Les Liens du... Samedi?

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Caroline Kitchener (The Lily), Who is Jenny B?:
  

  For the last week, women across America have been receiving almost identical versions of this card. Many women had the same experience that I did. Instead of going to their current address, the card was delivered to the house where they grew up, a false-alarm for one of life’s most emotional declarations: Mom, Dad, I’m going to have a baby.

  
  In other news, capitalism is terrible.
  
• David Crouch (Guardian), Post-term pregnancy research cancelled after six babies die. The Swedish research on post-term babies aimed to compare the health outcomes of pregnancies either induced at the beginning of week 42, or allowed to continue for a further week (unless it occurred spontaneously). After six babies in the second group died (the article says infants, but does not specify whether they died before or after birth), the researchers considered it unethical to continue the trial.
  
• Allie Conti (Vice.com), I accidentally discovered a nationwide scam on AirBnB.
  

Good News:

• Dan Collyns (Guardian), Student in Peru makes history by writing thesis in Inca language. Roxana Quispe wrote and defended her thesis on Quechua poetry, in Quechua.
  
• UK Govt reports that sales of vetinary antibiotics halved in the past four years. Pre-emptive dosing of herd beasts is believed to be a major factor in antibiotic resistance, so, good news here.
  
• Francesca Valdinoci (SBS), After almost 30 years in italy, a bottle of sand from Uluru returns home. The former tourist entrusted the souvenir to a friend currently travelling to Australia. The friend had the sand inspected and sifted at border control, before taking it on to Uluru.
  

Longer political and/or environmental affairs pieces

• Henry Kha (Conversation AU), The family court does need to reform, but not the way Pauline Hanson thinks:
  

  Contemporary family disputes that end up in court often involve child abuse, family violence, drug and alcohol issues and mental health problems. An effective family justice system requires information sharing and a coherent response.
  But family violence orders and child welfare are exclusively managed by the states and territories. This means the Family Court has limited investigative powers to follow up allegations of family violence and child abuse.
  One of the major recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission is to abolish the federal-based Family Court in favour of creating separate family courts in each state and territory. There’s only one state-based family court in Australia, in Western Australia.

  
  
• Sara Kaine and Emmanuel Josserand (Conversation AU), Working conditions in aged care homes are awful, largely because the work is done by women.
  
• Peter Kalmus, How to live with the climate crisis without becoming a nihilist.
  
• Cairns et al (Conversation AU), Dingoes found in New South Wales but we're killing them as wild dogs. "We performed DNA ancestry testing, much like the ancestry tests available to people, on 783 wild canines killed as part of pest control measures in NSW. Roughly one in four of the animals we tested were pure dingoes, and most were genetically more than three-quarters dingo. Only 5 of the 783 animals we tested turned out to be feral domestic dogs with no dingo ancestry."
  
• Claire G Coleman (Meanjin blog), They want me dead whether I fight them or not. On white supremacism in Australia.
  

Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other

• BBC Science, People more likely to feel pain on humid days. Featuring this years winner of 'best study name': 'Cloudy with a Chance of Pain'. This resolves the conflict between folk wisdom (arthritis > rain / cold) and the pattern a physiotherapist friend of mum's was remarking on, where many patients suffer worse in summer. Logically, since Australia is humid in summer.
  
• Celeste Liddle (Eureka Street), Going carless is still a privilege in Australia:
  

  When you look just at the rail networks elsewhere it becomes apparent why. Not only is every Australian city planned around a CBD with all lines going into and out of it and almost nothing going around it, but the sheer size of our cities shows that they were built purely for cars. Not having a car, rather than being a sign of poverty, is actually a sign of privilege in Melbourne. I live near enough to the CBD to have multiple modes of public transport at my doorstep and the existing routes suit where I mostly need to go.
  Many in the Melbourne mortgage belt simply do not have that option. There are suburbs with no trains, inadequate station parking and irregular bus services. With the sheer size of our Australian urban sprawls, it is unlikely the situation will change for these people any time soon. The situation is even worse in the country.

  
  
• Kassandra Vee (The New Inquiry), Work Sucks:
  

  But many of our comrades who are significantly less confused about history still have a bad case of activism-ism. They will tell you, their voice backed by the sounding of trumpets and the singing of angels, that revolution means “doing The Work.” Like good Calvinists, they know the real revolutionaries are the ones seen working hardest at it, the ones raising more money, getting more signatures, winning more votes, taking more arrests, getting more retweets, selling more papers, organizing more demos, breaking more windows, sitting through more meetings, etc. etc. etc. Though more common among nonprofit types, activism-ism (or its sullen asshole cousin, militantism) is not limited to any particular political tendency. Bad news for those comrades too, however: The revolution will not be a job fair. No one is gonna check your CV.

  
  
• Laura Turner (Buzzfeed), I started vomiting while I was pregnant. Two years later, I'm still sick. On anxiety and physical symptoms.
  
• Robyn J Whittacker (Conversation AU), Hell no, halloween is not Satanic: it's an important way to think about death. I prefer Copperbadge's reading of Halloween as an inversion festival, but the two factors I think are related.
  
• Peter Newman (Create Digital, March 2019), Are trackless trams here to solve our light rail problems. Found this while googling to find out what a trackless tram is (a very long trolleybus that uses... lasers, I think, to run on painted lines instead of a track, but has stations like tram stops rather than bus stops). Has some good comments on the urban planning / density benefits of trams over buses.
  
• Emily James (Guernica), The space between us. "My daughter was five days old when I realized the love I had for her would fall short."
  
• Keri Phillips (ABC Radio National), Asylums to antidepressants: a short history of mental illness in the West.
  
• Claire Lindsay (ABC Coffs Coast, June 2019), Narina Carter's rare disease causes her disability, but NDIS says no to funding.