Charles Foster 🇬🇷

C.S. Lewis, what a line

This evening at 5:30pm. Join us in our air-conditioned events space, 'The Benjamin Henry Room' for this talk by @tweedpipe in conversation with @dan_kieran Last tickets are now available here eventbrite.co.uk/e/198227550640…

the-tls.com/science-techno… My review of 'In Trees: An exploration', by Robert Moor. @TheTLS

Today! eventbrite.co.uk/e/charles-fost… @ExeterCollegeOx @DoubledayUK

At Hay today! Charles Foster & Bethany Handley Reserve a copy online via this link: caerphilly.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spydus… ☀️☕️🎪📖🎪☕️☀️ caerphilly.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spydus… ☀️☕️🎪📖🎪☕️☀️ #HayFestival #NationalYearofReading2026 @Bethany1Handley

Do join us! @ExeterCollegeOx @DoubledayUK @alex_christofi

Tomorrow! Join us if you can.

An extract from 'The Edges of the World' in the splendid @emergence_zine emergencemagazine.org/essay/what-are… @TransworldBooks @DoubledayUK @ExeterCollegeOx @alex_christofi

Very much looking forward to being @hayfestival next week with @calflyn and @SeanFletcherTV Do join us if you can hayfestival.com/p-25285-cal-fl… @Making_Hay @ExeterCollegeOx @TransworldBooks @alex_christofi @DoubledayUK

@nazdryv Thank you, James - and sorry that I've only just seen this.

@tweedpipe A wonderful talk on this subject today from the maestro, to open the Oxford Literary Festival 2026 We see him below putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece 'The Edges of the World'...

Now open!

@walterm Hello Walter. I have only just seen this. Thank you so much - and I hope that you think the book is worthwhile.

@tweedpipe I just read your essay on books about loneliness in an old issue of the TLS and it was absolutely brilliant. Thank you. I am going to get your new book now.

The new 2026 Barry Scholars Cohort for study at the University of Oxford: barryscholarship.org/2026-press-rel… My congratulations to you all! Coverage from Princeton: jmp.princeton.edu/news/2026/unde… Florida: news.ufl.edu/2026/05/barry-…

Great stuff here, courtesy of @JusBrierley

Why creativity shines out on the edge of things – aeon.co/essays/why-cre… : a piece by me in @aeonmag @TransworldBooks @alex_christofi @DoubledayUK @ExeterCollegeOx

Our very own Walter de Staplecat features in the @bodleianlibs’ latest exhibition, Pets & their People. 🐾 Curated by Exeter College Supernumerary Fellow Charles Foster (@tweedpipe). 🗓️ 11 March – 27 September 2026 📍 Weston Library | Free admission #ExeterCollegeOxford

Fish caught in the Mediterranean Sea in 1561 said to have been adorned with tattoo-like marking on its skin that looked like images of ships — from Adriaen Coenen’s huge 16th-century treatise on fish. See more from this remarkable book here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/adr… #FishFriday

“We laugh at honour, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” —C.S. Lewis

🚨 JUST IN: A migratory bird just shattered world records — flying 8,425 miles (13,560 km) NON-STOP across the Pacific without landing once. The bar-tailed godwit doesn’t stop to eat, drink, or sleep during its migration across the Pacific Ocean. Its journey from Alaska to Australia takes roughly 11 days of continuous flight, covering over 13,000 kilometers through storms, headwinds, and open ocean with zero land beneath it the entire time. Before departure, it does something almost surgical to its own body. It shrinks its digestive organs down to almost nothing, converting the stomach, intestines, and liver into raw fuel. The bird essentially eats its own gut to make room for fat reserves that will power its wings for nearly two weeks straight. The brain doesn’t fully sleep either. Half of it stays active while the other half rests, alternating in shifts mid-flight at altitude over the open Pacific. The godwit is simultaneously unconscious and navigating with magnetic field sensitivity that no human instrument in the 18th century could replicate. What makes this genuinely staggering beyond the physical record is the navigational precision involved. The bird leaves Alaska and arrives in New Zealand with accuracy that would embarrass early GPS systems. It reads Earth’s magnetic field, atmospheric pressure gradients, star positions, and potentially quantum-level compass mechanisms inside its eye that literally let it see magnetic field lines overlaid on its visual field. Evolution spent millions of years building an aerospace navigation system inside a 300 gram animal. We spend billions engineering machines that do what this bird does on instinct, fat reserves, and half a sleeping brain. The longest recorded non-stop flight by a commercial aircraft is around 20 hours. This bird does 11 days. Without a runway.