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Laurie Penny

@pennyred.bsky.social
10K followers 137 following 281 posts
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I’M 40 TODAY. And if you would like to help me celebrate, I would love nothing better than if you’d subscribe to my Substack. It means a lot to me. And just for today, I’m doing a 40% sale for new subscribers: lauriepenny.substack.com/p/birthday-s...
lauriepenny.substack.com
Birthday Subscription Drive: 40% Off!
Help me celebrate a new decade. This is the biggest discount I’ll ever do.
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Love Wins Always @lovewinzalways.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
This important piece by @pennyred.bsky.social was both my introduction to Milo—in 2016—and the first accurate prediction of everything to come. This as normies were in absolute denial of both the seriousness of the alt-right's bloodthirst and the strength of its connections to Yarvin and Anglin.
medium.com
I’m With The Banned
What my evening with Milo told me about Twitter’s biggest troll, the death of reason, and the crucible of A-list con-men that is the…
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Civilian Reader @civilianreader.com · 08/09/2026
TBT for CR20: from 10 years ago, an interview with Laurie Penny (@pennyred.bsky.social)... civilianreader.com/2016/09/08/i...
civilianreader.com
Interview with LAURIE PENNY
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Laurie Penny? Back-of-a-napkin CV? I’m a writer and a political journalist, I live in London, and I come from the internet, just like you. I’m 2…
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
First Dolly, now Tim Curry. This is horrendous. All we can do is keep the memory of these icons alive. Who would we be otherwise? What kind of world would we be leaving for Keith Richards?
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I’m reading the book Professor Jason Arday co-wrote about neurodiversity politics and so far it’s charming and clever and we haven’t quite got past an extensive detour into synth-pop and fuck, this guy had a lovely brain. And the British media bullied him to death on purpose about it.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
An essay about ADHD, by me, featuring a definitely relevant detour to discuss Brian Blessed and yetis. lauriepenny.substack.com/p/the-great-...
lauriepenny.substack.com
The Great ADHD Myth.
Apparently, THE SYSTEM is to blame. For everything else, there’s Elvanse.
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Nisa Malli @nisamalli.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
“Only one type of person has ever questioned my ADHD, and that’s adults who have spent their lives wrestling with very similar traits. They’ve worked very very hard to convince everyone that they’re normal” - @pennyred.bsky.social lauriepenny.substack.com/p/the-great-...
lauriepenny.substack.com
The Great ADHD Myth.
Apparently, THE SYSTEM is to blame. For everything else, there’s Elvanse.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
The 2020s are a disabling place to live. Modern life makes it harder for people with certain traits to function. This does not sit comfortably with the Protestant Work Ethic. I wrote about the ‘The Great ADHD Myth’, here- lauriepenny.substack.com/p/the-great-ad…
lauriepenny.substack.com
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Thousands and thousands of people here at the Jason Arday vigil in Trafalgar Square. This was taken just before the 6pm start. It’s now too packed to take photos.
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Nanjala @nanjala.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Precisely. Creating a narrow standard of femininity predicated on weakness and using it as a weapon to punish especially black women. Notice they haven’t said a peep about soccer which is primarily played by white women in the US, has more teams and pays more money.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Timeline cleanse: Weird wedding traditions in your country/community/family? I’ve just discovered that in Norway, if one half of the newly married couple leaves the room for any random reason, everyone else gets to line up to snog the other.
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Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD @arghavansallesmd.medsky.social · 15/08/2026
Over 200 articles were written about Jason Arday over the last few weeks in the British press alone. Here are some folks accused of plagiarism who didn’t get that kind of coverage. I’m hoping you can tell why. A thread. William O’Reilly: Professor at Cambridge who lifted 12 pages of text from… 1/
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
The British press bullied a vulnerable person to death, and they had fun doing it. Jason Arday made mistakes. He was publicly humiliate and mobbed for those mistakes purely because he was Black and autistic. Anti-woke ghouls decided to make an example of him. It’s not a ‘tragedy’. It’s a travesty.
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Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD @arghavansallesmd.medsky.social · 15/08/2026
PS it’s worth noting this witch hunt was started by a guy (yes, he is) who lost his position at Cambridge for saying if we lived in a meritocracy there would be 0 Black faculty at Harvard. That’s whose bidding the media gladly did.
I'm afraid this strategy is hopeless. Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. (Even that might be an overestimate, since high-school credentials are sometimes given a boost by affirmative action.) In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.
This is not the kind of crisis that people will forget about after the next news cycle. The elites who have adopted wokism as their religion will launch a massive counterassault.
The woke elite has far more collective intelligence than the conservative mob, and a thousand ways to outsmart and outmaneuver
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
The British press bullied a vulnerable person to death, and they had fun doing it. Jason Arday made mistakes. He was publicly humiliate and mobbed for those mistakes purely because he was Black and autistic. Anti-woke ghouls decided to make an example of him. It’s not a ‘tragedy’. It’s a travesty.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Done!
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
If enough other people feel this way, I’m more than happy to spend some of my post-burnout spoons cross-posting everything to Patreon. Let me know!
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe...
open.substack.com
No, I Will Not Wear A Sunflower Lanyard
A Preliminary Taxonomy of Neurodivergent Aesthetics
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Message received. I’m reviving my Patreon for everyone who would like to support my work without giving Substack their money. Thank you for being clear with me about that. Here’s the latest: www.patreon.com/lauriepenny/...
patreon.com
Autism and The English. | Laurie Penny
Autism and The English. by Laurie Penny on Patreon. Join Laurie Penny's community for exclusive content and updates.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
www.patreon.com/lauriepenny/... My latest, now on Patreon for those with perfectly reasonable ethical objections to Substack.
patreon.com
Autism and The English. | Laurie Penny
Autism and The English. by Laurie Penny on Patreon. Join Laurie Penny's community for exclusive content and updates.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
If enough other people feel this way, I’m more than happy to spend some of my post-burnout spoons cross-posting everything to Patreon. Let me know!
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe...
open.substack.com
Autism and The English
The neurodiversity backlash is about class.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe...
open.substack.com
No, I Will Not Wear A Sunflower Lanyard
A Preliminary Taxonomy of Neurodivergent Aesthetics
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe...
open.substack.com
Autism and The English
The neurodiversity backlash is about class.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
substack.com/@lauriepenny...
substack.com
Laurie Penny (@lauriepenny)
The purpose of a system is what it does. The pretext for the UK’s new transphobic bathroom bill is ‘women’s safety’. That is not what it does. This is the actual, real-as-in-actually-happening-rig...
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
My essay on The Odyssey just dropped: open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe...
open.substack.com
There's Only One Wrong Opinion About The Odyssey.
Petty tyrants and intellectual invertebrates are determined to wreck this rare and lovely moment of mass culture.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
We are all trapped in modern fascism’s paranoid retcon engine, but it doesn’t work the way they want it to. open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe...
open.substack.com
There's Only One Wrong Opinion About The Odyssey.
Petty tyrants and intellectual invertebrates are determined to wreck this rare and lovely moment of mass culture.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Me and my sweetie are going to attempt to watch THE FOOTBALL. I am English. He is Norwegian. Neither of us know much about THE FOOTBALL and its various players. Please tell me what I need to know about the football NB If you lie I will believe you.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Me and my sweetie are going to attempt to watch THE FOOTBALL. I am English. He is Norwegian. Neither of us know much about THE FOOTBALL and its various players. Please tell me what I need to know about the football NB If you lie I will believe you.
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SpoonieAngrySpoonie @kentishish.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Talk to @pennyred.bsky.social! She's resisting (and running a writing seminar inspiring others to resist as well, I'm taking it). She wrote a spectacular article: open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe...
open.substack.com
AI Writes Like a Depressed Person If a Depressed Person Could Write.
And there are important reasons for that. On Art, AI and a few things that happened to me.
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Mike Rayhawk @mikerayhawk.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
@pennyred.bsky.social returning to glorious, tragic, triumphant form lauriepenny.substack.com/p/ai-writes-...
lauriepenny.substack.com
AI Writes Like a Depressed Person If a Depressed Person Could Write.
And there are important reasons for that. On Art, AI and a few things that happened to me.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
To judge every member of a community on the basis of a crime committed by one member of that community is, of course, the very definition of prejudice.
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The News Agents @thenewsagents.co.uk · 03/06/2026
"I really hope the British public learns the lesson of Donald Trump, when it comes to Nigel Farage." Congressman Brendan Boyle says the Reform leader is a "fraud", but is it too late for the UK? www.thenewsagents.co.uk/article/i-ho...
thenewsagents.co.uk
'I hope Brits realise Farage is a fraud before it's too late' | The News Agents
Congressman Brendan Boyle claims Donald Trump is corrupt on an "unbelievable" scale, and warns that the UK could face the same under a Nigel Farage leadership.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
To judge every member of a community on the basis of a crime committed by one member of that community is, of course, the very definition of prejudice.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
A love letter to a phenomenal show. RIP #theboys, we shall not see its like again. reactormag.com/the-boys-was...
reactormag.com
The Boys Was the Show This Era Needed, and the One It Deserved, Too - Reactor
Based off an early aughts shock-jock comic, The Boys rose to tackle the current political moment better than any other TV show.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
After the #Arsenal victory parade, the hundreds of thousands of fans have trashed our neighborhood. Streets full of rubbish, urine and vomit. Genuinely glad everyone had a good time- and now Arsenal FC needs to organise and pay for the cleanup. It’s the right thing to do.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
A love letter to a phenomenal show. RIP #theboys, we shall not see its like again. reactormag.com/the-boys-was...
reactormag.com
The Boys Was the Show This Era Needed, and the One It Deserved, Too - Reactor
Based off an early aughts shock-jock comic, The Boys rose to tackle the current political moment better than any other TV show.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
open.substack.com/pub/lauriepe... New essay on Lena Dunham, misogyny and millennial cognitive dissonance.
open.substack.com
The World Owes Lena Dunham An Enormous, Unqualified Apology
And we all know why.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Glenn Beck is quoting from the US Declaration of Independence and insisting that rights come from ‘the Creator’. He has made an enormous crowd of angry English nationalists go completely silent. This is hilarious.
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Globe Emoji Žižek Capital @cesigno.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
interesting that anti trans activism has become a safe niche within the broader fascist movement for cis women. they are excluded from leadership positions, they know their place. but anti queer activism is outsourced to them.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Proud ‘Terf Island’ flags at the Unite The Right March.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
The most Spirit of Britain thing to happen at the Unite the Kingdom rally is this one drunk South East Asian lady in a brown fleece, sitting on the steps of St Martin In the Fields, cheering everything, singing a song about Jesus and swigging from a two litre bottle of cider. Queen of our hearts.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
I LOVE HER
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
This person at the nationalist Unite The Kingdom march is apparently dressed as a Knight Templar. I thought they were Darth Maul.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Tommy Robinson is now shilling for some ‘financial freedom’ and urging people to get their phones out and scan a QR code. I see two people doing it.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
The Unite The Kingdom Rally continues weird. An American musician is now singing a song about Jesus and Charlie Kirk and people are actually leaving.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
At the Unite the Right march, I just heard a speaker say that he proudly voted for Brexit…and almost nobody cheered.
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Laurie Penny @pennyred.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
At the far right Unite the Kingdom rally, The hugest crowd reaction, by far, is the booing every time someone says the name ‘Keir Starmer.’
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