So this experiment in posting links to my online reading has become... kind of overwhelming. it went rapidly from 'one or two things of note' to 'me keeping a record of anything worthwhile I read', which is... well. You can fill in for yourselves why the latter might be attractive to me, in this the Year of Career Furlough, Academic Blergh, And Personal ???. I don't regret it but I doubt I'll keep it up past 2019.

What this does mean I can do, though, is look back (because I started making separate link posts in January) and pull out 2-3 pieces from each month. Pieces I keep coming back to, for whatever reason.

January:

Pankaj Mishra (NYT), The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class: "With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine." Barely three days have gone by since this went up that I have not thought about How Right It Is.

Kathryn Schultz (New Yorker), The earthquake that will devastate the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps because for the first time I'm living in an earthquake zone, I think about this a lot.

February:

Louise Milligan (Guardian AU, book extract), The Kid and the Choirboy. I read a lot of very good, very harrowing Pell coverage, but this is the one that sticks with me. The interviews with the dead young man's mother, who had no idea, no way to explain what had sent her son so far off the rails, are particularly... something. It was this piece that really drove it home to me that these boys are only a few years older than me.

Price, Hedenstierna-Johnson, Zachrisson, et al, Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581. Finally a good, open-access, nuanced and yet readable-to-non-archaeologists piece on sexing viking graves (hint: genotype, phenotype, and grave goods are ALL problematic).

March:

Kelly J Baker (Women in Higher Ed), The Productivity Trap. Honestly I probably don't come back to this as often as I ought. Arguably, this entire exercise in link-saving is a Productivity Trap in itself.

Joshua Badge (Meanjin Blog), Difference and the Politics of Fear: a response to Christchurch, but also, an incredibly accurate description of Australian culture/politics, going right back as far as I can *remember* being aware of politics. It's... somehow reassuring to see your own memories pinned down like that. I'm not making this up: there is a clear line of continuity between then and now.

Jasmine Andersson (iNews UK), LGBT teachers who taught under s28 are still 'scarred' by its legacy. I've read a lot about education and LGBT people in the UK and AUs, this year, but this one... haunts me.

April:

Neli at Delicious Meets Healthy, How to make perfect hard boiled eggs. You laugh, but until this April I have never been competent at making hard boiled eggs, and now I am, and I have consumed them daily since mid-April. Therefore, this is the most memorable article I read in April.

Yen-Rong Wong (Meanjin Summer 2018), The Very Model of an Model Ethnic Minority. I would like to make this essay compulsory reading for Clueless White People.

Mike Seccombe (The Saturday Paper), Election 2019: Welcome to the Age War. Sums up the memorable economics issues of Election 2019.

May:

Sally Young (The Conversation) The Secret History of NewsCorp. I'm still fuming and shaking my fist over this. Of course NewsCorp started out as a union-busting pro-mining newspaper-buyer-upper-er company. OF COURSE.

Ruth Padawer (NYT, 2016), The humiliating practice of sex-testing female athletes: provided essential historical and scientific background to the Semenya case.

Arwa Marhadawi (Guardian UK), Palestinian lives don't matter.

June:

Tiernan, Deem and Menzies (The Conversation), Queensland to Quexiteers: don't judge try to understand us. Notable for being one of the few 'you just don't understand Queensland' pieces I read that actually explains the regional economy, instead of bleating vaguely about jobs.

Alexis Wright (Meanjin Summer 2018), The Power and Purpose of Literature. If this doesn't end up on literary theory course readers it's a crying shame. (Also a shame if it *only* ends up on indigenous lit / postcolonial course readers)

Richard Cooke (Saturday Paper), Free Speech, Censorship, and Media Raids. Viciously skewers the commonly-held notion that Australia has *ever* had a free media landscape.

So, there we go. The 16 most memorable things I read on the internet in the first half of 2019. And yes, I really do need to rein back the compulsive Reading Of Everything, June in particular was a mess to sift through.