Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Rachel Rasker (SMH), Enmore bar at risk as council pushes for midnight closing. Nooo, not the Sly!
  
• Naraj Warikoo (Detroit Free Press), ICE arrests 90 more students at fake university in Michigan. This is going to be in the history books under 'how could they claim they didn't know'.
  
• Judith Ireland (SMH), Church groups threaten to withdraw support for religious discrimination bill. Largely because it doesn't allow them enough rights to discriminate.
  

Good News:

• PinkNews, High Court bans anti-lgbt education protests outside Birmingham school.
  
• ABC News, Sydney lockout laws to be scrapped everywhere except King's Cross. Scrapping them in the Cross would be good, too, mind.
  
• Mark Reddie (ABC News), Gay cops win landmark discrimination case against NSW police. Bad news is their former boss now works for USyd security.
  
• Gia Kourlas (NYT) After Misty comes Marie: breaking barriers in the Nutcracker. Charlotte Nebres, of the School of American Ballet, cast as Marie in Blanchardine's Nutcracker.
  

Longer political and/or climate science

• Blythe McLennan (Conversation AU), As bushfires intensify we need to acknowledge the strain on our volunteers. Worth noting, as there's a high profile case atm in which a former firie is suing the state of NSW.
  
• Rick Morton (Saturday Paper), Bolt, Pascoe and the Culture Wars. Has Bolt actually read Dark Emu? Signs point to no.
  
• Rachel Shabi (Guardian UK), How immigration became Britain's most toxic political issue. This is a long read with a pretty deep perspective on recent history. Strongly recommend. (But suggest accompanying with Marc di Tommasi's Building Borders, for late 19th/early 20th c history,)
  
• Kate Aubusson (SMH), Air polution particles responsible for spike in UTIs, sepsis. This is not actually about the NSW fires, but presents evidence from a recent BMJ article (by US researchers) that suggests PM2.5, the particulate in bushfire smoke, correlates with a rise of infections other than lung infections.
  

Longer historical, cultural, scientific, misc

• Michelle Kelly (Sydney Review of Books), A library in bloom:
  

  Here, in what looks like the living room of a house on a suburban thoroughfare in Marrickville NSW, is the deaccessioned, salvaged, reconfigured library formerly attached to Australia’s national arts funding body, the Australia Council for the Arts.
  Eighty shelves all up (or more, or slightly less), as arrayed as planting rows. I remember the first time I encountered the concept of a relocated garden. My friend, preparing to move from the rental property she and her love had shared, announced she was taking the garden they had grown together with her – it wasn’t so many years ago. Hearing her describe her plans was a powerful revelation for me, a moment when something counterintuitive interrupts reality as the new reality: a garden isn’t necessarily rooted where it grows.

  
  
• Kassia St Clair (LitHub, exerpt from forthcoming book), What if we called it the flax age instead of the iron age. Does not actually answer that question, but DOES give a fascinating overview of archaeological evidence for early cloth.
  
• Jenny Hendrix (The Paris Review), Odd corners around Brooklyn, on Djuna Barnes.
  
• Erin Stewart (Overland), Antivax, anti-science and the pitfalls of sharing a rare condition with a celebrity. On EDS, and also discusses a range of other rare and under-diagnosed diseases (including the not-medically-recognised 'chronic lyme disease').