Les Liens du ... Jeudi?

Supplement to monday links, occurs irregularly.

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes: (Apparently it's Islamophobia o'clock in current affairs this week)

• Rex Santus (Vice.com), What You Need To Know About the Backlash Against Rep Ilhan Omar
  
• Angela Guiffrida (Guardian.com), Italian-Egyptian singer Mahmood win's Eurovision selection, faces islamophobic backlash. I have since heard he's confirmed to be going. (No word on whether anyone has confronted him re: BDS. I guess if you enter the Eurovision selection comp its taken for granted you aren't boycotting Israel)
  
• Thelocal.ch reports Geneva votes to ban religious symbols on public employees. The french-style secularism law will extend a hijab ban from high school teachers to all public servants, including university staff. There's a federal court challenge in the offing.

Not even dignifying the Daily Tele cartoon with a link. Good news is the Medivac bill did get passed, and Hakeem al-Arabi returned to Melbourne after two months in detention in Thailand.

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Joanne Edge, (Welcome Collection researcher) Diagnosing the Past, on the perils and pitfalls of retrospective diagnosis.
  

  Retrospective diagnosis is by no means a done debate among historians of medicine – many colleagues who I respect a great deal will disagree with my position. I may even change my mind in future.

  But for now, I don’t see it as my job to impose modern categories of thinking onto past cultures. My role is to discover how medical practitioners and patients in the past thought about their illnesses – how they diagnosed sickness, what their treatments were, and how they described their diseases – in order to better understand the worlds they inhabited.

  
  
• Suzannah Weiss (Bitch Media, 2017) interviews Hallie Lieberman (author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy) on The history and future of sex toys. 'The story of sex toys isn’t from repression to liberation.'
  
• Follow-up to Monday's link to the Dan Mallory exposé, Ruoxi Chen (Electric Lit), Dan Mallory is the oldest story in publishing.
  
• Frank Bongiorno, On Louise Adler, Academic Publishing, and Cultural Barbarism - re intense pushback on MUP's decision to focus on academic publishing going forward, after expanding its range in recent decades. Bongiorno spots a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in the criticism of the change.
  

  I appreciate that Adler’s strategy was a legitimate and imaginative response to the challenges faced by anyone seeking to run a university press today.

  I equally suspect that the MUP has a bright future ahead of it as it pursues a different pathway. Jack the Insider’s vision of “an injection of dry, turgid, unreadable academic texts” is as absurd as his account of MUP’s past, when it supposedly “published books that did not sell or more properly found an almost microscopic niche within academia, selling in tens of copies at best”.

  This is a press that published Manning Clark. And, strange to report: he was a university professor.

  
  
• Kristopher Jansma (Electric Lit), What Happened to Sylvia Plath's lost novels.
  
• Sarah Laskow (Atlas Obscura), Where Old, Unreadable Documents go to be understood - interesting profile of someone who's turned palaeography into a marketable small business skill.
  
• William McBrien (Archer Magazine), I'm the gay teacher you want the right to fire. Despite this eloquent piece, I think I remain the only Australian queer who thinks that protecting *children* from religious discrimination is a different order of priority to the unfortunate situation of adult queers/lgbtqetc folk who made a rational choice to enter the employ of a religious school. (And if we *are* going to get into the religious exceptions from anti-discrimination law, I want to start with strictly overseeing hiring processes that screen out pro-evolution science teachers.)
  
• Ali MC (SBS news) interviews Aunty Lyn Austin re: the state of Victoria's refusal consider compensation or redress for the Stolen Generation.

Arts type things

• Ali Choudry (Queerstories Podcast), Origin of the Modern Man. The podcast ends with a story about his photograph that was shortlisted for the Incinterator Prize, 'Origin of the Modern Man' (after Courbet's Origine du Monde). The photo (probably because it's explicit) can't be found online, but there's a detail image in the Incinerator Prize 2015 guide. The subject is a trans man, and in the podcast Choudry talks about creating the photograph in conversation not only with Courbet but to Orlan's Origine du guerre, which is a straight up dick pick in response to Courbet.