Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• 'Dame' sex toy company sues NYC subway over sexism.
  
• Mark Rylance quits the RSC over sponsorship from BP.
  
• Chennai runs out of water, and other cities are set to follow suit
  
• Peter Fitzsimmons (SMH), As a good Christian man, Folau's word should be his bond. I'm as sick of this whole Discourse as the next person, but I do enjoy Peter Fitzsimmons at his most wry and angry.
  
• King Street is dying: Newtown retailers shut up shop. This is faintly hilarious to me, because, although some of the stores profiled here predate me moving to Sydney, the creeping sprawl of expensive, boutique fashion across the strip throughout the entire time I lived in there and since is, to my eye, gentrification in action. These stores *drove out* restaurants and cafes, and now are being replaced again by restaurants.
  

Good News:

• Nsikan Apan (PBS news) reports: Smartphones are not making millenials grow horns.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Kim Mahood (Griffith Review), Kartiya are like toyotas. This piece - by a white woman who grew up in remote WA and still works there, caricaturing the motley assortment of white people who breeze through remote towns working for indigenous-focused or town-revitalisation programs, and the lack of preparation most of them have for work in remote Aus.
  

  UNLIKE THE BROKEN Toyotas, which are abandoned where they fall, cannibalised, overturned, gutted and torched, the broken kartiya go away – albeit often feeling they have been cannibalised, overturned, gutted and torched. They leave behind them dying gardens and unfinished projects, misunderstandings and misplaced good intentions. The best leave foundations on which their replacements can build provisional shelters while they scout the terrain, while the worst leave funds unaccounted for, relationships in ruins and communities in chaos.

  
  I found the link via First Dog On The Moon, who has been at a Species of the Desert Festival hosted by Pakaru rangers. Mahood spoke at the festival, and seems to be well-regarded. However. Parts of Mahood's essay seemed... um... dubious. Caricaturing the intra-community factors that lead to some indigenous people glomming onto white community workers, and others not? Fair. Describing the former group as 'the clan of Sambo'? MAAAYBE NOT A GREAT IDEA. Even if that isn't considered a problem to the indigenous people Mahood works with (and maybe it's not), that's a term that's really fucking loaded for a *lot* of black people, not just indigenous Australians. Anyway. Article very amusing, but treat with caution.
  
• Emily Oster (Guardian), Is Breast really best? I looked at the data to find out. This is just... a really good balance of data and individual considerations.
  
• Chi Luu (JStor Daily), The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke. Apparently Japan has 'old-man gags' that are baffling to young people, and Korea has 'middle-aged-man' jokes:
  

  As Choi shows when discussing ajae jokes, the popular culture around uncool Korean dad jokes allows for different views of masculinity, moving from a strictly authoritarian figure to someone who would playfully make jokes (even bad ones). There’s perhaps a parallel in English. No longer distant, traditional patriarchal father figures, dads can use jokes to bond and interact with their children, using simple humor that is most often appreciated by children earlier on in their development.

  
  
• Ask Polly (The Cut), My friendships make me sad. Just a really good example of a realistic, balanced advice column. I think Havrilesky slightly underestimates the extent to which communities of young (married, straight) *can* transform 'being a mom' into a personality trait, social requirement, and exclusion factor all at once, but this letter writer sure isn't dealing with that well.
  
• Mike Seccombe (Saturday Paper), The lobbying power of super funds. This is a FASCINATING look at the links between Australia's superannuation funds and unionism.
  

  Writing in the AFR in March, the executive director of the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs, John Roskam, said it could be argued that through the power of superannuation, “unions have an even more dominant role in the Australian economy than they did in the late 1940s when trade union membership peaked at 65 per cent of the workforce”.
  
  Roskam noted the original intent of compulsory super was to invest in the best interests of workers and so provide for their retirement, but suggested that what amounted to best interests was “in the eye of the beholder”. He warned that industry super funds could use their financial clout to wage “class warfare”.
  
  The flaw in the argument, though, lies in the fact the purpose of industry funds is to provide for retired workers, rather than to advance the industrial cause of those still working. And that brings a certain tension, for the interests of the funds in getting the best possible returns for their members do not always align with those still in the workforce.

  
  
• Meaghan O'Brien (Electric Lit), Reading Good Omens at the End of the World
  

  To be alive in 2019 means having the world’s end, or at least its destruction, on your brain’s back burner. It’s difficult to read Good Omens and not see our contemporary world. In an interview with The Guardian about the Good Omens miniseries, Neil Gaiman noted that “the weirdest thing is how a novel that was written literally 30 years ago feels really a lot more apt now than it did then … I mean, if I could trade, I would have a much duller world in which we had to try and convince people that an apocalypse was likely, instead of having the world that we’re in, where the nuclear clock is ticking closer and closer.” The jokes and tactics that Pratchett and Gaiman used to convince their readers that the end of the world could be nigh hit much harder as the world around us is starting to look even worse than an imagined, if comical, Armageddon.

  
  
• Ruth Pearce, How it feels to be a trans feminist academic in 2018. A year old, still unfortunately relevant.
  
• Andrew Knighton (War History Online), Myth busted: the truth about Geoffrey Tandy. There's a tumblr post going around suggesting that Geoffrey Tandy, a cryptogramist (ie, a biologist studying particular kinds of seaweed), was accidentally recruited to Bletchley park because they confused him for a cryptographer. In fact, he was specifically recruited because of his experience in *cataloguing*. It's not like there were many professionally trained military cryptographers - instead, Bletchley park recruited people with some military experience, who had expertise in fields involving data analysis. A seaweed scientist fit the bill. Voila. Tandy mostly worked in a part of Bletchley's machinery that focused on translating foreign words and jargon - his librarian background was invaluable for that.
  
• Hayley Gleeson (ABC news), Jess Hill's mission to understand abusive men.
  

  "Men who are shame-ridden can be like a tinderbox in their relationship because if they … choose to try and dispel that unbearable feeling of shame — [which might be triggered] when they're being challenged, or when they are not getting whatever it is they think they are due from their intimate relationship, or when they just feel like they're being exposed for being a vulnerable, emotional human being with frailties and flaws — if they choose to replace that feeling of shame with a feeling of power, by attacking, they [can be] a very dangerous individual."

  
  The article leans a bit bizarrely into 'feminists just write all men off as power-hungry'. I mean. This seems like an important book Hill has written, but this is not new news about abusive men, and it's feminist studies that will tell you that (feminists, and non-white scholars. Lundy Bancroft will give you the pat answers that Hill here ascribes to 'feminist' thinking and policy).
  
• Ken White (The Atlantic), Why Sarah Fabian argued against giving kids toothbrushes. The policy, and the legal situation, goes back further than the Trump administration. Something called the Flores Agreement protects minors in custody, since 1993, and legally binds the government to provide them with 'safe and sanitary' conditions. In 2017, a District judge ruled on this case (which was begun under the Obama administration) that the CBP is obliged to provide toothbrushes, etc, to fulfil that requirement. In order to appeal the ruling, the federal department needs to demonstrate that the judge *modified* the terms of the Flores Agreement. Thus, Sarah Fabian arguing that toothbrushes are not an inherent requirement of 'safe and sanitary'.
  
• Nir Kaissar (Bloomberg.com), Employgers can buy retirement security for 2.64 an hour.
  

  Workers once had brighter retirement prospects, if not higher wages. What’s changed is that over the last four decades, a growing number of employers replaced their pensions with 401(k) and other defined contribution plans, shifting the responsibility of saving for retirement to employees. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 28 percent of private sector workers who participated in an employment-based retirement plan were enrolled in a traditional pension in 2014, down from 84 percent in 1979.

  
  Really interesting - I know that Australia's system is fundamentally different to the pension-based system that was standard in the UK until the 90s (more like the defined-contribution schemes that became popular in the 90s); I don't know much about the US retirement savings industry. Now I know more than I did.
  

Comments policy: Everything I said in the caveats to this post applies. I teach critical thinking for a living, but I'm not *your* teacher, and this blog is not a classroom. That means I don't have to abide by the fallacy of 'there's no such thing as a bad contribution to discussion'.

Comments

[samskeyti]

When I support Better Read, Elizabeth's and the new mini-Gould's in one week I am doing a good deed!

[highlyeccentric]

... new mini-Goulds?

... I am suspicious but intrigued.