Les Liens du... Jeudi!

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes: -

• Emmet Stinson (Overland), And the winner isn't: on the inherent stupidity of literary prizes. I am... skeptical of this. It's just a leeetle on the nose to run a piece on how literary prizes don't exhibit merit the week an Indigenous woman wins the country's biggest literary prize. It has a nod to Lukashenko (and, before her, Wright) and to the Stella Prize as well, but... at best it was written beforehand and had the acknowledgement of Lukashenko's merit wedged in at the last minute: at worst, it was written *after* she won, and Isn't Racist, But...
  
• Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing), Data mining reveals 80% of (American) books published 1924-1963 never had their copyright renewed and are now in the public domain.
  
• LaTrobe University's 'Private Lives' survey (large-scale health and wellbeing survey of LGBTIQ Australians) is up and running for the third time. If you fit the alphabet soup (or 'other related identities) and are resident in Australia, I recommend it. (I will be returning, I think, when I actually AM legally resident in Australia again)
  
• Haaretz, Israel, Saudi forces rapped for killing children by UN report. Israel for deaths of Palestinian children, Saudi for Yemeni children's deaths. This is particularly fascinating if you go look at a range of headlines from the same day: half of them complain that Israel *wasn't* listed, while others complain that the listing is unfair. Haaretz is about the closest to balanced, although the headline misleadingly implies that Israel is being blacklisted alongside Saudi. Both states feature in a report to the Security Council, but only Saudi and its military coalition states appear in the blacklist. No sanctions are attached to either appearing in the report or in the blacklist: the blacklist is intended as the 'shame' part of 'name and shame'. So Israel gets named, but not shamed.
  
• ABC radio: sculpture with 'subtle nipples' censored in Melbourne. Apparently Tumblr are running Melbourne art competitions now (in addition to nipples being present there was issues of 'clarity' re gender of the nipples in question.
  

Good News:

• Equality Australia (The entity formerly known as Australian Marriage Equality) report that in response to petitions, major retailers have withdrawn conversation therapy related books.
  
• Guardian reports Italy grants asylum to eritrean man mistaken for years for trafficker. Only good news in that Italy ponied up and granted him asylum in the end: their police force's stubborn insistence *in the face of all evidence* that they had arrested A Famous Trafficker sure is... something.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Katharine Murphy (Guardian AU), How Facebook's hall of mirrors lead to the prime ministership of 'Go Sharks'.
  

  I suspect Fletcher and I would agree that the only thing worse than the status quo is Facebook – already too dominant and too insufficiently regulated – appointing a truth commissar and setting itself up as the arbiter of reality. Also not desirable: a government appointed truth commission.
  Solutions are going to be hard to find. But the fact is we have a serious problem when the primary place where citizens congregate can be a hub for misinformation, which is corrosive for the body politic, and nobody is ultimately responsible for making the environment better.
  In the bear pit, the government hovered on the brink of braggadocio.
  While I was wrestling with these conundrums – the truth and how to safeguard it – Labor trialled a question time session where it sought to hold various government figures, from the prime minister down, responsible for statements they had made previously that turned out to be ... how can I put this politely ... less than accurate.

  
  
• R.O. Kwan (Oprah Mag 'Coming Out' series), Why Incendiaries author R.O. Kwan came out as bisexual on Twitter.
  
• Jia Tolento (Guardian), The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman. This is an exerpt from 'Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion', which I may or may not read. Parts of this I was like 'hah, yeah" ("She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached."), but... it's not actually analysis, at least not this excerpt. It's polemic, with few cited sources. The best historicised part is the section on Barre classes.
  
• Carrie V. Mullins (Electric Lit), Supper Club (Lara Williams) imagines what could happen if women unleased their hunger.
  
• Motoko Rich (NYT), Craving freedom, Japan's women opt out of marriage. Covers a bunch of stuff, from the rise of single-woman-wedding-parties (ie, you rent a dress and get photos and have a wedding reception for Just You) to the declining birth rate. *Doesn't* address the economic status of the women interviewed - it's dropped in a caption that one of them works in a florist one day a week, so... I'm guessing she has family resources to draw on that means she doesn't *need* to marry.
  
• Samuel Leighton-Dore (SBS news), I was never the right kind of boy and I was bullied because of it:
  

  Looking back on the difficult years I spent at school — something I’ve made a habit of doing with various psychologists — it’s often tempting to conclude that the cruel and sustained bullying I experienced was because of my being gay. But for all those years before I was sexually active, I think it had more to do with the fact that I didn’t fit society’s idea of how a boy or man should be and act: masculine, rough, stoic and strong.

  
  
• Rebecca Hausler (The Conversation), The Cowra Breakout: Remembering and reflecting on Australia's biggest prison escape. I think this *might* have warranted a few sentences in my y 10 history textbook (I have a hazy sense it might have shown up as evidence of the suicidality of Japanese POWs), but WOW there is SO MUCH GOING ON HERE, and I had no idea about the literary footprint. I need to read Anita Heiss' novel, I think.
  
• Maddison Griffiths (Archer Magazine), Being bisexual and mixed: preserving culture through a queer lens.
  
• Carla Bruce-Eddings (Guernica Magazine), Blood Oranges. Creative non-fiction / personal essay / thing. Cannot summarise, cannot pull-quote, can only recommend.
  
• Rachel Klein (Bitch Media), The booming baby-shower industry empowers anti-choicers. Written from the specific perspective of an Orthodox Jewish family from a speficic sect who, by tradition, make no preparations in advance of the arrival of a child.
  

This has been Liens du Jeudi. You may or may not get more links on the weekend, or possibly even on Monday as per schedule, depending on how The Tourism is treating me.