Les Liens du Lundi

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
( Assume the sort of content warnings you'd expect for a clerical abuse trial )

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.