Meera Duba

(Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I'll meet you there) Rumi

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Hardeep @hardeep_gambhir]

i have been a big article and essay enjoyer for 7 years.

i have probably read more than 10,000+ essays online

below is a thread of my favourite essays or articles of all time (that i remember)

pls drop your favourite ones below.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

This is biblical.

A woman in her eighties. Ten years into Alzheimer's. Hadn't spoken a full sentence in five years.

Takes one, 5 gram dose of psilocybin.

She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life, recognized family and held real conversations. She regained bladder control after five years, walked on her own. and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks.

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@arnesa_kustura @ImpatienTourist Reject the "traitor mentality completely, not speaking about Bosnia but in general & as a Sudanese, I know.The life of a refugee is extremely tough,if u decide women & children need to leave, how do u send them alone to face unknowns, possible violence, humiliations & poverty?

[Chidanand Tripathi @thetripathi58]

A guy sat at his laptop ready to permanently delete his 15-year-old Gmail account.

He was getting 400 spam emails a day. Fake Best Buy receipts. Phishing links from "Netflix." Cryptic extortion threats.

He hovered his mouse over "Delete Account" and sighed: "I just want peace."

His coworker, a former email deliverability engineer, looked over his shoulder.

"Before you nuke 15 years of contacts and data, let me show you something. Your email isn't broken. It's weaponized. There are 22 ways you've been leaving the door wide open. Google won't tell you this because the data collection feeds their entire ad engine. Give me 14 minutes."

Here's what she showed him:

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@methamphtameen Thats is interesting,do you really think present day Nubians don't have a drop of Arab blood?Do u know of any references on this?The Kushites make sense, since they were an ancient civilization that lived there before any Arab invasions,but am not so sure of present day Nubians

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@imsoprettyylike 2-resource rich countries but cursed with poverty, did I mention corruption? I am Sudanese, but think of myself as Afro Arab, a hybrid. Proud to be part of Africa and also part of the Arab world, a unique hybrid which can best be explained as Sudanese.

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@imsoprettyylike 1-During my studies, I met alot of African students at 1 point,from Kenya,Uganda & Cameroon etc.. I was surprised to realize how much we had in common. We talked about colonization, portrayal of Africa in media, dictators & corruption, endemic diseases which we were studying,

[ًً @kelevitch]

The Muslim world’s financial “backwardness” is actually proof that classical Islamic scholars were the most sophisticated macroeconomic thinkers of the pre-modern era and the West accidentally proved it in 2008.

The prohibition of riba was never primarily a moral injunction against greed alone rather It was a systemic design principle to prevent the decoupling of money from productive economic activity. When you ban interest-bearing debt as the engine of capital accumulation, you force wealth to remain tethered to real assets, real partnerships, real risk-sharing.

The entire 2008 financial crisis was a textbook demonstration of what happens when you build an economy on the exact mechanism Islamic jurisprudence spent centuries arguing against: the multiplication of money through money, completely detached from underlying value. CDOs, mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps: pure riba architecture collapsing under its own abstraction.

Islamic banks largely weathered 2008 better than conventional ones because the structural rules prohibited the specific instruments that caused the collapse.

The insane part: Western economists spent the 20th century mocking Islamic finance as a medieval relic. Then they spent the 21st century slowly reinventing through “stakeholder capitalism,” ESG investing, and calls to link executive pay to long-term performance, the core intuition that capital must carry risk to be legitimate.

Fuqaha in the 9th century called it. No gain without exposure to loss.
They just didn’t have the PowerPoint.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

وَمَن احسن من الله حكما لقوم يوقنون؟

[Culture Explorer @CultureExploreX]

The greatest Eastern fiction does not ask whether you can win; it asks whether you can govern yourself.

That is the problem these books place before us. People can conquer cities, inherit power, speak of duty, chase beauty, and still be ruled by pride, fear, comfort, and desire.

Across these stories, kings learn that death outranks conquest, families collapse while rituals continue, warriors mistake loyalty for wisdom, lovers confuse longing with truth, and seekers discover that excuses can become a whole way of life.

A civilization does not fall only from invasion. It also falls when people lose judgment and start calling their chains freedom.

That is why these works should be read now, in an age that often teaches people to defend the self before they have learned how to examine it.

Read them because they leave the reader with a harder standard: do not ask only what you want from life; ask what your desires are turning you into.

https://t.co/Hc731pNBLa

[Lorwen Harris Nagle, PhD @LORWEN108]

Darwin understood something about anxiety that modern psychiatry still struggles to accept:

You cannot think your way out of a body problem.

Here’s the system he used to regulate his mind: 🧵

[Anti Fragile @anti_fr4gile]

@LORWEN108 As Charles Darwin famously said (paraphrased): "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change"

He adapted to his condition by creating habits and routines and built a life around it.

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@ChaiTriple @H22vok @IraninSA Poverty is one thing, genocide is another! Read & watch news so u stop with ignorant replies like this.

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@H22vok @IraninSA Let ME give You a lesson about Islam. The prophet,SAW, was kind to his fellow Muslims. Islam doesn't judge by the color of skin or race but by piety. So, why is the UAE destroying Sudan & killing innocent Muslims? Shameful crimesان هربتم من عدالة الارض، فلن تهربوا من عدالة السماء

[Mohanad @MohanadElbalal]

It’s common knowledge that that Khalid Yousif and his Sumoud political cabal is allied with the UAE sponsored RSF militia; but even still staying silent as UAE drones bomb Khartoum airport today but hopping on Twitter to condemn Iran for striking the UAE is awful political optics.

The smart play would’ve been for this traitor to the Sudanese people to hold back on the UAE sycophancy just for today, but he couldn’t help himself.

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@AbdiiJama2025 @amjadt25 @tory999 Its shameful than an African country sides with another country, the UAE, while they destroy another African country, Sudan. Guess Afrucan solidarity is a myth!

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@BenjaminNorton @amjadt25 Please do not forget the UAE'S role in supporting the RSF who have committed genocide in Darfur, murdered, raped, looted, terrorized and displaced civillans across Sudan. We hold the UAE responsible for death and destruction in Sudan.

[Frank Luntz @FrankLuntz]

54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level.

https://t.co/ez7rqoTkML

[Meera Duba @meerduba]

@leviremmick @123itsmeMary Totally agree, if students were held back, it would be a wake-up call for both students and parents to do better.

[No filter Skin @NoFilterSkin]

The fruit with the most fat is coconut.
The fruit with the most sugar is dates.
The fruit with the most protein is jackfruit.
The fruit with the most vitamin C is guava.
The fruit with the most vitamin A is mango.
The fruit with the most fiber is raspberries.
The fruit with the most antioxidants is blueberries.
The fruit with the most calcium is figs.
The fruit with the most vitamin K is kiwi.
The fruit with the most water is watermelon.
The fruit with the most potassium is banana.
The fruit with the most natural melatonin is tart cherries.
The fruit with the most vitamin E is mamey sapote.
The fruit with the most iron is mulberries.
The fruit with the most healthy fats is avocado.
The fruit with the most folate is papaya.
The fruit with the most resveratrol is red grapes.
The fruit with the most vitamin B6 is bananas.
The fruit with the most pectin is apples.
The fruit with the most bromelain is pineapple.
The fruit with the most lycopene is pink grapefruit.
The fruit with the most magnesium is tamarind.
The fruit with the most manganese is pineapple.
The fruit with the most lycopene is pink grapefruit.
The fruit with the most lutein and zeaxanthin is honeydew melon.
The fruit with the most sorbitol is prunes.
The fruit with the most niacin (Vitamin B3) is avocado.
The fruit with the most zinc is blackberries.
The fruit with the most quercetin is cranberries.
The fruit with the most riboflavin (Vitamin B2) is passion fruit.
The fruit with the most phosphorus is passion fruit.
The fruit with the most selenium is soursop.