Les Liens du Lundi

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Cochrane and Handley (ABC News): Hong Kong democracy protestor detained briefly by Border Force on her way to a pro-democracy event in Melbourne. "They claimed there are riots in Hong Kong nowadays and they asked me about my intention to come to Australia … they asked me if I kept any weapons in my luggage."
  
• Marisa Iati (WaPo): Conversion therapy center founder who sought to turn lgbtq christians straight now sazs he's gay and rejects the cycle of shame.
  
• Denis Johnson (Melville House Books): What happens when you give a monopoly a dystopian text: they learn how to be badder. On Amazon and the The Testaments embargo.
  
• Lisa Cox (Guardian AU): 'Dead things everywhere': is Australia facing the summer from hell?
  
• Island Magazine reports that they have lost their core funding from the Tasmanian govt.
  

Good News:

• Katie Serena (Allthat's interesting, 2017 updated Sept 2019): Lost languages discovered in one of the world's oldest libraries. Palimpsests recovered from manuscripts in St Catherine's, Mount Sinai, include texts in Caucasian Albanian and Christian Aramaic.
  

Longer political analysis

• Ruby Hamad (SBS voices), Would Caster Semenya have been banned if she was white?.
  
• Karen Middleton (Saturday Paper), Divisions over the religious discrimination bills.
  

Longer cultural / historical / other

• Noah Cho (Catapault Magazine), My Harabeoji taught me it's always better to add more garlic.
  
• Schmidt and Milburn (WaPo), To some, this queer couple looks straight. For him that's okay, for her it feels like a lie. Although the authors do a good job of contextualising, and also talk to a bi woman, it's really remarkable that the lesbian woman referred to in the headline here (partnered with a trans man) doesn't make any reference to bi people as she's trying to explain her situation.
  
• Ask Polly (The Cut), My kid is non-binary and I can't get over it. Come for the snark, stay for the actually sensible advice.
  
• Abby Walthausen (Electric Lit), This cookbook from 1942 is a textbook for making a better world. Title is a bit me, but the article is a great reflection on a cookbook entitled 'How to cook a wolf'.
  
• Amelia Nierenberg (NYT), A tomato grows in the East River.
  
• Alex Hern (Guardian): Apple made Siri deflect questions about feminism. Although admittedly the big sticker here seems to have been Siri answering 'Siri, are you a feminist' with evasions. Personally, I do not think a robot assistant SHOULD be declaring itself a feminist??? Like. Some level of consciousness and free will is required to be a feminist, I feel???
  

Disclaimer: divisions between sections may be arbitrary and variable.