Clare Moriarty
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quiteclare.bsky.social
Clare Moriarty
@quiteclare.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.1K following 880 posts
History and Philosophy of Maths and Science, and philosophy of parenthood. Mariah-Carey/Denis-Irwin-admirer. Postdoc
-she- 🏊‍♀️

Ramblings &c. : claremoriarty.com
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quiteclare.bsky.social
I was wondering if the BS here was Bratislava and now I'm worried my bottle is 13 years out of date!
November 20, 2025 at 5:51 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
or this beaut
November 20, 2025 at 4:30 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Essential fare today. Holy God it's cold out there.
Image of a blue hot water bottle on a wooden table 👌
November 20, 2025 at 9:17 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Lol
Image of Parrott from Wikipedia where someone has edited his name to Troy "Jesus" Parrott
November 16, 2025 at 4:16 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Living my best life in the Vinted descriptions section
Text (from Vinted garment description) reads "great for work, modest dressing occasions etc. Incredible funeral outfit."
November 11, 2025 at 9:31 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Is it... too small? 🫠
(Just need @lizcarolan.com to tell me the blocking will transform it...)
#knitsky
Image of my 2 yr old son standing on a chair trying on a knit I'm finishing up while having his evening bottle. It's a striped little sweatshirt in blue, grey, green, navy and maroon. It looks a little bit snug.
November 7, 2025 at 6:34 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
I just got some GOOD job news, which I'm not allowed discuss... but if you see me in a professional context there will be signs I am returning to full time academic employment.

Picture below of me, checking people in at the @swip-i.bsky.social conference in Maynooth, dripping in Bottega.
#philsky
Cardi B at a recent Patriots game wearing full length maroon Bottega Veneta coat and thigh-high boots, with a matching crocodile Hermes Birkin bag.
November 6, 2025 at 4:23 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Was going to make a joke about stretching my credentials for various job applications but I really just wanna show this giant earthworm my 5-yr-old and I found stretching up an absolute storm earlier.
Look at!
A seriously stretched earthworm on some tarmac The same earthworm, seconds later
November 4, 2025 at 9:54 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Spooky scenes! a few other ghouls about too...

She was weirdly worried someone was going to make her vote and she didn't have a dragon pen.

#dragonsforconnolly
A small child wearing a dragon mask outside the doors of a polling station.
October 24, 2025 at 8:06 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Category is:
Wikipedia entries that really seem like theyre actually about hard to reach trains but aren't.

One for @heliolithic.bsky.social (unbelievably, Niamh has asked for this as a Halloween costume... where to start?)
Wikipedia page for the bird "Inaccessible Island rail".
October 19, 2025 at 5:00 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Thirdly, you can have the best people on earth working in these roles, but without proper infrastructure/spaces, they can't fulfil potential/discharge proper care. I queued for D&C surgery alongside ppl awaiting delivery, could hear babies cry when I woke up from surgery.
Text: "Finally, infrastructure. There is compassion in good design. The row of seats that face the registration desk in the hospital I attended for miscarriage surgery contained me and two heavily pregnant women checking in to give birth. Having had this experience, I feel I can say with confidence that there’s a good reason you wouldn’t have a wedding planner and an undertaker share a reception. Similarly, because of construction works at the hospital and some necessary repurposing of rooms, I could hear newborn cries from the recovery bed where I ate my first bites of post-surgery toast. Again, an emotional hardship most could do without. The urgency of better, newer hospitals is not just about better facilities and technology, it should be about taking us out of buildings that are not fit for purpose – and that’s leaving aside the legacy of the carceral ghosts that inhabit many of these institutions, the sites of so much injustice against women on this island in recent history."
October 7, 2025 at 10:14 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
The second was to take your knowledge of your body seriously. I knew my dates and my cycle well, but when things weren't measuring right, I let myself believe that I'd got the dates and my cycle length wrong. Looking back, I could have spared myself some pain here if I believed myself.
Text: My second big lesson was to trust my knowledge of my body. As a philosopher working primarily on the history of science, I think I have a pretty healthy mixture of, on the one hand, appropriate deference to medical expertise and, on the other, the kind of scepticism over clinical certainty that is a necessary byproduct of having studied the way scientific knowledge evolves over time. I’ve had a very regular 29-day cycle for most of my adult life. When early scans showed that the blastocyst was not the right size for its gestation, I let myself be talked around to the idea that I was wrong about my dates and cycle length and that everything was probably okay. Of course, people will try to allow a person to keep a hope alive where it’s wanted (and it’s difficult for health practitioners to ever know your medical values), but I feel I could have spared myself some subsequent grief if I had trusted myself.
October 7, 2025 at 10:14 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
My first insight is that, for those of us who had our first babies in the height of COVID, a normalisation of isolated fertility care set in that was hard to shake. Years later, I went in for my miscarriage surgery alone, because I genuinely didn't think to ask if I could bring my husband.
Text reads: "So I knew no other way, and the loneliness of that clinical experience never really occurred to me at the time. However, it normalised a sense of pregnancy as a purely individual business in a way that I look back on very differently now. When, at just more than 13 weeks, I went into the hospital for my booking appointment and learned I’d lost the pregnancy, I scrambled to get a D&C (dilation and curettage) appointment immediately. I wanted to be through it as quickly as I could. When the day came for surgery, I had so internalised the normality of medical isolation in my Covid pregnancy that I didn’t even think to ask could I bring my husband to the hospital with me. I just assumed I couldn't"
October 7, 2025 at 10:14 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Nice. It does feel a bit emblematic of the landlord-cum-politician issue in Ireland.
October 6, 2025 at 8:09 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Dropped this off to a pal's baby today.
I hope its proportions are actually less weird than they look here.
Had a bad few months of knitting... hope I'm back in the swing now.
#showusyourknits
Hand knitted baby jumper lying on a wooden table. Jumper is a crew neck, flat construction, in multicoloured yarn, with sage green cuffs and collar. Button placket across the shoulder to admit giant baby heads. Buttons blue and yellow. Same jumper described in last image, but the back of it is face up.
October 5, 2025 at 11:35 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Been a while, old friend!
Image is a cover image of Hartry Field's 'Science Without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism' (1980)
October 1, 2025 at 10:29 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Finally... as Ben Davies and I argue in a new paper about baby feeding... as one of the most sustained and intense interactions families have with public health and institutions, pregnancy and postnatal care are especially vital in the battle for public trust in science and medicine.
Snip of article. Text reads: "Equally shameful was Kennedy’s chiding co-opting of the “believe all women” slogan to describe the “gaslighting and marginalising” of a very particular subset of women: those who believe vaccines impacted their babies’ neurologic development. This was especially galling in the context of the claim that pregnant women’s failure to “tough it out” was responsible for their children’s health outcomes – and even more so when the children in question are so often stigmatised and pathologised by this same movement. Medical and scientific institutions must continue to counter these narratives and pursue reproductive and paediatric healthcare that sustains public trust. Women’s healthcare may well be the new front line in the fight to retain trust in science and institutions."
September 29, 2025 at 8:31 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
I discussed the weird hostility to trust as a part of scientific method that RFK keeps pedaling, Trump's irresponsible "tough it out" framing of pregnant pain and fever, the anti-science elements of current "wellness" influencing...
Snip from the article. Text reads: Trump, Kennedy and their Maha (Make America Healthy Again) initiative have become central to discussions of contemporary hostility to science. Alongside the infamous cuts to American research infrastructure by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Kennedy’s recent declaration that “trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy” was a sign of his complete lack of regard for scientific method. Though it certainly requires critical thinking and dissent, a scientific approach also depends on trust. At certain levels of complexity, we can’t all check each other’s work and it’s impractical to instruct people to “do their own research”. Snip of article. Text reads: "hat “tough it out” rhetoric, which he used repeatedly, is telling. “If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re going to have to do. You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly. It can be something that’s very dangerous to the woman’s health, in other words, a fever that’s very, very dangerous and ideally a doctor’s decision because I think you shouldn’t take it and you shouldn’t take it during the entire pregnancy.” This “tough it out” presentation of fever and pain in pregnancy as something to be weathered – something that, if you grit your teeth will vanish unassisted – is emblematic of a mood of talking about women’s pain (especially in pregnancy) as barely medically salient. It trivialises women’s suffering, endangers their welfare, and carves a dangerous wedge between women and their healthcare supports at a critical time." Snip of article. Text reads: "It’s not very surprising to see such careless suggestions that women’s healthcare choices in pregnancy explained their children’s neurodivergence come from an administration that has shown continual disdain for women. Alongside the surge of “tradwife” influencer culture, which instructs women to submit to husbands and “lean in” to completely economic disempowerment, social movements have sprung up stigmatising any trust in medicine (often styled “interventions” to the course of nature). A new breed of wellness influencers instructs us to ignore medical advice, discontinue medications and heal at home – the same old snake oil, now repackaged as empowerment against dogma."
September 29, 2025 at 8:31 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Not every day you get to see "preeclamptic" rhymed 🥰😍

Ps: @irishtimes.com let me review the album 🙏🙏🙏
Lyrics section of Spotify, highlighting lyrics "I had another baby, I was preeclamptic, you gotta love it" from the song "Dead" from her new album Screenshot of the Cardi B 'Am I The Drama?' tracklist
September 27, 2025 at 11:45 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Reid, also bringing something good
September 9, 2025 at 11:58 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
I think of that video of Miyazaki (studio ghibli fame) reacting to AI animation very often.
Still of Miyazaki in a video. Cc reads "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself"
September 7, 2025 at 1:13 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
"Our house is trapped under a rainbow now".
Image of a back garden with a pretty much full view of a rainbow's arc
August 27, 2025 at 6:28 PM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Morning, doves. 🥰

My son is called Colm, the Irish word for dove/pigeon.

Can't move for Colms here this morning.
Two little collared doves perched on top of a garden playhouse
August 22, 2025 at 6:45 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Today, academics, ask yourself:

Am I bringing enough of a Flann O'Brien energy to my R&R work?
Image is a snip from Flann O'Brien's letters, reading: "It is a pity you did not like my beautiful book. As a genius, I do not expect to be readily understood but you may be surprised to know that my book is a definite milestone in literature, completely revolutionises the English novel and puts the shallow pedestrian English writers in their place. Of course I know you are prejudiced against me on account of the IRA bombings."
August 15, 2025 at 10:50 AM
quiteclare.bsky.social
Morning scenes...

Still shorts and t shirt weather, and the last days of creche before big school 🥲

And... trying to do 15 minutes of piano after drop off before work
August 15, 2025 at 8:04 AM