Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Yuval Abraham (+972 Mag), What do Palestinians in Gaza reallz think about the Israeli elections?
  
• Luke Henriques-Gomes (Guardian AU), ParentsNext: 80% of recipients who had payments suspended were not at fault, data shows. This is the same program that was requiring a mother attend library story time during her child's kindergarten days.
  
• Graham Russell (Guardian), He's a barbarian: Maori tribe bans replica of Captain Cook's ship from port. Someone's organised an anniversary tour with a replica Endeavour, the move is not universally popular for obvious reasons.
  
• Jarni Blakkarly (SBS News), Exclusive: Australian man win's court battle to reinstate place of birth on his passport. The (white, elder) Australian man was born in Jaffa, under the British Mandate government, and his birth certificate records his place of birth as 'Palestine'. He was recently issued a passport giving his place of birth as 'not stated', and has sued to have it corrected to 'British Mandated Palestine'. There's... a Lot going on here, and the article approaches the issue from several angles, but the one thing it doesn't say is what happens to naturalised Australians born in *other* former British territories that were divided up post war. If one was born in Dhaka before partition, for instance, I think the birth certificate (if you had one - white British subjects likely did), the birth certificate would probably say Bengal: what does a passport for such a person say? What about people born in disputed territories, like Kashmir, or Taiwan? None of those are perfect analogies, and shouldn't necessarily dictate the just outcome for a case of a Palestinian birth certificate, but I wonder if there's a governing policy or if it's a case of make it up as the passport office see fit.
  
• ABC News, Robodebt class action to be brought against the government. Bill Shorten, in his post-leadership phase, has found one tiny percentage of a spine.
  

Good News:

• Sharnie Kim (ABC Far North), Growing a rainforest on land once owned by Christopher Skase.
  

Interesting Items:

• In the UK, the King's Place Theatre is staging an opera based on letters written to Marie Stopes. I don't think it grapples with Stopes' eugenicist streak, but it isn't *about* her - it dramatises (or operises) individual letters detailing sexual complaints.
  
• Bogong moth tracker launched in the face of unprecedented collapse in numbers. I was just thinking last week that the dry winter followed by strong westerly winds would make good Bogong migration conditions (they don't always reach the coast), but I guess there are a lot fewer of them now.
  

Longer political:

• Shalailah Medhora (Triple J / Hack), Over 2000 people died after receiving a robodebt notice. The Department of Human Services denies causality.
  
• Na'ama Carlin (ABC Religion and Ethics), From BDS to voter suppression: Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied a voice:
  

  I make no claims about individual people participating in a broad movement. It is indeed likely that BDS gives legitimacy to some people who espouse antisemitic views, in the same way that Donald Trump’s dog-whistling (such as his use of the term “globalist,” an antisemitic slur popular among the alt-right) attracts fascists and neo-Nazis that operate under the guise of nationalism and free speech.
  Instead, I argue that associating BDS with antisemitism is another way of delegitimising Palestinian struggle as violent, even when it is the ultimate act of nonviolent resistance. In a twist of irony, even absence of action (boycott being a refusal to purchase or engage) is conceptualised as violent action. No matter what shape it takes, Palestinian resistance is deemed always already violent.

  
  

Longer pieces - culture, memoir, natural history, other

• Ed Yong (The Atlantic), Why scientists taught rats to play hide and seek: to study play and pleasure, is the short answer.
  
• Tavi Gevinson (The Cut), Who would Tavi Gevinson be without instagram? Who indeed. I remember Tavi's blog from before Instagram was a thing, and before Rookie Mag (which never appealed to me), so this was an interesting read.
  
• Tina Tallon (The New Yorker), A century of shrill: how bias in technology has hurt women's voices:
  

  The proliferation of AM (amplitude-modulated) radio stations in the early nineteen-twenties led to frequent signal interference, and by 1927 Congress decided to intervene by regulating the bandwidth allotted to each station. Both as a result of these limitations and advances in telephony research, most broadcasters and equipment manufacturers eventually limited their signals to a range between three hundred and three thousand four hundred hertz—a range known as “voiceband”—which was viewed as the bare minimum amount of frequency information needed to adequately transmit speech. Unfortunately, the researchers and regulators who were deciding on this range primarily took lower voices into account when doing so. In the January 1927 issue of the Bell Laboratories Record, J. C. Steinberg, in a brief titled “Understanding Women,” quips that “man’s traditional inability to understand women may have a basis of fact if one so wishes to interpret certain recent experiments in our Laboratories.” Steinberg’s experiments showed that the voiceband frequencies reduced the intelligibility of female speech by cutting out the higher frequency components necessary for the perception of certain consonants. Steinberg asserted that “nature has so designed woman’s speech that it is always most effective when it is of soft and well modulated tone.” Hinting at the age-old notion that women are too emotional, he wrote that a woman’s raised voice would exceed the limitations of the equipment, thus reducing her clarity on air. He viewed this as a personal and biological failing on women’s part, not a technical one on his.

  
  
• Kate Madill (The Conversation AU, 2015), Keep an eye on vocal fry: it's all about power, status and gender.
  
• Ben Arnold Lohmeyer (The Conversation AU), If you want to cut bullying in schools, look at the invisible violence in our society.
  
• Rob Hindley (National Library of Australia blog), Pirates, corsairs and sea rovers: exploring Australian pirate history at the NLA.
  
• Chrysanthos and Ding (Honi Soit, 2017), Food fault lines: mapping class through food chains. This came to my attention thanks to the news that the Sydney Chicken Curtain is crumbling, with El Jannah opening up in Newtown soon. (What I also found fascinating about these maps is that my old stomping grounds in Marrickville lie outside all the food curtains they mapped: caught between the Harris Farm Hedge and the Steakhouse Square, either one side or the other of the Red Rooster Line depending on whether you include the airport store, and adrift in a dessert wasteland. Not true Western Sydney and yet too far out, until recently, to be fashionable. Prime gentrification territory.).
  

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.

Another scratch list, assembled in transit.

Current and stale affairs, hot and lukewarm takes
*ABC news: Pro-China death threat posters guarded by university security. In a really simple demonstration of how ill-prepared Australian universities are for dealing with the large Chinese student population (although immensely prepared to take their $$), University security at UTS, who do not speak Chinese, zealously guarded a Lennon Wall associated with pro-Hong Kong protestors, unaware that nationalists had got there first and plastered death threats.
*Ben Doherty and Yang Tian (Guardian AU): Instagram censors Melbourne artist’s anti-Beijing posts but ignores trolls
*Matt Keely (Newsweek): Cathay Pacific new CEO pledges to comply with Beijing, while Taiwan media says previous CEO refused.
*South China Morning Post: Cathay Pacific staff warned over social media use.
*Simon Jack (BBC): Supermarket considers rationing small business buyers.
*SMH: Three quarters of refugees on Manus and Nauru seriously ill, doctors claim.

Good news
*Judi Lowe (The Conversation AU): Filipino fishermen are making millions protecting whale sharks. “Our research<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0964569118303909> involved investigating what effect the whale shark tourism has had on livelihoods and destructive fishing in the area. We found that Oslob is one of the world’s most surprising and successful alternative livelihood and conservation projects.”

Longer political essays
*Denis Muller (The Conversation AU): It will be money, not morality, that turns the tide on Alan Jones. Provides a good history of Alan Jones’ career and close relationship with Liberal PMs going back to Howard.
*Jordan Baker (SMH): Begging for chairs: grant competition reveals schools’ funding struggle.
*Krystian Seibert (The Conversation AU), Get Up fights for progressive causes, but it is not a political party and is not beholden to one:

Groups like GetUp are now subject to even more regulation than third parties, thanks to legislative changes<https://www.aec.gov.au/parties_and_representatives/index.htm>introduced by the government last year. Because of the amount they spend trying to influence elections, they fit into a new category called “political campaigner<https://www.aec.gov.au/parties_and_representatives/financial_disclosure/guides/political-campaigners.htm>”. Political campaigners are required to register with the AEC and submit a more detailed annual return than “third parties”, similar to the returns required of political parties.

So, when Morrison calls for GetUp to be accountable like a political party, that’s already the case. However, despite being regulated in a similar way to political parties, they don’t receive the same benefits.

Any further restrictions on GetUp will also harm conservative lobby groups like Advance Australia, but the liberal government doesn’t care about that because those groups are negligible to its support base, whereas GetUp is an effective threat.

*Youyou Zhou (Quartz): China’s fangirl culture mobilising against Hong Kong protests:“Using language heavily influenced by China’s fan-girl culture, a post on the social network Weibo personifies the nation<https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/weibo-post-hk-idol.png> as a “little brother” (link in Chinese) who needs to be protected”.

*Salvatore Babones (The Conversation): Australian universities can’t rely on India if funds from Chinese students start to fall.

*Fileborn, McCann, Mitchell and Kunjan (The Conversation): Victorian changes to birth certificates will not increase sexual violence: here’s why. Good news: the changes passed last week, although I don’t think I saved a link.

*Samantha Maiden (The New Daily): Key study misrepresented in NSW abortion ‘gendercide’ claim:

Ugly claims that the decriminalisation of abortion in New South Wales will lead to “gendercide” and a generation of missing girls have raged for weeks, with the La Trobe study often cited as the sole research evidence<https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/47/6/2025/5057663>.

But now the report’s authors have said politicians had been “misinterpreting” the findings, which they say offer no conclusive evidence that women are aborting children based on gender.

Longer other: historical, cultural, natural historical, etc
*Rebecca Woods (The Conversation): ’Like’ isn’t a lazy linguistic filler. ‘Like’ is used for emphasis and clarification more than as a filler word.
* Leah Rupanner (The Conversation AU): Women aren’t better multitaskers than men, they’re just doing more work.
*Hamilton Nolan (Splinter News): People are convicted based on one witness all the time. This is a bit old, and US-focused (it’s context is Kavanaugh) but it came up again in the context of the Pell appeal. Useful overview of the many kinds of cases where a single witness would not be unusual.
*Lee Kaufman (Meanjin blog): What I’m Reading. Notable for being one of several mentions of Tsiolkas lately that are making me reconsider not bothering with The Slap.
*Kirsten Tranter (Overland): An inherently stupid prize of our own. Takes issue with the Stimson essay we had Issues With in the comments here a few weeks ago.
*Naaman Zhou (Guardian AU): Why Australia should be enchanted by the long-haired rat

Sent from my iPhone

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes: -

• Kevin Carrico (Foreign Policy), Universities are turning a blind eye to Chinese bullies:
  

  The next hour of harassment and intimidation laid bare the fundamental (and fundamentally flawed) logics of contemporary Chinese authoritarian nationalism on the global stage.
  First, volume is key. “Hong Kong is part of China, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Hong Kong has always been a part of China and always will be part of China.” Such declarations of absolute ownership, shouted in close proximity, overlook the realities of history, wherein it was precisely Hong Kong’s separation from China that allowed it to develop into the dynamic city that it is today. An inverse relationship is apparent between the soundness of an argument and the volume at which it is delivered, aiming not so much at winning hearts and minds as overpowering eardrums.
  Second, victimization is your best friend. Despite being the aggressors in this case, invading protesters’ personal space and menacingly shouting people down, the patriots perpetually framed themselves as victims.

  
  
• Ben Matthews (The Conversation), George Pell has lost his appeal: what did the court decide and what happens now. Content note: the usual for the Pell case.
  
• Melissa Davey (The Guardian), Vatican invoke's Pell's 'Right to appeal'.
  
• Juliette Garside (The Guardian), Malta car bomb kills Panama papers journalist. "Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan."

Good News:

• Birth certificate law reform is underway (slowly, and with much public debate) in Victoria.
  

Useful information:

• The Woks of Life, How to keep food from sticking to the wok or pan.

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Colin Jones (The Japan Times), Seven lessons from a Japanese morality textbook. If nothing else, this explained for me why university students were so keen to tell me Japan has four seasons, in tones of great reverence, as if this is exceptional. They get taught about seasons alongside flags, as if they're unique to Japan.
  
• Rick Morton (The Saturday Paper), Murdoch media fuels far right recruitment. I saw some very mixed commentary on this piece, which reports on a 'world first' study which tracked far right facebook groups and quantified their media sources and relationships between media links and meme creation. Dong Won, in particular, was scathing about white people making a 'world first' realisation of something that non-white people have been saying for ages. However, the research team Morton interviews are not exclusively white, and the study *is* the first to quantify media sources used by far right facebook groups. Have we not learned that *measuring* things cultural critics observe is, yanno, actually useful?
  
• Alison Flood (The Guardian), Lost Proust stories of homosexual love to be published. For 'lost' read 'known to scholarship for at least fifty years'.
  
• Sarah Cox (The Narwhal), Canada's forgotten rainforest. What it says on the tin.
  
• Andy Cox (The Saturday Paper), The legacy of Graham Freudenberg:
  

  Freudenberg was conscious of the need for clarity, and the 1965 speech made Labor’s position unequivocal. Importantly, this stance wasn’t forged through the personal retribution or ideological attacks we see valorised in parliament today. It was based in fact, not born of ego or vendetta.
  “We oppose the government’s decision to send 800 men to fight in Vietnam. We oppose it firmly and completely.” Again, the thread of the later Gallipoli speech is evident; Freudenberg turns Calwell towards the personal impact of war. “We do not believe,” he observes, “[war] will promote the welfare of the people of Vietnam. On the contrary, we believe it will prolong and deepen [their] suffering.” Tragically prescient.
  Sadly, the suffering was real also for the almost 60,000 Australians who went on to serve in Vietnam, the 521 who died, the 3000 wounded and the generations affected since. As the son of a Vietnam War veteran, I hear Freudenberg’s warning – decades on – and I thank him, personally, for his bravery in standing against the tide. It’s why I write. It’s why I believe his legacy is so important.

  
  
• Michael W Twitty (Afroculinaria), Dear disgruntled white plantation visitors: sit down.
  
• Jane Caro (The Saturday Paper), The bullying of school leadership by parents.
  
• Catherine Ford (The Guardian), Life as a professional eavedropper. I used to do this job (I think for the rival company to Ford's employer), and yes, this.
  
• Ellie Violent Bramley (The Guardian), Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy urban planners:
  

  So goes the logic of “desire paths” – described by Robert Macfarlane as “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning”; he calls them “free-will ways”. The New Yorker offers other names: “cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails)”. JM Barrie described them as “Paths that have Made Themselves”.

  
  The article talks about some institutions which delayed installing footpaths, waiting for people to form desire paths, which were then paved in. This sounds great, but left me wondering about wheelchair users on those sites: how did they get around until the desire paths were paved (after, at least, they would have access to the same most popular routes as pedestrians).
  
• Lucy Shelley (Electric Lit), Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror unspools the chaos of the internet. I wasn't impressed with the extract from Trick Mirror I read in The Guardian, but this almost convinced me.
  
• Megan Nolan (The Guardian), The sense that I was clever was knocked out of me: confessions of a university dropout. A very good piece, although I have mixed feelings about academic twitter's response to it.
  
• Andrew Norton (The Conversation), If you have a low ATAR you could earn more doing a VET course than a uni degree: if you're a man. Acronyms for furriners: ATAR is the national ranking for university entrance; VET stands for Vocational Education and Training.
  
• Lauren Tanabe (The Lily), I was more depressed than ever during pregnancy: no one believed me.
  
• Rawah Arja (SBS Voices), Being single, Arab, and female: "The intimate details of my personal life are now displayed for all guests, which is about the same time my anxiety searches for different escape exits. ‘But why?’ they ask over and over again, and more than anything I want to say, Because the sons you raise are not husband or father material, but I stay quiet and smile through my teeth, praying that by some miracle a hole will swallow me."
  

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes: -

• Emmet Stinson (Overland), And the winner isn't: on the inherent stupidity of literary prizes. I am... skeptical of this. It's just a leeetle on the nose to run a piece on how literary prizes don't exhibit merit the week an Indigenous woman wins the country's biggest literary prize. It has a nod to Lukashenko (and, before her, Wright) and to the Stella Prize as well, but... at best it was written beforehand and had the acknowledgement of Lukashenko's merit wedged in at the last minute: at worst, it was written *after* she won, and Isn't Racist, But...
  
• Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing), Data mining reveals 80% of (American) books published 1924-1963 never had their copyright renewed and are now in the public domain.
  
• LaTrobe University's 'Private Lives' survey (large-scale health and wellbeing survey of LGBTIQ Australians) is up and running for the third time. If you fit the alphabet soup (or 'other related identities) and are resident in Australia, I recommend it. (I will be returning, I think, when I actually AM legally resident in Australia again)
  
• Haaretz, Israel, Saudi forces rapped for killing children by UN report. Israel for deaths of Palestinian children, Saudi for Yemeni children's deaths. This is particularly fascinating if you go look at a range of headlines from the same day: half of them complain that Israel *wasn't* listed, while others complain that the listing is unfair. Haaretz is about the closest to balanced, although the headline misleadingly implies that Israel is being blacklisted alongside Saudi. Both states feature in a report to the Security Council, but only Saudi and its military coalition states appear in the blacklist. No sanctions are attached to either appearing in the report or in the blacklist: the blacklist is intended as the 'shame' part of 'name and shame'. So Israel gets named, but not shamed.
  
• ABC radio: sculpture with 'subtle nipples' censored in Melbourne. Apparently Tumblr are running Melbourne art competitions now (in addition to nipples being present there was issues of 'clarity' re gender of the nipples in question.
  

Good News:

• Equality Australia (The entity formerly known as Australian Marriage Equality) report that in response to petitions, major retailers have withdrawn conversation therapy related books.
  
• Guardian reports Italy grants asylum to eritrean man mistaken for years for trafficker. Only good news in that Italy ponied up and granted him asylum in the end: their police force's stubborn insistence *in the face of all evidence* that they had arrested A Famous Trafficker sure is... something.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Katharine Murphy (Guardian AU), How Facebook's hall of mirrors lead to the prime ministership of 'Go Sharks'.
  

  I suspect Fletcher and I would agree that the only thing worse than the status quo is Facebook – already too dominant and too insufficiently regulated – appointing a truth commissar and setting itself up as the arbiter of reality. Also not desirable: a government appointed truth commission.
  Solutions are going to be hard to find. But the fact is we have a serious problem when the primary place where citizens congregate can be a hub for misinformation, which is corrosive for the body politic, and nobody is ultimately responsible for making the environment better.
  In the bear pit, the government hovered on the brink of braggadocio.
  While I was wrestling with these conundrums – the truth and how to safeguard it – Labor trialled a question time session where it sought to hold various government figures, from the prime minister down, responsible for statements they had made previously that turned out to be ... how can I put this politely ... less than accurate.

  
  
• R.O. Kwan (Oprah Mag 'Coming Out' series), Why Incendiaries author R.O. Kwan came out as bisexual on Twitter.
  
• Jia Tolento (Guardian), The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman. This is an exerpt from 'Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion', which I may or may not read. Parts of this I was like 'hah, yeah" ("She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached."), but... it's not actually analysis, at least not this excerpt. It's polemic, with few cited sources. The best historicised part is the section on Barre classes.
  
• Carrie V. Mullins (Electric Lit), Supper Club (Lara Williams) imagines what could happen if women unleased their hunger.
  
• Motoko Rich (NYT), Craving freedom, Japan's women opt out of marriage. Covers a bunch of stuff, from the rise of single-woman-wedding-parties (ie, you rent a dress and get photos and have a wedding reception for Just You) to the declining birth rate. *Doesn't* address the economic status of the women interviewed - it's dropped in a caption that one of them works in a florist one day a week, so... I'm guessing she has family resources to draw on that means she doesn't *need* to marry.
  
• Samuel Leighton-Dore (SBS news), I was never the right kind of boy and I was bullied because of it:
  

  Looking back on the difficult years I spent at school — something I’ve made a habit of doing with various psychologists — it’s often tempting to conclude that the cruel and sustained bullying I experienced was because of my being gay. But for all those years before I was sexually active, I think it had more to do with the fact that I didn’t fit society’s idea of how a boy or man should be and act: masculine, rough, stoic and strong.

  
  
• Rebecca Hausler (The Conversation), The Cowra Breakout: Remembering and reflecting on Australia's biggest prison escape. I think this *might* have warranted a few sentences in my y 10 history textbook (I have a hazy sense it might have shown up as evidence of the suicidality of Japanese POWs), but WOW there is SO MUCH GOING ON HERE, and I had no idea about the literary footprint. I need to read Anita Heiss' novel, I think.
  
• Maddison Griffiths (Archer Magazine), Being bisexual and mixed: preserving culture through a queer lens.
  
• Carla Bruce-Eddings (Guernica Magazine), Blood Oranges. Creative non-fiction / personal essay / thing. Cannot summarise, cannot pull-quote, can only recommend.
  
• Rachel Klein (Bitch Media), The booming baby-shower industry empowers anti-choicers. Written from the specific perspective of an Orthodox Jewish family from a speficic sect who, by tradition, make no preparations in advance of the arrival of a child.
  

This has been Liens du Jeudi. You may or may not get more links on the weekend, or possibly even on Monday as per schedule, depending on how The Tourism is treating me.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Stephen Long (ABC), Adani's Carmichael subsidiary is surving on a lifeline from its parent company:
  

  • The company responsible for the Carmichael coal mine has current liabilities of more than $1.8b versus current assets of less than $30m
  • The auditors signed off on the company being a "going concern" because of a 12-month guarantee from the Indian parent firm
  • Accounting expert Sandra van der Laan says "effectively on paper they are insolvent. I wouldn't be trading with them"

  
  
• Matt Mcgrath (BBC), 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months.
  
• Mary Pappenfuss (Huffpo), Immigration officials snatch 9-year-old US citizen heading to school, hold her for 2 days. You all know about this one already, I'm sure. The link is just to say: I'm seeing this. (And, in the process of trying to understand it, I learned a bunch about the demographics of the US-Mexico border that I would not have otherwise known.)
  
• Zoe Druitt (Metronews UK), Women in India pay the price for cashew nut demand as vegan diets rise. Blaming vegans is a bit of a deflection here: it's pretty clear 'UK (and other int'l?) supermarkets setting unreasonably low prices' is to blame, and vegans (and others - me included) are merely the beneficiaries.
  

Good News:

• There's an ACCC enquriy into Digital Platforms happening (looking at how google, facebook, etc shape information access in Australia).
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Madeline Ward (Overland), The issue of free speech at the University of Sydney isn't what you think:
  

  This was not an especially unusual situation for me, nor for the other student activists involved. The Code of Conduct, the Student Discipline Rule and the investigative processes that are set in motion after a student is suspected of breaking either are familiar enemies to left-wing students at the University of Sydney. Incredibly broad in both language and application, the Code and Rule are used in tandem to define a number of behaviours that could potentially constitute an act of misconduct, from failing to ‘treat all employees, members of the public and other students with respect, dignity, impartiality, courtesy and sensitivity’ to ‘prejudicing the good order and government of the University’ and ‘prejudicing the good name or academic standing of the University.’ Any number of behaviours can be treated as a potential instance of misconduct: from the publication of politically controversial material to a campus protest.

  
  
• Irina Dumitrescu (Longreads), Reading Lessons, essay reprinted from Heller and Conklin Akbari (eds), How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Soud.
  From a section talking about the OE 'Solomon and Saturn':
  

  It struck me at some point that this is a poem about learning to read. Yes, it is about understanding the individual letters on a page, but it is also about developing a powerful connection to a lyric, a story, a prayer, or a song. Solomon and Saturn imagines that a text can grab the reader so profoundly and emotionally that the act of encountering it might feel like terror. I do not think that the bookish Anglo-Saxon who wrote this curious poem really wanted reading to feel scary or violent. But I think he — or she — found a poetic way to express how shattering deep reading can be, and how our very bodies sometimes have to be a little bit destroyed for us to access it. The poet also knew there was something implausible and magical about reading intensely, that the feeling might only be granted for brief moments, like a spell.
  
  Yes, I have forgotten how to read. I have practice at forgetting, but practice in learning too. And occasionally I am reminded that I belong to a quiet, timeless community of other longing readers, all of them yearning for a connection perfect and ephemeral. With them, I am still learning how to read.

  
  
• Megan Garber (The Atlantic), When Harry Met Sally and the high maintenance woman.
  
• Izzie Ramirez (Bitch Media), Doing nothing is a radical idea for marginalized people, review of Jenny Odell's 'How To Do Nothing'.
  
• Kera Bolonik (The Cut), The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge. What. What even happened here. None of this makes sense. A professor has an affair (low on actual sex, high on emotional wossnames), may or may not have fathered a child, gets deeply entangled with the woman and her partner, hits the rocks with his "ex" wife he's still living with, and somehow... the two women secretly move into his home while his "ex" wife is away.
  
• GennaRose Nethercott (Electric Lit), The literature of cootie catchers, which are those pyramidal foldy things you use to tell fortunes (I have no idea what we called them but it sure wasn't that).
  

  The cootie catcher is primarily associated with girlhood, a gendered tradition passed hand-to-hand at sleepover parties and in schoolyards. Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become—leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Why bother with divination when you can control the future? Adolescent girls, however, were never afforded this promise. Thus, girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. If they couldn’t control the future, at least they could get a preview of what’s to come.

  
  
• Simon Springer (The Conversation), Thrash Not Trash: why heavy metal is a valid and vital phd subject
  
• Yara Rodriguez Fowler (Electric Lit), Sexual assault survivors don't owe anyone their stories: a manifesto against telling the truth.
  
• The Design Files, A day in the life of Benjamin Law, Writer.
  
• Clara Berridge and Karen Levy (The Conversation US), Webcams in nursing home rooms may deter elder abuse, but are they ethical?. That sure is a question.
  
• Greta LaFleur (Sydney Review of Books), A Fairy's Tale, review of Paul Takes the Form of A Mortal Girl
  
• Anthony Nocery (Archer Magazine), I've done drag a few times. Contains this great anecdote:
  

  “Yeah, darl. My name was Wynonna Strider. She wasn’t allowed into the shops.” “How often did you do it?” I asked. “A few times,” he joked. “It was a bit of fun. We could just be stupid and have fun. Act like we always did when we were together but in public.” He smiled, “I remember once I was tottering down the street in my dress and heels and some guys shouted ‘show us your tits’ so I pulled them out of my dress and waved them over my head and screamed “here you go, mate” and they ran away because they didn’t know what to do.” “Wow.” “Yeah,” he said. “Its one of my favourite things I’ve ever done.”

  
  
• Antonia Pont (The Lifted Brow), Consent: on rejecting and being rejected (Exerpt; I read the full essay in TLB 41):
  

  A friend, whom I consider wise in a rare way, once told me something about desire. She’d worked for a decade as a counsellor for couples of every ilk and persuasion—gay, straight, older, younger, newly besotted, long-term—hence she had a pretty good sample size to ground her speculations. She’d observed that when anger is operating somewhere in a relationship between two people, then there can be affection and affectionate gestures but, in most cases, there won’t be desire, or not for long. Through the haze of anger, the other seems simply undesirable. Enduring anger, then, will tend to mean either that sex slowly gets replaced with lots of ‘loving’, sweet but not very ‘sexy’, behaviours, or (my extension of her theory) that there might be regular instances of compulsory congress—since contemporary folk can be committed to diligent, frequent sex as a to-do list item—but things won’t tend towards elated tumbling, scintillating eroto-brilliance or throat-catching swoons. The sex, if there’s any at all, basically won’t be very hot or very happy. So goes my paraphrasing of her concept. It’s stayed with me for years. I’ve called on its logic when sex in my own relationships has dropped off and I couldn’t (or didn’t want to) work out why.

  
  Well THAT sure is a thing I couldn't have described but absolutely recognise.
  
• Michelle Tydd (The Saturday Paper), Childless Men. Report on the work of Imogene Smith, who is heading up a Deakin University project on the experiences of men who choose not to have children - the first such report. I'm really interested in this, as it for much of the twentieth and all of the twenty-first century so far, children or childlessness have been thought of as *women's issues*, and not foundational to a man's social identity (this was not always so; fatherhood, involving both legitimate and illegitimate children, was an absolutely central component of medieval masculine identity). I'm a bit... hmm... about the fact that this article stresses 'bad experiences with their own fathers' as a factor (on the grounds that a. a similar finding about women would be reductive and b. so many quote unquote failures of masculinity get blamed on Poor Relationship With His Father, it would be an easy reduction to make).
  

Today's update (I read... a lot in the last two weeks) brings you: threats to academics in India, investigations in to the Newstart rate, and actual Trinitarian heresies. Also Leonard Cohen, and an illegal bookstore.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Canberra Times: National Archives may not survive unless funding doubles.
  
• New Dheli TV: Right-wing students protest material on Dheli University syllabus, demand that the heads of English and History be 'handed over' to them. The students are part of the RSS, a hindu nationalist paramilitary group that has strong links with India's governing party.
  

  ABVP, the student wing of the RSS, surrounded the Vice Regal Lodge at the university complex, protesting against "objectionable material on the RSS" in the DU syllabus.
  During a meeting on the syllabus of under-graduate courses at the Delhi University campus, Professor Rasal Singh, a member of the academic council, objected to an update to the English syllabus, which, he alleged, portrayed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its ideology in "bad light".
  'Maniben alias Bibijaan' by Shilpa Paralkar on the 2002 Gujarat riots, and papers like 'Literature in Caste' and 'Interrogating Queerness' depict a wrong picture of the RSS and Indian culture, he claimed.

  
  
  

Good News:

• Gina Rushton (Buzzfeed AU), Indigenous babies are more likely to be born premature. These researchers say they have the solution:
  

  Indigenous mothers are almost twice as likely to give birth to premature babies than non-Indigenous mothers in Australia, and this gap is widening. But new research reveals a model of maternal and infant healthcare is successfully addressing this disparity.
  Birthing on country involves Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, families and communities in its design, leadership and implementation. It aims to bring cultural birthing traditions and community support to mainstream maternity services and, in some cases, make birthing in the community easier, sparing Indigenous women hundreds of kilometres of travel away from their support systems.
  In 2013, the Birthing in Our Community Service was established in Brisbane by two Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations and a tertiary maternity hospital. A study published last week in peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet found the service achieved a “significant’’ reduction in preterm birth compared to hospital-based tertiary maternity services.

  
  The article then goes on to look at birthing-on-country programs and why they're culturally vital, but it never actually explains why that translates to fewer preterm babies. I had to fish that information out of the article in The Lancet ("The known modifiable causes of preterm birth include inadequate antenatal care, psychosocial stress, infections, smoking in pregnancy and teenage pregnancy" - yeah it makes sense why all of those things would be better served by local, culturally appropriate, birthing services).
  
• SBS news: Parliamentary enquiry launched into raising Newstart rate. I saw on the Greens facebook a post that suggested the Senate had passed a motion to raise the rate, but I can't find any journalistic confirmation.
  

Other:

• Canberra Science Fiction Guild call for contributions: 'Unnatural Order' Anthology. I don't think I have a monster story in me, but perhaps some of you (Australians) do!

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Natasha Simonova (History Today), Doctoring the Ladies: "Although not allowed to study at university, women in 18th-century England still found ways to join – and challenge – the scholarly world."
  
• Kashmir Hill (Gizmodo), I tried to block Amazon from my life. It was impossible.:
  

  In addition to entertainment options going dark, basic tools of my work become unusable, notably the encrypted messaging app Signal and the workplace communication platform Slack.
  It’s hard to convey how disruptive this is if you’re not a person who uses Slack at work; it tends to replace office meetings, emails, and phone calls. Without Slack, I basically have no idea what is going on at the office for the entirety of the Amazon-blocking week, and my colleagues have little idea what I am up to.

  
  TL;DR Amazon owns a lot of web hosting services, and is almost certainly using them to scope out the market and then out compete its own clients.
  
• John Tait (SMH), Did Israel Folau misquote the bible? Hell yes!. I'm ashamed that I didn't pick that up myself - no, Galatians doesn't say *anything* about sodomy! I knew that!
  
• Kate McClymont (SMH), Why the PM and most Christians are going to hell:
  

  Baptism, according to the Folaus, must take place in water in the name of Jesus Christ. Baptisms performed in Christian churches across Australia in the name of the Trinity – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - are false and those ministers are false teachers, the parent was told.
  One of those who won’t be saved is Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose Pentecostal Horizon Church teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. When the parent asked the Folaus if Mr Morrison was a Christian, they laughed and said no, "He’s a Hillsong."

  
  Out here rejecting the Second Ecumenical Council! Great going, guys! (I believe, in the true medieval style of assigning names of past heresies to anything that vaguely resembles them now, that they're Pneumatomachians. Make of that what you will.)
  
• Joyce Cohen (WaPo), For those with hearing impairments, restaurant noise isn't just irritation it's discrimination. Looks carefully at whether Title IX (US) might *require* restaurants to offer environmental changes for hearing impaired customers, as well as the endemic fact that many restaurants have unsafe noise levels for everyone.
  
• Jess Zimmerman (Electric Lit), The Towering Influence of Leonard Cohen. No summary, no pull quote, but I loved everything about this - especially the description (courtesy of a friend of Zimmerman) of Cohen's work as existing on "a spectrum between horniness and apocalypse".
  
• Melissa Michaud Baese-Berk (The Conversation), Did we mishear Neil Armstrong's famous first words on the moon:
  

  But Armstrong insisted that he actually said, “That’s one small step for a man.” In fact, in the official transcript of the Moon landing mission, NASA transcribes the quote as “that’s one small step for (a) man.”
  As a linguist, I’m fascinated by mistakes between what people say and what people hear.
  In fact, I recently conducted a study on ambiguous speech, using Armstrong’s famous quote to try to figure out why and how we successfully understand speech most of the time, but also make the occasional mistake.

  
  
• Michael Seidenberg (Electric Lit), In memory of Brazenhead: the secret bookstore that felt like a magical portal:
  

  Since Brazenhead was an illegal business, the only way to visit was hearing about it by word of mouth. It was best to buy books if you could, and it was advisable to bring whiskey to share with whoever else might be there, and most importantly with Michael. Some nights there were fifty people there, some nights there were two. You never knew quite what kind of party, or what kind of evening you would walk into. It was secret but not exclusive: The price of entry was merely that you had to want to be there, that you had to want to sit around talking shit with Michael about whatever ridiculous topic Michael wanted to talk about, that you had to think a night where you were allowed to lapse out of conversation and sit in a corner taking books down from shelves for 45 minutes was a good time. It was a place that attracted weirdos and losers and social climbers and grown-up awkward kids who still wanted to live inside books, and it is where I met or became close with many of my very favorite people.

  
  
• Helen Davidson (Guardian AU), Six years and I didn't achieve anything: inside Manus, a tropical purgatory.
  

  Healthcare is a lightning rod for the concerns of people like Pokarup. Australia has funded a clinic, run by Pacific International Hospital, exclusively for the refugees. But it operates only in business hours and is frequently accused of abrogating its duty of care, shunting patients to the Lorengau hospital.
  “I actually confronted the PIH doctors when two or three of our guys were up at the hospital,” says Pokarup, referring to some refugees.
  “They were left up there on Friday night and didn’t go back until Sunday. They occupied three of the beds for emergency, and one of the side rooms. What if one of the Manus citizens [needed it]?”
  Lorengau’s hospital is grim. Perched at the top of a hill, it is a series of worn-down, brightly painted weatherboard buildings connected by covered walkways.
  Hand-painted signs label the dentistry, operating theatre, dispensary and emergency rooms. The emergency department has four cupboard-sized stalls separated by thin walls and doorways covered by curtains. Every one is occupied, and people sit outside, under the covered balcony, some attached to drip stands.
  What this place could have done with the $2m a month Australia has given PIH.

  
  
• Julie Perrin (SMH), No lights, no linen: how Alex survived six years on Newstart: account of a disabled man's struggle to get by on jobseeker's allowances.
  

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'.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Hannah Ryan (Buzzfeed AU), The government asked asylum seekers about their sex lives, then fought to keep the interviews secret. The initial interviews are damning (newsflash: 'cum drinking' should not be a necessary datapoint in determining if someone is gay!), but the trail of efforts to evade FOI requests are really impressive.
  
• Equality Australia, 50 LGBTIQ organisations and allies support affirming religious discrimination bill. I'm on the record as thinking that the effort to strike down religious exemptions to anti-discrimination law (vis a vis the hiring and firing of lgbtqi staff, at least) is a waste of time, but if we *are* going to have a national stoush about the Right To Hold Beliefs Your Employer Doesn't Like, then yeah, we need protection for queer people of faith as well as for Israel bloody Folau.
  

Good News:

• Kelly Richman-Abdou (MyModernMet), Lego designs Braille bricks to help visually impaired children learn to read. I have many Questions (starting with: will they issue different packs for different languages, like scrabble?), but this sounds really cool.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Professor Sir Michael Marmot (The Bedpan), The poor can't afford to follow public health advice
  
• Carrie Lyell (The Independent), Trans people aren't 'erasing' lesbians like me. Another necessary instalment from the department of Things That Shouldn't Have To Be So Frequently Stated.
  
• Rich Juzwiak (Jezebel), Define homophobic:
  

  Now after the fact, I remain unconvinced that author and critic Dale Peck’s critique of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, “My Mayor Pete Problem,” originally published (and then unpublished) by The New Republic, was homophobic in any definition of the word that I have ever experienced, despite having experienced the exact sort of gay-on-gay bitchery and contempt for the way I live my life as a gay man that Peck displays in his essay. NBC, The Hollywood Reporter, our sister site Gizmodo, on top of legions of tweeters all deemed it “homophobic” without much support, as if it was so self-evidently bigoted that they didn’t need to waste their time explaining. Or maybe it was as if they believed the definition of “homophobic” to be “being mean to a gay person.”

  
  
• Tony Birch (Meanjin Autumn 2019), There is no axe: identity, story and a sombrero:
  

  But are enough people listening? It would seem doubtful. In a recent essay, the Guardian UK columnist Gary Younge reflected on the global conservative movement and its strategy to take control of the term ‘identity politics’. By ‘railing against liberals, feminists, migrants and Muslims,’ he wrote, ‘the right has cornered the market in victimhood’ (Guardian Weekly, 12 October 2018). While conservatives, in Younge’s view, often conflate identity as an exercise in pandering to special interests, dubious affirmative action initiatives or simply uninvited competition for oxygen, he reminds us that identity often denotes the obvious contrast between privilege and discrimination. He comments that ‘in Britain there are, on an average day, roughly 1,400 assaults on women [and] 25 hate crimes committed against gay and transgender people’. Meanwhile, in the United States ‘for every $100 of wealth a white person has … an African-American has just $5’.

  Younge suggests that it is perhaps time to ‘retire the phrase “identity politics” for good’ if it primarily serves the interests of white people feeling sorry for themselves. Reflecting on his call for a shift in terminology that might also advance the necessary debate, I picked up a copy of the Weekend Australian (27–28 October 2018) and read an article by another retiree, John Howard, under the headline ‘Broad church is the best bet in this age of identity politics’. In danger of extending the gambling metaphor, it seemed clear that Gary Younge was on the money.

  
  Resonates well with the Adolfo Aranjuez piece in the same issue.
  
• Ruby Hamad (Meanjin Autumn 2019), The meaning of The Lebs. This is a piece I needed, because I was repelled by the excerpt from The Lebs in Meanjin a while ago - by its relentless misogynistic POV - enough so that I didn't want to take a risk on buying it. I suspected that, in the full-length book, we're probably getting a *nuanced critique* of a particular model of masculinity, rather than its wholehearted endorsement, but... nothing I saw was talking about misogyny in relation to this book. Hamad cites a bunch of (white) reviewers who had the same reaction I did, and carefully walks through an alternative reading.
  

  Ley was not the only reviewer who couldn’t seem to accept he was reading a dramatised critique of misogyny, not a documentary account of it. Even the positive reviews seemed fixated on the misogyny of the characters as if books and films about Western toxic masculinity were unheard of. ‘Yet by having fictional characters refer to real-life rape victims as “sluts”, this novel enters controversial and sensitive territory … taking creative liberties with actual victims … might not be so well received,’ wrote Clinton Caward in the Sydney Morning Herald, who has, presumably, never watched a Hollywood film about the US military’s many exploits in the Middle East.

  ‘This is what white men always do; they protect the bullshit in their own culture,’ Ahmad scoffs. ‘If you look at American Pie, it’s full of sexual assault.’ He is referring to Ley’s rebuke that the book failed in its attempt to juxtapose the misogyny of the Lebs with that of white society by having the characters watch the film American Pie.

  ‘He called it a false equivalency [but] my argument has always been that misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy is learned behaviour,’ Ahmad explains. ‘And in The Lebs, I try and show you where they learned it from, and they didn’t learn it from the sheikh.’

  
  
• Toby Walmsley (Overland), Academic freedom is not freedom to discriminate
  
• Jessie Ngaio (Archer), Ethical Porn and Submission. Notable for being actually an nuanced look at the strengths and pitfalls of both, rather than a straight up defense
  
• Jennifer Rutherford (Meanjin Autumn 2019), The BB book. I can't figure out why this is listed with essays rather than memoir, but it's good, genuinely intriguing writing about everyday things.
  
• Notches blog interviews Anna Clark, Alternative histories of the self: a cultural history of sexualities and secrets. 'Alternative Histories of the Self: a Cultural History of Sexualities and Secrets is about five unique people and how they developed a sense of self that reconciled their sexual nonconformity with their ethical standards. People will want to read this book because these are fascinating, puzzling people with secret private lives they tried to understand in creative ways.'
  
• Kerri Winter (The Queerness), Easy Target is female empowerment at its finest. Review of Easy Target by Bitch, who I had never heard of before and am glad I now have.
  
• Dean Biron (Meanjin Autumn 2019), Ordinary People: really gripping essay from a policeman who worked on historical sex offense cases.
  ( The most striking thing is how grindingly conventional they (historical offenders) turn out to be )
  
  
• Jaqueline Kent (Meanjin Autumn 2019), You will have a drink with me: the story of Wake In Fright and its afterlives.
  
• Enza Gandolfo (Meanjin Autumn 2019), West Gate: story of a bridge:
  

  The men’s love of the bridge was associated with the pride they took in their work and with the symbolic nature of the West Gate Bridge in the imagination of the city. It wasn’t only the workers, Melburnians were watching and waiting with anticipation for this bridge that was going to be bigger and better than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Hundreds visited the site, standing on the viewing platform to watch its progress. It’s that love which haunts me when I stroll along the Stony Creek Walkway, when I drive over the West Gate. And the injustice and tragedy, that these workers were the ones who paid with their lives for poor decisions that they had no role in making.
  
  On 15 October every year a memorial ceremony is held under the bridge; survivors, friends and family remember their workmates. There is a memorial plaque, garden and sculpture under the bridge; the plaque was paid for by the workers—the union members, who wanted to ensure that their mates were not forgotten. The survivors have continued over the years to tell their story whenever they’ve had the opportunity but while there is usually some reporting of the tragedy on the anniversary every year, when the survivors gather with their families and the families and friends of the victims, the story is largely forgotten. Certainly, I have found that in my classrooms there are rarely more than one or two who know the bridge collapsed during construction.

  
  
• Na'ama Carlin (Meanjin Autumn 2019), Of the Name: on names, cultural inheritance, being present with others, depression, and much more.
  

Caveats commenter: I've banned the person for whose benefit I have been issuing bi-weekly warnings, apologies to the rest of you if I've been patronising the shit out of you for months. Continue demonstrating medium levels of critical literacy and a basic ability to read the room, it's much appreciated.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Hong Kong leader says extradition bill is dead, students not satisfied. I saw a lot of positive coverage of the 'victory', but I'm inclined to believe the case made here: it's not dead until the bill is formally withdrawn. It seems that many in HK agree, because afaik protests are ongoing.
  
• B'tselem, Human rights organizations based in Israel voice concern before Bundestag president over motion defining BDS as antisemitism.
  
• Amazon Prime day: workers to strike over warehouse conditions. That's today and tomorrow, folks. Putting my Good Omens rewatch on hold accordingly.
  
• Mercymisrule on tumblr, one of the most amazing things that has been said to me in therapy is that self-esteem doesn't exist. I'm adding this to my list of things that don't exist.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Anna Spargo-Ryan (The Guardian), Mental Illness is complex, yet patients are often left to manage their own brain:
  

  The system – not over-medicalised but under-nuanced – relies on self-advocacy. We are just not attuned enough to notice strangers with mental illness in the same way we might notice a knife sticking out of them. The need for immediate care requires someone who’s feeling god-awful to find the energy and courage to ask someone to make it better.
  Sometimes, the idea that it can get better keeps us alive. There is a hopefulness in a medical model. It says, I know you feel rotten right now, but there are treatments you can try. It says, it can be better than this one day. And it promises, I take your pain seriously.
  In Australia, it doesn’t, yet.

  
  
• Elodie Under Glass, for CaptainAwkward.com, Breaking the Low Mood Cycle. With excellent illustrations.
  
• Eve L. Ewing and Hanif Abdurraqib, Echoes on the Internet. A letter-series between creators who work as a 'poetry collective'.
  

  I think a lot of people think about collectives as primarily being about shared production—making together, or doing together. Those things can be very cool. I think in our case, I mostly think of a collective in the sense of being together, and thinking together. (Of course, all those verbs aren’t mutually exclusive.) It means a public co-sign. It means I stand with you. I’m on your team. I have your back, and I’m counting on you to have mine. That’s such a simple thing, but it counts for so much. It also feels wildly risky and dangerous, because so many people are just so terrible, and so many things are just so terrible. It’s so risky to trust anyone. And even riskier, in a sense, to tell someone else that you’re ready to be accountable to them, to keep promises, to take responsibility not only for not embarrassing yourself (hard enough) but for not embarrassing them. That’s a lot. Human relationships are so risky.

  
  
• JB Brager (The Nib), Livejournal made me gay. I resemble this remark so hard. (Although, as I said to Twitter, you could also say Sir Gawain made me queer, and if only I could draw there would be a comic in that)
  
• Lee Williscroft-Ferris (The Queerness), Album review: Kylie Minogue, Step Back in Time: The Definitive Collection. No I have no idea why I read this but it's really quite interesting.
  
• Elad Nehorai (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), Legacy Institutions don't get to dictate how Jews use the lessons of the Holocaust.
  
• Andrew Ford and Anni Heino (Meanjin Summer 2018), The Song Remains the Same: Funiculi Funicula. I absolutely loved this series of endnotes to Meanjin 2018, and I loved the prompt to look up Funiculi Funicula. What a good hilarious song.
  
• Noel Figart, Bullet journals, or: excellence v perfection.
  

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'.

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?
  ( At that point even putting the B on was controversion and the T wasn't even standard yet )

  
  
• 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'.