Les Liens du Lundi

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• Michael Kolziol (SMH) breaks down the negotiations that got the medevac bill passed (for non-Australians watching, that's the bill that allows the 1000 people currently on Manus and Nauru to be evacuated to the mainland for medical treatment, with restrictions that remain frankly totalitarian but are better than... not at all. The bill passed last week, the first bill to pass both houses against a sitting government since 1929.)
  
• On which:
  

  1. The minister still can refuse any medical transfer
  
  2. Offshore Detention centres still exist
  
  3. Stop band aiding detention centres.
  
  Got it??

  — #SanctionAustralia (@riserefugee) February 13, 2019

  
  
  
• US senate passes sweeping bipartisan land conservation bill, adding to many national parks. Bill is expected to pass the lower house as well.
  
• Al Jazeera, Japan to recognise the Ainu as 'indigenous people' for the first time.
  

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Constance Grady (Vox) What Do You Do When The Art You Love Was Created By A Monster. In argument it's saying the same thing as most #metoo based conversations about cinema and literature. In content, though it's striking: Grady speaks to three different literary profs about approaches that different schools of literary analysis take to the art/artist interface.
  

  But the idea of separating the artist from the art is not a self-evident truth. It is an academic idea that was extremely popular as a tool for analyzing poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, and that has since evolved in several different directions. It’s one possible way of thinking about art, but it’s not the only one.

  To get a handle on what all the options out there look like, I interviewed three literary critics on the phone. I asked them to walk me through how the idea of separating the art from the artist emerged, how it’s changed over time, and what the alternatives are in 2018. My hope was that by the end of our conversations, I’d have a better sense of how to solve my Edward Scissorhands problem — and how to deal with all the art created by men who have been accused of monstrous things over the past year of #MeToo. Here’s what I learned.

  
  I'm just so impressed with how the author of this piece and the scholars she interviewed break down and make relevant developments in critical theory.
  
• Detan Jotanovic (Archer Magazine), Happy Valentines Day Me: how being single became central to my queerness. I think this is the first piece I've read on queer single/soloness for a long time that resonates with me in mostly good ways, in part because it's *not* about asexuality or aromanticity, just... singleness.
  
• Shannon Palus (Slate), Why can't we have decent toilet stalls?. In covering the design and economics factors that go into your basic prefab toilet stall wall/doors, it doesn't mention what I expected would be the first line of defence of the humble toilet stall: it's easier to rescue a locked-in client from a stall that has a at the top of the door. The doors in my local pub are floor-to-ceiling, but fortunately the stall dividers aren't, because the other week one of the bartenders had to shimmy over to let out an old lady who couldn't operate the latch.
  
• Dear Prudence (Slate), Should I move in with my hoarder boyfriend, featuring a really sterling example of sensible advice that's applicable in less extreme situations:
  

  He can be making important strides in changing long-standing habits and those changes may be insufficient for you to be interested in living with him—both of those things can be true at the same time. It’s necessary to distinguish between legitimate struggles that he deserves to get help and support with (like hoarding or anxiety in big groups of people) and harmful choices that he’s making (like picking fights with you to manage said anxiety). You also don’t have to stay in this relationship just because he saw a dentist, bought a few extra dressers, and stays out of the sun. If he considers the work he’s done over the last year to be bending over backward for you and you see it as just a drop in the bucket, then it’s time to call for a pretty serious timeout

  
  
• Elissa Washuta (Guernica Magazine), White Witchery, on occult practice and sharing occult spaces with white women, as a native american practitioner.
  
• Jake Evans (ABC news), Federal Candidate Tim Hollo discovered seven potential citizenships: on s44, migration history, and the difficulty of renouncing citizenships you didn't know you had
  

Items of humorous interest:

• Katie Tiedritch on twitter resigns the Monsters Inc Scare Floor for better OH&S and improved workflow
  

  I've analyzed some screenshots and have attempted to recreate the basic layout of Scare Floor F, which is the production environment shown in the movie, and have identified the primary features of the room (blue text) and each team's individual scare station (black) pic.twitter.com/ixGVkKVzZR

  — Katie Tiedrich (@katietiedrich) February 17, 2019