Les Liens du... Samedi!

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Anna Horan (The Saturday Paper: The Briefing), Whistleblower says PM's department breached FOI laws. No one is surprised, but good to see the AFP raids haven't entirely scared off whistleblowing.
  
• Sarah Hearne (blog), Sexism vs Cultural Imperialism. Long story short, a young female Korean researcher published a study in an American medical journal which produced statistics to the effect that the gender of a doctor does not have a significant impact on the outcome of a certain operation. She framed it 'Does physician gender...?' and a lot of westerners got very upset about the question even being asked.
  

  In other words, female doctors are being told they can't be any good at intubation because they don't have the requisite strength, and the authors of this paper are aiming to test this assumption.
  
  So we have a paper being written in a non-first language about a topic that gets very little attention in Korea but blights the careers of many female professionals. That's incredibly brave in my mind. The paper has flaws - every paper has flaws - and one flaw is that doesn't put the problem of sexism in medicine into a context, and that's something that the reviewers and editors should have picked up on. But the research is sound. They spent 3 years (2013-2016) collecting data and it's taken until now to get it analysed and through peer review to be published. This isn't something cobbled together one night over beers.
  
  It finally gets published online, gets spotted by someone on Twitter and all hell breaks loose. No matter the cries of people who try to provide context.

  This crossed my Twitter several times. Last I heard the lead author was apologetic and intended to retract the paper, but had been encouraged to issue a correction statement instead. The whole situation looks like gross negligence on the part of the journal editors, who should not have let her walk into this.
  
• Sirius Building to be refurbished, NSW govt nets 150 million in selloff
  

Good News:

• Miki Perkins (SMH), UN Inspectors to visit Australia under anti-torture pact. Only minimum good news, because the pact allows/requires the inspectors to work secretly and puts the onus on governments as to whether to report findings and if and how to respond.
  
• Dennys issues a statement supporting trans people's bathroom access after someone called the cops on a trans woman in North Carolina for using the women's room.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Spencer Quong, (Paris Review), Queerness Cyborgs and Cephalopods: an interview with Franny Chong. I still have not got around to reading Franny Chong but she's fascinating in interview.
  
• Caroline Dodds Pennock and Bodie A Ashton, Why we as academics created a letter in support of LGBT+ rights. Despite the title the article focuses pretty tightly (as did their letter) on trans rights
  
• E. Alex Jung (Vulture), Keanu Reeves walks into Chateau Marmont: An Always Be My Maybe Casting Story.
  
• Angelica Jade Bastién (Vulture), Why we can't stop watching Keanu Reeves, 30 years on:
  

  The full-bodied listening Reeves exhibits in My Own Private Idaho is a hallmark of his work opposite women as well. Reeves is a great example of what Roswell New Mexico writer Alanna Bennett deemed The Look: “The number one thing a man in a romcom needs, TV or movie, is the ability to look at their love interest REALLY WELL. The man barely even needs to speak if he just knows how LOOK at a person.” Reeves has given that look in multiple contexts — his face is bright with awe when he looks at Carrie-Anne Moss’s Trinity in the Matrix films; it has a touch of admiration when he gazes at Sandra Bullock in Speed; and it is filled with unmitigated desire for Diane Keaton’s Erica Barry in Something’s Gotta Give.

  
  
• Melissa Gira Grant (New Republic), White Mom's Burden: on Cindy McCain's racist fantasies of trafficking.
  
• Suzy Freeman-Greene (Meanjin Summer 2018), You don't get to choose: a memoir piece on her experience of her mother's death.
  
• Melanie Saward (Overland), Why I fear Scott Morrison's Pentecostalism:
  

  Though Scott Morrison professes to ‘love all Australians,’ I believe his love comes with conditions. His abstinence from the 2017 Marriage Equality Survey, his belief that those who ‘have a go will get a go,’ his decision to end his victory speech on election night with the words ‘God bless Australia’ and his willingness to be photographed at worship are all demonstrations of what those conditions are. Those of us who are queer, black, have uteruses, have immigrated, who are not Christian, who aren’t in secure jobs with savings, and who care about the environment, may be loved by the prime minister, but we are not his priority. Our issues and the things we need and care about can’t be his focus while he lives a faith that excludes the people who are struggling the most. I’ve heard the sermons and I know that the Pentecostal doctrine allows little room for separation between ideology and other aspects of your life.

  
  
• Laine Sainty (Buzzfeed AU), Opinion: Everyone is wrong about Israel Folau. "Israel Folau’s belief that gay people go to hell is not niche. But it is harmful — and sacking him does nothing to help." I have read a lot and have a lot of conflicted opinions but I think this piece might come closest to a stance I can sit with.
  
• findingfeather on Tumblr, Untitled piece on queer childhood and queer history:
  

  If you wanted to destroy a girl’s life, you got enough people to whisper that she was a lesbian. That meant she was dirty, predatory, gross.
  Most people didn’t actually realize there was a difference between being gay or lesbian and being trans: they were simply ultimate expressions of each other, after all. Which is part of what makes cis lesbians and bisexual women participating in the absolute bullshit behind transphobic treatment of trans women so … not baffling, but disgusting to me. 
  Because literally everything they’re spewing is what straight culture used to say about all of us, so how the fuck is this okay?
  When I was around fifteen or sixteen I came across the idea of “bisexual”, mostly because I got lucky, fell onto the internet, and fell onto a particular set of message boards and lj-communities that - entirely by chance - introduced me to a whole community of queer, kinky, poly adults who were remarkably tolerant of a sixteen year old occasionally saying dumbass things, and who also were talking about their lives and their experiences and their concerns.
  And about their fights to be acknowledged as existing, about biphobia, transphobia, kink-phobia and other bullshit that went around the LGB community. (Oh yeah: at that point even putting the B on was controversial in some spaces and the T wasn’t even standard yet. Good times.) 

  
  
• Maria Papova (Brain Pickings), The story behind Dylan Thomas' 'Do not go gentle into that good night'.
  
• Sina Grace on Tumblr, As pride month comes to a close it's time I spoke candidly about my experience at Marvel Comics.
  
• Soraya Roberts (Longreads), If I made $4 a word this article would be worth $10 000. Apparently there's a journalist out there named Taffy Brodesser Akner and she's getting paid $4 a word. Roberts has questions.
  

  This is what it meant when I posted that quote and those words: It meant, what in the actual fuck.
  It meant what fucking other freelancers in the world are making $4 a word right now. It meant what fucking magazines in the world are paying $4 a word right now. It meant what fucking lies is this industry telling us when so many people — people in actual war zones — only dream of making 50¢ a word. It meant in what fucking world can a freelancer treat $4 a word like it’s not near-impossible for the rest of us. The meaning was so obvious that I honestly didn’t think anyone would even notice the message. But they did. And they mistook it for something I didn’t mean at all: “Fuck Taffy.”

  
  
• Tania Melnyczuk (Blog), Non-speaking autists thoughts on ABA.
  
• Deborah Shapiro (Lithub), I love soap operas: they made me a better writer. I think Shapiro's analogy between soaps and the novel is too broad, but I am very interested in what she has to say about soaps being entirely-character driven.
  

  But while you could shift from one show to another, soaps reward the long-time viewer. You watch the same actors inhabit the same role, sometimes for years. As you observe them shed styles and selves, you share a history. So much contemporary literature deals in disconnection and alienation, the frustrations and failures of communication, the lives of quiet desperation. One thing you can say for soaps—the desperation is conspicuous and spectacular, never quiet. But even at their most cartoonish, what soap characters do is connect with each other, and the viewer, day after day. This sustained connection, however shallow or superficial it initially may be, builds and deepens over time. And in this way, there’s something highly novelistic about soaps, what they’re able to do with time and character, that has compelled me as a writer. I’m interested in the moments and the webbing of connection. And how the passage of time plays into that. I’m a sucker for the kind of flashback scenes only soaps can do, when they’re able to run snippets of old footage of the same actors, from 20 or even 30 years ago.

  
  A lot of what Shapiro says about soap and character also applies to fanwork, and some some long-running non-soap TV (certain series of Star Trek, for ex), and to interconnected media like complex comic 'verses.
  

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'.