Les Liens du Lundi

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• From the department of 'clearing low bars': 'This is about men's behavior' says top police officer after murder of another woman in Melbourne.
  
• LGBTI Muslims to lead (by now, have lead) Birmingham Pride, alongside Andrew Moffat, the man who created the 'No Outsiders' program.
  
• Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop' is now just a normal tunnel because it's 'simple and it works'. Sigh.
  
• My favourite piece of information from the UK EU elections, from deep in this live results page:
  

  Chris Williams, an agent for the Green party in Leicester, has told the Guardian that he has seen scores of spoilt ballots, apparently forged by pro-Brexit voters.
  
  Slogans such as ‘Brexit now’, ‘We need brexit’ and ‘We’ve already voted on this’ were scrawled next to Brexit, he said, but the electors neglected to vote for either Ukip or the Brexit party.
  
  Williams had been checking the disputed ballots as part of his duties as an election agent, and also found one ballot which had ‘wank’ written in every single box apart from that of the Green party. The voter left a note saying ‘not wank’ for the environmentalist party which was deemed acceptable as a vote.

  
  
• Algeria is due for a presidential election in July. The last date to deposit candidature dossiers was the 25th of May. They got two, both at the very last minute. (News report in French) As far as I can figure out, the four-term president Bouteflika withdrew his fifth-term candidacy, and the other leading candidates (eg this chap) didn't submit their dossiers after all. The two candidates who did may not meet the constitutional requirements to run.
  
• Running out of children a south korean school enrolls illiterate grandmothers.
  
• US energy department rebrands fossil fuels 'molecules of freedom'.
  
• Netanyahu failed to form a coalition govt and has to call a new election.
  
• White House ordered the USS John McCain 'out of sight' during Trump's visit to Japan. Since you can't hide a giant ship, this involved hanging tarps over its bows to hide the name.
  

Good News:

• Mae Martin is making a book for teens about 21st c sexuality
  
• Trevor Nace (Forbes), NASA says the earth is greener today than 20 years ago, thanks to China and India.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Rachel Shabi, Finding my roots in Tel Aviv, on ancestry and experience as a Mizrahi Jewish person in Israel and the UK.
  
• Alexis Wright, The Power and Purpose of Literature. Oh man. Alexis Wright should be on the lists of key literary theorists, and this is dense. No sentence or paragraph here is really that complex, but the whole thing is... doing a *lot*. It's hard to pull out a chunk that encapsulates even 50% of what's going on here.
  

  The world is becoming more in need of writers who can think far more deeply and bravely than ever before, to tell of the complexities, scope and connectiveness of our existence, to find the words and ways to express how we will live through the massive changes of global warming, in stories that can capture the imagination of far more people in the world, and in the hope that literature—these stories of ourselves—will have a role to play in helping to shape the future of our combined humanity. Call it survival literature, works that make you think, or food for the mind. This is why I believe that the task of literature is endless. Unless writers can keep up with the demands and rigours of the storytelling practices required for this new literature, the mountain of thoughts being generated throughout the world and not worked through or cared about will break away from our combined humanity more freely, and become random and unmoored, and will prey on whatever scattered ideas befall our combined civilisations. As Patrick Chamoiseau wrote in his novel Texaco, ‘literature in a living place must be taken alive …’

  
  
• Ed Pilkington (Guardian US), Move 9: women freed after 40 years in jail.
  
• Maaza Mengiste (Guardian UK), This Ethiopian prince was kidnapped by Britain: now it must release him.
  
• Kevin Dickinson (BigThink), The value of owning more books than you can read.
  
• George Denny-Smith and Martin Loosemore (The Conversation), It's time to move the goalposts on Indigenous policies so they reflect Indigenous values.
  

  What price would you put on leaving your family, community and other things you value? How good would a job have to be to make it worthwhile? This a dilemma for those who make and administer the policies and programs intended to “close the gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Indigenous people don’t necessarily see the benefits of working being worth the required costs the same way as non-Indigenous people. Any policy that doesn’t account for this crucial human factor is probably doomed to fail.

  
  
• Carla Pascoe Leahy (The Conversation), Mothers explain how they navigated work and childcare, 1970s to today.
  
• Eloise Grills (Meanjin Summer 2018), Bad Drivers. Some striking vignettes, but I couldn't actually figure out what the... point... of the memoir was.
  
• Richard Deniss (Guardian AU), What's left and right in Australian politics today?:
  

  Between 1985 and 1995 the NSW coal industry sacked around half of its workforce. The adoption of longwall mining and open pits meant that a lot fewer workers could extract a lot more coal. And so miners were sacked in large numbers. Neither the Coalition nor the Minerals Council raged against the impact of technological change on regional jobs back then.
  Do you see the pattern?
  The right wing of Australian politics has created, or allowed, unjust transitions to occur in the public and manufacturing sectors for decades. But whenever “market forces” threaten politically powerful industries like mining, logging and farming, there is never a shortage of money or political will to ensure “workers and communities” get protected. But it’s not workers and regional communities getting protected, it’s the right’s favoured industries.

  
  
• Jennifer Nichols (ABC Rural), Most of the world's macadamias can be traced back to a single Australian tree. Since commercial macadamias are grafts, this is bad news for the crop's genetic robustness. (I think I got this link via lilysea).
  

A Good Video:

Stéphane Lambiel, FaOI2019




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