Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

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.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I feel like that essay about How to Cook a Wolf missed a pretty big point about WHY they had to scrimp in the 1940s. The author mentions rationing as though it were an act of God, not the federal government redirecting resources towards a goal. Yes modern responses to climate change are a personal choice? No federal involvement there.