Strong Verbs Are Just Better

One of you says the fire is a judgment from God. He, Israel Folau, says this land is full of a wickedness that goes against his truths. The droughts, the fires, they are the spears of his power that strike at the heart of darkness. Now, I am fearful of locusts. Though perhaps locusts should also be fearful. The wrath of his God is indiscriminate. It is random, and thus being so, strikes at all creatures, great and small. It is not just fires, but actions of men and women, all must be razed to ground zero, smouldering, scorched, until the one true way to his ideal is met.
I carry his words like a chain around my emaciated neck. The dead carry his words on their bones.

Sometimes families were offered community-based support through a voluntary program (called ChildFIRST). But according to the report, what the program offered was “inadequate to meet the complexity of issues identified” by families and, in many cases, ChildFIRST reported them back to child protection.
The commissioner describes this as a “referral roundabout”. While the report looked at Victoria only, these issues are nation-wide. And this isn’t just happening in Australia – a 2014 report in Canada showed a similar problem.
How is it possible child protection in two different jurisdictions have made the same mistakes?
My research shows these are not mistakes. The inaction these kids experience is a systematic ignoring, set up by the child protection model. And that’s why the commissioner’s recommendation to increase resources won’t fix it.

For any child with ADHD, the age when they can no longer manage will depend on the balance of their personal characteristics and pressures and expectations of their environmental circumstances.
An intellectually able child who can finish their work quickly and easily in the early years of school can find the effect of their ADHD only becomes a problem later. Conversely, a child with ADHD who is in a class with predominantly older children is likely to struggle academically and socially at a younger age.
Contrary to popular opinion, parents are often reluctant to start their child on stimulant medication. They may be afraid others will criticise them, particularly people who deny the validity of ADHD.
Denying a child’s difficulties are due to diagnosable ADHD means another explanation is necessary. The child may be blamed for being lazy or the parents, particularly the mother, blamed for being “too soft” on discipline.

For many people, being summoned by a parent and asked "CAN I HAVE A WORD?" might be the prelude for a sombre revelation or intervention. For me, when I arrive at Mum and Dad's house, it is almost always a prelude to being shown a bizarre example of the quirks of the natural world. As well as the toad living in his shoe, other WORDs my dad has had with me in the past couple of years have involved showing me a set of terrifyingly human-looking teeth he dug up in the garden, a remarkably phallic stain left on the kitchen ceiling in the wake of a burst water pipe, a pretty wasp's nest in his shed and an unusually large and bendy courgette. In 2011, after asking "TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?", he led me to the flagstone upon which, the previous day, a heron that he had come to view as his nemesis had dropped the lifeless body of one the carp from his garden pond. It was hard to know what to say, but I sensed from the chalk outline he'd drawn in the exact shape of the fish's body that he was taking the loss hard.

Affordability, identity, and imagination are a potent mix for impulse shopping. I made it to the Shopify checkout page before stopping myself. As a sanity check, I reached back to the nether regions of my closet, where I extracted a beige, cotton canvas tote smushed somewhere between my raincoats and umbrellas. I found four smaller totes scrunched up inside — totes within a tote — like nesting matryoshka dolls.
Totes are taking up an expanding part of our lives. If you live in a major US city, there’s a good chance you have them hidden somewhere – in the back of your closet, under your sink, or in your car’s trunk. As counties and states are imposing fees or outright bans on plastic bags, many people are carrying lightweight totes as a way to save money. But totes have also become the new graphic t-shirt. Culturally, they’re everything: a useful item for daily carry, an inexpensive thing to manufacture, a cheap item to purchase, a marketing tool, and a symbol of identity. If you understand what’s happened to totes in the last 20 years, you can understand a lot about American consumer culture.

About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art, in culture, in politics, et cetera—especially in the case of physical disability. This, I thought, fell short of the field’s promise for literary studies. Where, I wondered, was the field’s equivalent of Epistemology of the Closet, the book in which Eve Sedgwick showed us how to “queer” texts, such that we will never read a narrative silence or lacuna the same way again? Put another way: I wanted a book that showed how an understanding of disability changes the way we read.
Melanie Yergeau and Julia Miele Rodas have written that book I dreamed of a decade ago, but they’ve written it independently, as two books. Both writers start by challenging the premise that autism—as an intellectual concept and as a personal diagnosis—is antithetical to speech, rhetoric, and literature.

A fundamental, material part of this infrastructure was something called the miners’ institute. These were buildings, sometimes known as working-men’s institutes, or workmen’s halls, which were constructed in industrial communities as a multipurpose social and cultural space. Again, these places were built on collectivist principles, with workers paying a proportion of their wage into a communal fund, usually something like a penny per week, to pay for the construction and running of the building – sometimes even carrying out the construction work themselves. This then entitled them to use it. These buildings were created in order to be part of the community, part of the social fabric: they could be used for community meetings or to hear political speakers, there was usually a bar or a space for dancing, a pool or snooker room, a cinema room, so it was a social, cultural and political space at once.
Crucially, these buildings also usually contained a library and reading room, where members could freely access both books and newspapers. This point highlights the tradition of self-education that was also important in these communities: the idea of educating yourself, the autodidactic tradition which defined so much of this early working-class culture. This is something that’s been lost sight of in an age where education is now associated with class mobility, “aspiration”, and transcendence into the middle class. When people say ‘education’ they tend to mean ‘university education’ and to assume that this somehow excludes working-class people. But in early working-class communities, self-education and access to knowledge could be seen as an obvious part of the cultural fabric – you gained knowledge in order to understand the world and understand your own conditions, not necessarily to transcend your class individually but to improve yourself as part of that class, and to collectively improve your situation.

In a briefing on Brexit, the Society of Authors argues against the visa salary requirements of £30,000 for long-term migrant workers and £35,000 for indefinite leave to remain: “Authors in the UK earn an average of just £10,500 per year. The proposed threshold therefore does not reflect the ‘skills’ of writers or the cultural sector at large. Salary level is not an appropriate measure of skill or wider contribution to the UK’s social and economic life.” This emphasis on salary failing to represent skill highlights the necessity of reviewing the visa routes and the failure of immigration policy to consider vast cultural benefits—benefits that far exceed financial input. Reducing migrants to their salary not only diminishes their talent but also insults British authors who fall significantly below the warped perception of what it is to be “skilled.”

Medical Education

Citation: Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon, "for using a simple animal-training technique— called 'clicker training'—to train surgeons to perform orthopedic surgery."

This 2016 study focused on two specific surgical tasks: "tying the locking, sliding knot" and "making a low-angle drill hole." The authors wanted to test the effectiveness of "acoustic feedback" on the learning process—typically used by animal trainers—which prior studies indicated might also work on human behavior and could be superior to traditional demonstration techniques. "The clicker serves as a conditioned reinforcer that communicates in a way that is language- and judgment-free," they observed. The result: the clicker-trained group of medical students took more time to learn the tasks than the control group, but they were better at performing the tasks precisely. And when it comes to surgery, precision is paramount.

• Mona Chalabi (Guardian UK, 2013): Why is puberty starting younger?. Key data (from 'the study published today', which is infuriatingly not actually cited in this article) is that in a 2013 study of American girls, age of puberty measured by breast tissue development was only a few months earlier than in the 1990s. Also cites the German study c. 2010 which is responsible for the long-range stats from 1860 to 2010.
  
• Mary Lewis (The Conversation UK, 2018): Children aren't starting puberty younger, medieval skeletons reveal. Osteoarcheological evidence suggests children between 990-1550 entered puberty between ages of 10 and 12, same as today (as far as I can tell, this is based on skeletons of children who *died* as adolsecents - the piece doesn't address whether that skews the data). Although the onset of puberty was relatively young, it took much longer for the process of maturation to complete than it does now, probably due to environmental factors such as nutrition.
  
• Jayashri Kulkarni (The Conversation UK, 2011): Twelve going on 20: are girls reaching puberty earlier. Summarises research to the effect that age of menarch has fluctuated a lot over time; studies as of 2011 suggested that some aspects of puberty, such as breast tissue development, were happening earlier, but the age of menarche had stabilised at around 13, based on UK / NZ research.

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.

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.

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”.

Last year, a truck driver employed as a casual in the mining industry took his employer to the Federal Court to argue he was entitled to annual leave, and the court found in his favour. The case rested on the nature of his working arrangements – they were regular and predictable, with the employee working a seven-day-on, seven-day-off continuous roster, which was set in advance for a year. The court found he was not a casual employee. Prima facie, this decision has implications for casual academic work.
The court ruled that the “essence of casualness” is that there is “no firm advance [mutual] commitment … to continuing and indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work”. The common characteristics of casual work were described as irregular work patterns, uncertainty as to the period over which employment was offered, discontinuity, intermittency of work and unpredictability. Casual academic work has none of these features. If it did, the teaching programs at Australian universities would be rendered completely unsustainable.

I let the bitter currents flow, and fade. It’s not their fault that I am here, and they can’t know that I am haunted by past classrooms, like the after-school Arabic I used to attend as a boy with my brother and cousins. I remember watching one of the teachers, an old hijabi, screaming as she chased my brother out of the room with a broom, or maybe he was the one wailing, or they both were, as she beat him with it in the corridor. When my mum found out teachers hit us often, she took us out and, just like that, severed us from our homeland, ensuring we would forever be little Lebs at home in western Sydney and nowhere else, a thickened English in our mouths peppered with Arabic curses and prayers. If I seem less than appreciative of her bold action, it’s only because my mother beat us more often and more harshly, as did our aunties and uncles, so really it was less about the tenderness of our bodies and more about reasserting her dominance over them, her divine blood-right to do whatever she wanted to us.
As a consequence, I grew up in a household where languages both familiar and strange swished around my small body. I knew the sound of the azan as well as my own name, I could recite the Fatiha flawlessly, and I could operate within the home as a domestic drone, able to recognise a certain amount of commands—go to sleep, get up, shower, hurry up, bring us tea, walk, run, pray, come inside, get out, be quiet—and a certain number of insults such as idiot or donkey or dog, but I was never asked to speak; in fact, I was discouraged from it, and so even these fistfuls of words are like rough bricks in my mouth. It was never a problem until my teyta, a mountain who dwindled into a hill as we aged, tried to speak to me. Every failed conversation with her sank into my bones, the deep sadness that would come into her eyes when I couldn’t respond or had to look to an adult nearby to translate. She was the only one who wanted to hear what I had to say and she might as well still have been in Lebanon for all the good it did us. For her part, the only English words she knew were ‘I love you’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Excuse me, please’ and, randomly, ‘Friday’, which she called Freeday.

Climate refugees, in other words, don’t exist – at least, not from the perspective of the current legal apparatus.
They might have done nothing wrong (few people have smaller carbon footprints than the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa).
They might be the victims of processes set in train by others.
But that doesn’t matter.
As international law now stands, they’re not entitled to anything.

It was my mother who memorably washed my mouth out, after a particularly knock-down, drag-out screaming match between me and my older brother. There’s no denying that I had the fouler mouth in the argument, but because I was three years younger and no match for him physically, words were all I had to fight his uncanny ability to push my buttons. Language is often the most effective weapon against power, especially when those who use it to fight back—like women, like children—aren’t supposed to have any. My mother had always hated profanity and vulgarity, but hearing them issuing from her little princess’s mouth was an intolerable assault. And so the woman who not only refused to spank us but could barely execute a grounding that lasted longer than five minutes rubbed her hand against a bar of Dove soap that rested on the rim of the kitchen sink and shoved her lathered palm in my mouth.
In the moment, I’m sure she felt an incredible sense of alienation from her only daughter, whom she wanted to believe was sweet, beautiful, kind—all the things a girl should be. Perhaps it felt to her like she was bringing me back to the idyllic state in which I was born, when she looked into my infant eyes and said to my father, “If you could imagine the perfect little girl, this would be it.” To me, it felt like the words I’d conjured to defend myself from my brother’s taunts were being purged, redacted, stricken from the record—like my voice itself was being scrubbed from my mouth.

SR: I said ki-ki. K-I hyphen K-I. Ki-ki is the equivalent of, in the gay world, of a woman—she can’t make up her mind. One minute she’s a butch, another minute she’s a femme, you know? She can’t make up her mind. And it’s almost as bad, quote-quote, as being a bisexual between the two worlds.
EM: Uh-huh.
SR: That’s the ultimate low.
EM: Mm-hmm.
SR: I was in trouble. Definitely in trouble. Because, you know, well, you know, okay, what was it gonna mean if I was a ki-ki? Well, it was gonna mean that I was gonna be ostracized. And I was.
I was attracted to a woman more masculine than myself. But in that society, I was a dead duck. Because a, you know, a butch could not afford to make love to another obvious butch. I mean, there was something terribly wrong with this, you know?
And I may not have much masculinity. And I didn’t see myself as having a lot of masculinity. But I don’t think I would have survived without what I got. I don’t plan on any asshole butch confused person taking it away from me.
And so I just, you know, went, now hear this. I have cut myself in half to be part of this gay society, you know? I have this potential. Now, in order to belong to this group, I have to cut off my heterosexual potential. That leaves 50 percent of me. And if you think that I’m going to cut the 50 percent of me into 25 percent, you’ve got another think coming. Screw this. I am ki-ki. And I know that there’s plenty of people around here who probably are, because there’s nothing normal about this crap. It’s not normal.

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.

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.

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.

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 )

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.”

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.