Les Liens du Jeudi!

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Stephen Long (ABC), Adani's Carmichael subsidiary is surving on a lifeline from its parent company:
  

  • The company responsible for the Carmichael coal mine has current liabilities of more than $1.8b versus current assets of less than $30m
  • The auditors signed off on the company being a "going concern" because of a 12-month guarantee from the Indian parent firm
  • Accounting expert Sandra van der Laan says "effectively on paper they are insolvent. I wouldn't be trading with them"

  
  
• Matt Mcgrath (BBC), 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months.
  
• Mary Pappenfuss (Huffpo), Immigration officials snatch 9-year-old US citizen heading to school, hold her for 2 days. You all know about this one already, I'm sure. The link is just to say: I'm seeing this. (And, in the process of trying to understand it, I learned a bunch about the demographics of the US-Mexico border that I would not have otherwise known.)
  
• Zoe Druitt (Metronews UK), Women in India pay the price for cashew nut demand as vegan diets rise. Blaming vegans is a bit of a deflection here: it's pretty clear 'UK (and other int'l?) supermarkets setting unreasonably low prices' is to blame, and vegans (and others - me included) are merely the beneficiaries.
  

Good News:

• There's an ACCC enquriy into Digital Platforms happening (looking at how google, facebook, etc shape information access in Australia).
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Madeline Ward (Overland), The issue of free speech at the University of Sydney isn't what you think:
  

  This was not an especially unusual situation for me, nor for the other student activists involved. The Code of Conduct, the Student Discipline Rule and the investigative processes that are set in motion after a student is suspected of breaking either are familiar enemies to left-wing students at the University of Sydney. Incredibly broad in both language and application, the Code and Rule are used in tandem to define a number of behaviours that could potentially constitute an act of misconduct, from failing to ‘treat all employees, members of the public and other students with respect, dignity, impartiality, courtesy and sensitivity’ to ‘prejudicing the good order and government of the University’ and ‘prejudicing the good name or academic standing of the University.’ Any number of behaviours can be treated as a potential instance of misconduct: from the publication of politically controversial material to a campus protest.

  
  
• Irina Dumitrescu (Longreads), Reading Lessons, essay reprinted from Heller and Conklin Akbari (eds), How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Soud.
  From a section talking about the OE 'Solomon and Saturn':
  

  It struck me at some point that this is a poem about learning to read. Yes, it is about understanding the individual letters on a page, but it is also about developing a powerful connection to a lyric, a story, a prayer, or a song. Solomon and Saturn imagines that a text can grab the reader so profoundly and emotionally that the act of encountering it might feel like terror. I do not think that the bookish Anglo-Saxon who wrote this curious poem really wanted reading to feel scary or violent. But I think he — or she — found a poetic way to express how shattering deep reading can be, and how our very bodies sometimes have to be a little bit destroyed for us to access it. The poet also knew there was something implausible and magical about reading intensely, that the feeling might only be granted for brief moments, like a spell.
  
  Yes, I have forgotten how to read. I have practice at forgetting, but practice in learning too. And occasionally I am reminded that I belong to a quiet, timeless community of other longing readers, all of them yearning for a connection perfect and ephemeral. With them, I am still learning how to read.

  
  
• Megan Garber (The Atlantic), When Harry Met Sally and the high maintenance woman.
  
• Izzie Ramirez (Bitch Media), Doing nothing is a radical idea for marginalized people, review of Jenny Odell's 'How To Do Nothing'.
  
• Kera Bolonik (The Cut), The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge. What. What even happened here. None of this makes sense. A professor has an affair (low on actual sex, high on emotional wossnames), may or may not have fathered a child, gets deeply entangled with the woman and her partner, hits the rocks with his "ex" wife he's still living with, and somehow... the two women secretly move into his home while his "ex" wife is away.
  
• GennaRose Nethercott (Electric Lit), The literature of cootie catchers, which are those pyramidal foldy things you use to tell fortunes (I have no idea what we called them but it sure wasn't that).
  

  The cootie catcher is primarily associated with girlhood, a gendered tradition passed hand-to-hand at sleepover parties and in schoolyards. Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become—leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Why bother with divination when you can control the future? Adolescent girls, however, were never afforded this promise. Thus, girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. If they couldn’t control the future, at least they could get a preview of what’s to come.

  
  
• Simon Springer (The Conversation), Thrash Not Trash: why heavy metal is a valid and vital phd subject
  
• Yara Rodriguez Fowler (Electric Lit), Sexual assault survivors don't owe anyone their stories: a manifesto against telling the truth.
  
• The Design Files, A day in the life of Benjamin Law, Writer.
  
• Clara Berridge and Karen Levy (The Conversation US), Webcams in nursing home rooms may deter elder abuse, but are they ethical?. That sure is a question.
  
• Greta LaFleur (Sydney Review of Books), A Fairy's Tale, review of Paul Takes the Form of A Mortal Girl
  
• Anthony Nocery (Archer Magazine), I've done drag a few times. Contains this great anecdote:
  

  “Yeah, darl. My name was Wynonna Strider. She wasn’t allowed into the shops.” “How often did you do it?” I asked. “A few times,” he joked. “It was a bit of fun. We could just be stupid and have fun. Act like we always did when we were together but in public.” He smiled, “I remember once I was tottering down the street in my dress and heels and some guys shouted ‘show us your tits’ so I pulled them out of my dress and waved them over my head and screamed “here you go, mate” and they ran away because they didn’t know what to do.” “Wow.” “Yeah,” he said. “Its one of my favourite things I’ve ever done.”

  
  
• Antonia Pont (The Lifted Brow), Consent: on rejecting and being rejected (Exerpt; I read the full essay in TLB 41):
  

  A friend, whom I consider wise in a rare way, once told me something about desire. She’d worked for a decade as a counsellor for couples of every ilk and persuasion—gay, straight, older, younger, newly besotted, long-term—hence she had a pretty good sample size to ground her speculations. She’d observed that when anger is operating somewhere in a relationship between two people, then there can be affection and affectionate gestures but, in most cases, there won’t be desire, or not for long. Through the haze of anger, the other seems simply undesirable. Enduring anger, then, will tend to mean either that sex slowly gets replaced with lots of ‘loving’, sweet but not very ‘sexy’, behaviours, or (my extension of her theory) that there might be regular instances of compulsory congress—since contemporary folk can be committed to diligent, frequent sex as a to-do list item—but things won’t tend towards elated tumbling, scintillating eroto-brilliance or throat-catching swoons. The sex, if there’s any at all, basically won’t be very hot or very happy. So goes my paraphrasing of her concept. It’s stayed with me for years. I’ve called on its logic when sex in my own relationships has dropped off and I couldn’t (or didn’t want to) work out why.

  
  Well THAT sure is a thing I couldn't have described but absolutely recognise.
  
• Michelle Tydd (The Saturday Paper), Childless Men. Report on the work of Imogene Smith, who is heading up a Deakin University project on the experiences of men who choose not to have children - the first such report. I'm really interested in this, as it for much of the twentieth and all of the twenty-first century so far, children or childlessness have been thought of as *women's issues*, and not foundational to a man's social identity (this was not always so; fatherhood, involving both legitimate and illegitimate children, was an absolutely central component of medieval masculine identity). I'm a bit... hmm... about the fact that this article stresses 'bad experiences with their own fathers' as a factor (on the grounds that a. a similar finding about women would be reductive and b. so many quote unquote failures of masculinity get blamed on Poor Relationship With His Father, it would be an easy reduction to make).