

Sam Knight’s Premonitions Bureau is one of those books that so many people recommended to me that I was beginning to dread reading it.

The fires in southwestern France are an appalling demonstration of the reality of climate change in 2026.

(Warning: this is a post that discusses maternal mortality) There was a post doing the rounds on BlueSky this week, commenting on contemporary assaults on medical science and their deadly effects on pregnant people.

One evening in 1935, Alfred Jably knocked at the door of his landlord Abel Tennegain during dinner.

People on the internet are arguing about what ‘science’ means and what properly belongs to the ‘history of science’.

When I was a student, I remember identifying journal articles on a paper reading list, then trundling off to the library to visit the stacks, where journals were stored on sardine shelves, that could only be accessed by spinning the wheels to move the she…

In his history of the forest of the Landes, Jacques Sargos tells a story about utopian canal projects.

My social media of choice lit up last week with threads about student disengagement.

It goes in fits and starts, but I’m still here, publishing posts infrequently, to no particular schedule.