highlyeccentric | Les Liens du Lundi (Reply)

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

Jill Stark (SMH) 'It's such an exhilarating feeling to be so free from your shackles', short piece interviewing Patrick Abboud in advance of Mardi Gras2019
Kelly J. Baker (Women in Higher Ed), The Productivity Trap
Denis Muller (The Conversation AU), Ita Buttrose's appointment as ABC chair is a step in the right direction

Continued list of George Pell related links

My top pick:

Des Cahill (The Saturday Paper), Trials and Great Tribulations. Cahill is a former priest, a research psychologist, a devout Catholic, and an expert witness to the Royal Commission.

Throughout church history, the dangerous cocktail of psychosexually immature, maldeveloped and sexually deprived celibate priests and monks with easy access to children has been a problem. And not only in the Catholic Church, but also in Buddhist temples and Hindu ashrams. The danger has increased exponentially over the past two centuries with the massification of schooling, the growth of youth associations and the rise of religious teaching orders of nuns and brothers.
In our RMIT University study for the royal commission, we found the chances of a Catholic child being sexually abused was between 1:200 to 1:400. Chances increased if the child was male, especially if an altar boy or choirboy. They were exponentially increased if a child was confined to an orphanage or residential care facility run by religious brothers. The Catholic Church still operates some 9500 orphanages worldwide, many in the poorest areas of India and Italy, a fact not once mentioned during the Vatican summit.

Telegraph UK confirms the Vatican will open an investigation into Pell, without waiting for the appeal hearing
David Hamer (The Conversation AU), How an appeal could uphold or overturn George Pell's conviction - nice legal explainer here.
AAP/Guardian AU, Pell appeals over 'fundamental irregularity' in his trial
Melissa Davey (Guardian AU), George Pell has good chance of winning appeal against convictions, expert says: based on interview with Melbourne professor Jeremy Gans (but note that USyd's Hamer was less convinced of the chances of the 'jury was unreasonable' argument flying)
Daniel Reeders (Meanjin blog), Candle-lighting: the Catholic response to the Pell conviction
Richard Cooke (Guardian AU), The inconsistencies of George Pell's defenders just display their power
Here’s my question: where have these people been?

Did these past decades of institutional child abuse never happen? Were they looking away the whole time? Has everything we learned – painfully – about the damage it does, and its shame, been unlearned? Can it be still unrecognised that abusers groom whole communities as well as individual children? Of all the implausible excuses available, surely “but how could a priest do this?” must rank close to the top.

The jury did not buy Robert Richter’s very expensive defence, but for Pell’s defenders it has become an article of faith. And that faith needs miracles: cloth that is immovable, slits that are at the same time not an “opening”, schoolboys incapable of dodging authority, rope that cannot be untied, abuse that is either reported in an instant or never existed.
Melissa Cunningham (SMH), You no longer rule our world: the message from accuser's sister to cardinal's supporters: interview with the sister of the complainant in the now-dropped Swimmer's Trial.
Alex McKinnon (The Saturday Paper), George Pell's Conviction:
For nearly 20 years, the Australian Catholic Church’s response to child sexual abuse was shaped by a child molester.
Cardinal George Pell’s conviction on sexual assault charges this week has so many ramifications, of such importance, it is difficult to know where to look first. [...]
When Pell was merely Australia’s most senior Catholic, his efforts to protect the church from survivors of clergy abuse were legendary. His conviction casts those efforts in a new and horrific light: he was not simply callous, he was complicit. Pell built entire legal architectures, placed innumerable obstacles in the way of survivors and their loved ones, spent decades and millions of dollars, not only to protect the church but to protect himself.

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

Michael Salter (The Atlantic), The problem with the term 'Toxic Masculinity'. I'm a bit ... hmmm... at this piece (I've never assumed 'toxic masculinity' refers to an innate quality. It's obviously systemic???), but Salter at least does due dilligence, drawing on feminist and black scholars throughout this piece.
Tamara Winfrey Harris (Bitch Media), Black women make their own marital rules
Diana Anderson (Bitch Media), Less Fear, More Queer: a critical review of Nadia Bolz-Weber's new, progressive (ish) book on Christianity and sexual shame.
Jaqueline Alnes (Guernica), What Remains: a beautifully written memoir piece on the author's experience of a neurological disorder, and her affinity with 'Juanita', the mummy found in ice in the Peruvian mountains in 1995.
Cher Tan (Liminal Mag), Interview with Sonia Nair: a lot of interesting stuff here, on food, language, cultural identity, and the nature of literary/cultural criticism
Madeline Dore (Extraordinary Routines), Creatives share their routines when dealing with burnout, shock and overwhelm. It's a bit... I feel like it's a problem if we're at a point where 'have a routine for dealing with burnout' is a thing lots of people can talk about. I particularly like Honor Eastly's description of the pre-burnout phrase as 'crispy', though.
Kashmir Hill (Gizmodo), Facebook is giving advertisers access to your shadow contact information: there's a lot out there on this topic at the moment, but this is the one I read. The part that I didn't know was that if you use an email address to buy or subscribe to something, the company can add that address to its list of 'target ads to this person'. I use my junk email address for instagram, facebook, and online shopping. That certainly explains why no sooner did I buy something from a UK department store than I got eerily accurate ads for their wares (although accuracy is decreasing with time - nope, department store, i do not want a frilly spring dress).
Lorena Allam and Evershed (The Guardian AU), The Killing Times: the massacres of aboriginal people Australia must confront. I feel a little bit... odd that this is talking about this information as utterly new, when I've definitely been reading about the frontier wars for a decade or so (without necessarily even having gone out of my way to look for it). I'm concerned about the fact that this piece clearly *does* draw on the work of Indigenous historians and other historians of colonial violence, but doesn't explicitly cite any books or articles - it only cites a smaller scale digital humanities mapping project. I very much doubt Allam and Evershed personally sifted all the archives necessary to identify written records like Henry Meyrick's 1846 letter to his family where he notes the high levels of violence against indigenous australians in Gippsland. They will have gone to secondary scholarship first, to find out where to look. They do quote from conversations with Prof Lyndall Ryan (who headed up the smaller-scale digital mapping project), but she's not herself indigenous. I'm fairly sure there are Indigenous scholars working on this? Who should be cited?
At any rate, the data here is (while not comprehensive) some of the most extensive yet collected, and it's an interesting collab between the Indigenous Affairs editor (Allam) and the 'data and interactives editor' (Evershed). I'm just sceptical because of the tendency on the part of journalists to gloss over historians' work even as they draw on it, and of digital humanists to act as if work hasn't been *done* if it's only available in text format.
Mike Seccombe (The Saturday Paper), Cash not for comment: review of Michaela Cash's position vis a vis the Federal Court case on the AWU raids.