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Laurie Penny Profile picture
@PennyRed
Sep 12, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
The use of books as a way of signalling, or the idea that ‘I’ve read more books than you’ is a way to get one over on someone else, has always disturbed me.
I really think having or even reading lots of books ought to be morally neutral. Books are great, but I know people who are highly intelligent, knowledgeable and well-educated who prefer other ways of learning and other forms of storytelling.
I say that as someone who reads an unusually large number of books, and I don’t love to make my reading history public. I don’t want people to know what I’m reading or when. It’s special and private!
That doesn’t mean people who *do* have a lot of books are all status-jockeying. I’d love to have a physical library I could refer back to.
Oh my GOD ignore me I’m a plonker. I completely forgot that I put up a literal picture of my books on insta today.
Whitman said: ‘Very well, then- I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.’
But my friends say: ‘stop pratting about on Twitter, Laurie, and lie down.’

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More from @PennyRed

Laurie Penny Profile picture
Sep 18, 2022
Right. So. The fact that the 'accessible' part of the Great Big Queen Queue has been permanently shut down should be getting way more attention. Here's why. Let me tell you a story from last night: #QueueForTheQueen
The idea behind the Accessible Queue is that the very old, sick or disabled people can 'pay their respects' without having to walk for 14 hours in the cold. There were limited, staggered time slots. Yesterday it was shut it down by lunchtime. So what did those people do?
>
What do you think they did? They Queued. Some of them had already travelled long distances and made a huge effort to get there. They gave it a go anyway. In my group, the oldest Queuer was 84, and quite frail, but he insisted on trying- it was that or go home. >
Read 11 tweets
Laurie Penny Profile picture
Jul 17, 2022
I’ve gone on holiday on purpose, by myself.
This heatwave seemed a good time to break the habit of a decade and actually take a few days off to rest. But I couldn’t afford to travel to somewhere cold AND stay somewhere nice.
So I’m in a hotel up the road.
I’m not leaving it.
This year so far I have:
Worked a 20-week writers’ room for A Big Shh Project
Worked another 5 week writers’ room
Published 40 essays
Written two screenplays
Published a book
Dealt with the dramatic fallout from said book
Travelled to America to see my partner
Got Covid >
>recovered from Covid
Dealt with some big personal faff
Learned about my autism
Come out as autistic
Helped organise my little sister’s wedding celebrations
Given talks at a literary festival
Moved house twice
Done a LOT of work supporting friends and family
… I’m quite tired.
Read 5 tweets
Laurie Penny Profile picture
Jul 9, 2022
Thread: here are some ways to handle a heatwave, for other #actuallyautistic people and anyone else who might need it.

I’m one of those autistic people who gets really sick in the heat, so here’s what I learned living through several US heatwaves without air conditioning. >
Firstly: you really do need to keep drinking water. Unless you’re very attuned to it, you might not realise when your body needs fluids until you are already dehydrated. In a heatwave, dehydration is more dangerous. Set a timer to drink water every hour if you have to. >
Second: insulate. A lot of buildings in Europe are badly insulated, and this means they also heat up quicker. Keep the curtains and windows closed in the daylight hours to stop your bedroom turning into a greenhouse. (With thanks to @quinnnorton for research help). >
Read 12 tweets
Laurie Penny Profile picture
Apr 13, 2022
This article by @JonHaidt is interesting, instructive and wrong. The long-view look at democracy and technology is an essential, all-too-rare perspective. There are also some fundamental fallacies in the analysis that seem to stem from Haidt’s baseline priorities and assumptions.
One assumption here- and it’s one that American writers of every political persuasion make- is that the American democratic experiment is the best possible framework for human society. That any substantial deviation from the Founding Fathers’ basic paradigm amounts to heresy.
Haidt rightly points out the link between technological progress and new modes of civic discourse and social organisation- tracing the genesis of modern democracies back to the printing press, among other more bloodthirsty social innovations. >
Read 7 tweets
Laurie Penny Profile picture
Mar 10, 2022
Here we go:
1. The state should not have the power to subjugate people on the basis of observed sex. Nor should the way a person is treated, relates to the world, or chooses to identify be constrained on that basis. >
2. There is a concerted effort all over the world to return women to a state of sexual subservience and economic dependence on men, to coerce women into doing the vital life-making work of care and reproduction whether they want to or not. >
3. That tendency is often justified with arguments to ‘nature’, or claims that feminists, gay people and trans people are undermining ‘traditional values’, or the status of ‘the family’. Conservatives want ‘womanhood’ and ‘manhood’ to be rigid, impermeable categories. >
Read 21 tweets
Laurie Penny Profile picture
Mar 7, 2022
Apparently I need to be clear about this, but I have never once claimed that @jk_rowling made up her trauma, or lied about experiencing violence, or deserves to be threatened or abused. For the record, this is what I said in the same piece that’s being quoted out of context:
I have no reason to disbelieve @jk_rowling’s account of her experience. She didn’t and doesn’t deserve to be abused. That’s still true, even though today she bizarrely chose to use her platform to tell the world I’m lying about my experience of trauma. Integrity matters. ‘Night.x
I don’t believe that experiencing violence and abuse gives anyone, however famous, a free pass to turn around and harass a minority group l. That’s not the way morality works.
Read 4 tweets

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