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highlyeccentricCurrent and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -
Amusements:
Longer political and/or climate science pieces
Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other
- Jack Monroe (blog), After the election: how to do something when everything feels pointless and awful. "And then, when the weight of grief starts to subside, we can make a conscious decision to help the vulnerable in our country and our communities, in any way that we can. Charity is no more than a sticking plaster for the cuts made to the welfare budgets, public services. We shouldn’t need to be spontaneously bailing out cruel austerity cuts and defunded vital services, and yet, here we are. Like military medics on a battlefield, we patch our comrades up with whatever we have to hand, ducking the fire and heat and flying shrapnel and doing our best, not knowing when the next blast will come or who it will hurt, nor from where."
- Darren Gray (SMH), Canadian pension fund loads up on Australian water rights and almond farms. Eurgh.
- Stephen Wright (Overland), On burning forests.
Amusements:
- McSweeneys Internet Tendency (2007), An update on the problem of Maria.
Longer political and/or climate science pieces
- The Saturday Paper Editiorial, This is an emergency:
Something needs to happen, something drastic and soon. The sky is burning orange and something needs to happen. The air is on fire. This is wartime and the government we elected is our enemy. The whole country needs to face this together.
After the Great Fire, Nero built his palace in the ruins. Scott Morrison doesn’t have that kind of imagination. He doesn’t know what’s next and his inability to conceive of it stops him from confronting what is happening now. This is the great, great failure of our time, and it will ruin the earth. - Karen Middleton (The Saturday Paper), Labor changes message on coal.
- Melissa Davey (Guardian AU) Australia faces massive rethink to prepare for long term bushfires and air pollution.
Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other
- Caleb Johnson (Electric Lit), The stories that helped me embrace the rural south. On the work of Larry Brown.
- Nathania Gilson (Lifted Brow), The necessary work of carrying on living: a review of Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing.
- Ada Calhoun (Oprah Mag), The new midlife crisis: why and how it's hitting gen X women. "Other research suggests that women's happiness bottoms out around 40; men's, around 50. (Maybe that's another reason the female experience isn't much discussed: By the time men start thinking about these issues, women seem unaffected, but only because they've already been through it."
- Sloane Tanen (Electric Lit), The book that defined my teen anxiety turned out to be a lie. I was only tangentially aware of Go Ask Alice as a teen (despite its conservative message, the actual content would have had it ruled out of my school library, and it lacked the dragons and swords that guided me in the public library), so I couldn't have told you if it was meant to be a memoir or fiction. But wow, the actual story is weird.
- ABC Health (2016), Ice Addiction: can you become dependant after just one use? Answer: no. Which is all three of logical, in line with what I'm hearing as a court transcriptionist, and completely opposed to what the media were saying when ICE first hit the streets.
- Michael Mohammed Ahmad, (SMH Good Weekend) I sat silently watching that front door, like a mouse watching a tiger. A slice-of-life as Ahmad attends the mosque with his son in the wake of the Christchurch bombings.4
- Sophia Hepsibah Benjamin (Archer), Pure OCD and the groinal sydrome: body beyond control:
rowing up as a conventionally attractive cishet woman, my body has been culturally inscribed as desirable and inherently ‘sexed.’ My delineation as a hyper-sexual body has been enforced by the media, by social communities, by family members, by men, and perhaps most strangely, by myself.^
My experience of Pure O and the Groinal Syndrome might just be the propagation of culture inside my own body, or my body simply trying to live out the existential expectation that has been placed upon it.
Like the theorist Elizabeth Grosz says, “Our ideas and attitudes seep into the functioning of the body itself, making up the realm of its possibilities” (190). Or perhaps my Pure O is an act of furious irony. You want me to embody sex? I’ll be aroused non-stop. You want to denigrate my sexed body? I will spew self-hatred from every synapse and pore. - Keyvan Allahyari (SRB), The trouble of Middle Eastern literature. There's been a run of essays I really enjoy in SRB lately, and this is one.
- Scott Robinson (Overland), The end of the future, again, and again, and again:
Television seems beset by a repetition compulsion. Its episodes – with notable exceptions – are structurally repetitive, and the industry as a whole constantly revives its ‘hits’. The Good Place and Russian Doll theatricalise this very compulsion. What is it about our apparent loss of a future that makes us obsess about the afterlife, death and, importantly, the moral and political condition of our lives?