Les Liens du Samedi

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -

• M. Rambaran-Olm, Anglo-Saxon studies, academia and white supremacy. I've largely been watching from the sidelines as the ISAS goes through this convulsion (I am not an Anglo-Saxonist myself), but if you read one piece out of it, read this one.
  
• Freedman, Itkowitz, and Samenow (WaPo), NOAA staff warned in Sept 1 directive against contradicting Trump. Lie about the weather to avoid embarrassing the President, very normal behaviour.
  
• Justin McCurry (Guardian), Fukushima: Japan will have to dump radioactive water into the Pacific, minister says.
  
• Donna Page (Newcastle Herald), Morrison government ducks Senate's PFAS inquiry demand.
  
• Hannah Ryan (Buzzfeed Aus), Indigenous people could be deported if new law passes, lawyers have warned. The law in question is a character test for visa holders; we have already seen a few cases of people with Indigenous Australian heritage, born overseas, falling afoul of the visa system.
  
• Jamie Seidel (News.com.au), In for a roasting: Australia on the brink of 'apocalyptic' conditions.
  
• Kristie Sexton-McGrath (ABC Far North), 'Dogs balls' shrump to be recognised as new species, but colloquial name to remain.
  

Good News:

• Markus Mannheim (ABC), Canberra to house one of Australia's biggest batteries as ACT weans off fossil fuels.
  
• Bianca Hall (SMH), Temporary reprieve for ancient Djab Warrung trees. Only temporary good news, but it's something.
  

Longer political analysis

• Ben Wellings (Conversation AU), A Dog's brexit: Johnon's missteps about to send weary voters to another election as EU divorce gets ugly. This is out of date, now, in Brexit Years.
  
• Ben Hillier (Overland), Why this Tamil family from Queensland is at risk. Actually breaks down the legal situation of the #hometobilo family. (TL;DR their best hope is that, because the girls were born in Aus, they are legally stateless - their lawyers argue that the older girl, who is the subject of the case, cannot be deported.)
  
• Clive Hamilton (Conversation AU), Why Gladys Liu must answer to parliament about alleged links to the Chinese government.
  

Longer other - cultural, historical, miscellaneous

• Simons, Sullivan, and Johnson (The Conversation AU), Fewer casual positions and less out-of-hours work could help retain early career teachers.
  
• Tuohy and Edwards (SMH), The four-day fallacy: busting the myth of part-time working mums.
  
• Jen Gunter, Why does the department of ob-gyn at the University of Utah offer a premarital exam for women?
  
• Jane C. Hu, Woman frustrated by dick pics makes her own filter.
  
• Lara Soneschein (Overland), What we mean when we say Never Again.
  
• Holly Barrow (Electric Lit), How Brexit Could Destroy the UK Publishing Industry:
  

  In a briefing on Brexit, the Society of Authors argues against the visa salary requirements of £30,000 for long-term migrant workers and £35,000 for indefinite leave to remain: “Authors in the UK earn an average of just £10,500 per year. The proposed threshold therefore does not reflect the ‘skills’ of writers or the cultural sector at large. Salary level is not an appropriate measure of skill or wider contribution to the UK’s social and economic life.” This emphasis on salary failing to represent skill highlights the necessity of reviewing the visa routes and the failure of immigration policy to consider vast cultural benefits—benefits that far exceed financial input. Reducing migrants to their salary not only diminishes their talent but also insults British authors who fall significantly below the warped perception of what it is to be “skilled.”

  
  
• Jennifer Ouellette (Ars Technica), Cubed wombat poop, why your left nut runs hot, among Ig Nobel winners. Possibly my favourite:
  

  Medical Education

  Citation: Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon, "for using a simple animal-training technique— called 'clicker training'—to train surgeons to perform orthopedic surgery."

  This 2016 study focused on two specific surgical tasks: "tying the locking, sliding knot" and "making a low-angle drill hole." The authors wanted to test the effectiveness of "acoustic feedback" on the learning process—typically used by animal trainers—which prior studies indicated might also work on human behavior and could be superior to traditional demonstration techniques. "The clicker serves as a conditioned reinforcer that communicates in a way that is language- and judgment-free," they observed. The result: the clicker-trained group of medical students took more time to learn the tasks than the control group, but they were better at performing the tasks precisely. And when it comes to surgery, precision is paramount.

  
  
• Specific cluster on age of puberty:
  
  • Mona Chalabi (Guardian UK, 2013): Why is puberty starting younger?. Key data (from 'the study published today', which is infuriatingly not actually cited in this article) is that in a 2013 study of American girls, age of puberty measured by breast tissue development was only a few months earlier than in the 1990s. Also cites the German study c. 2010 which is responsible for the long-range stats from 1860 to 2010.
    
  • Mary Lewis (The Conversation UK, 2018): Children aren't starting puberty younger, medieval skeletons reveal. Osteoarcheological evidence suggests children between 990-1550 entered puberty between ages of 10 and 12, same as today (as far as I can tell, this is based on skeletons of children who *died* as adolsecents - the piece doesn't address whether that skews the data). Although the onset of puberty was relatively young, it took much longer for the process of maturation to complete than it does now, probably due to environmental factors such as nutrition.
    
  • Jayashri Kulkarni (The Conversation UK, 2011): Twelve going on 20: are girls reaching puberty earlier. Summarises research to the effect that age of menarch has fluctuated a lot over time; studies as of 2011 suggested that some aspects of puberty, such as breast tissue development, were happening earlier, but the age of menarche had stabilised at around 13, based on UK / NZ research.
  
  
• Sarah Rowe (Archer), Vaginismus and breakups: owning my sexuality.
  
• Lexi Beach (Electric Lit), Why it matters that Amazon shipped The Testamens early. What confuses me about this debacle is that people seem *surprised*? I think I remember something similar with the HP books?
  

Standard disclaimer: list subdivisions are arbitrary and not reflective of the worth of any particular piece in my mind.

What Are You Reading Weekend

Currently Reading:
Fiction: Tony Birch, 'Common People' - a short story collection.
Technically also les Trois Mousquetaires, but I haven't touched it for a while.
Lit Mag: Meanjin Winter 2019. Only one issue behind, go me!
Poetry: Making very slow progress on Paradise Lost, via Anthony Oliviera's podcast.
Academic: Revisiting Troilus and Criseyde
Other non-fiction: Zip and zilch.

Recently Finished:

Gluten-Free Girl Every Day by Shauna James Ahern

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I haven't actually cooked out of this yet, but I really enjoyed reading it, and it furnished my mum with a shepherd's/cottage pie recipe to solve a Great Dilemma.


Cardinal by Louise Milligan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was incredibly compelling, and I devoured it in under 12 hours. The archival work is - as far as I can determine, because this is a journalistic work and not a historical one and thus lacks citations - very very good, and the prose compelling.

I do wonder about the ethics of publishing this (and the 7.30 Report segments from which it grew) *before* the charges been laid in the Cathedral or Swimmers trials. Before charges are laid there aren't non-discolure orders or non-publication orders, but... did the ABC and Milligan *not* think that media coverage like this would leave any trial open to claims of prejudice? All I can think is that neither Milligan nor her interviewees seriously expected Pell to ever set foot on Australian soil again.

I also wonder about MUP publishing it as popular non-fiction: how would it have stood up as an academic text, in history or in media studies? (Historians would want *a metric fuckton* of ethics approvals, I'm quite sure.)


Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A really interesting, strong collection. Almost no one in these stories is *likeable*, but I didn't expect otherwise with a title like that. The narratives are, for the most part, in the vein of contemporary realist writing wherein mostly miserable people are doing their best with mostly miserable circumstances. Once or twice, the women make a break. Once or twice, there's even a halfway decent man standing with them.

Recurring themes include assault, mediocre sex, lust *despite* the mediocrity of the man involved, motherhood, mother-grief, everyday violence.


Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The single focalising character structure of this series... really lets this book down. Hobb does her best to compensate, with Fitz's visions and his metaleptic slips as narrator, but it doesn't work super well. Especially given the actual events of the plot are really well and intricately woven together, that's a disappointment, as is the sharp short shrift of the ending.

Still. Worth it to see Fitz *finally* stop moping so much. And the Fool riding high. ILU, Fool.


The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well that... takes a sharp turn from 'plucky youngster strives to escape her assigned Lot In Life and undergoes Special Training' to 'highly realistic (except for the magic) retelling of the Sino-Japanese war, complete with the Nanking Massacre'.

It's GOOD, don't get me wrong, but it's A Lot!

I also... a pretty central part of this narrative involves a race of Mystical Fire Shamans who hail from what seems to be Fantasy Taiwan, and are darker-skinned and more quote-unquote "primitive" in their ways than the people of Fantasy China or Fantasy Japan (although they are brutally impressive warriors). The people of Fantasy China have many racist opinions about these Fantasy-Austronesians, whom they ruled over until Plot Happened. Kuang does a faaairly good job of lampshading the difference between 'opinions the characters have' and 'opinions that are reasonable to hold', and 'dehumanising anyone: it are not good' is obviously shaping up to be a big theme throughout the series. But I note that while I have read many positive appraisals of this as an Asian-inspired fantasy by an Asian-American author, if anyone has written about this book from the perspective of an Indigenous Taiwanese (or other Austronesian indigenous?) reader, I haven't found it. If anyone knows of such a thing, lemme know.


Also finished, to review later: AJ Demas, Sword Dance; The Lifted Brow 41; Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic; Thea Astley, It's Raining In Mango

Online Fiction

Jo Cumberland (Meanjin Winter 2019), Home. Just a really striking piece. (NB: touches on suicide.)


Up Next:

I have the sequel to 'The Poppy War', and I'm expecting 'The Mad Ship' to come in at the Mobile Library on Monday.

---

Music Notes:

I have purchased Lil' Nas X EP. I suspect he will be a one-hit wonder, but it sure is a good song, that one hit.