Strong Verbs Are Just Better

It's been so long since I did a reading post that I it feels really weird to try to preface this with commentary on the best or most arresting thing I've read lately.

Here's something that stood out to me, though: Siderea on The Problem of Morality. I had another one of those weird conversations with my parents the other day where I offhandedly said something, of an acquaintance with a strained parent relationship, "well, if I had a father who [x], I'm not sure I'd WANT to speak to him". Parents: "you can't just stop talking to people over political differences!"

And I'm astounded, repeatedly, because... this seems like an abdication of morality, or ethics, to me. And yet, as my parents occasionally get up the gumption to needle me about, I obviously don't think people should exclude *me* because I offend their morals. I feel like there's a difference between making that since on the basis of *private morality* (how I conduct my sex or relationship life - and even then, as in the case of spousal abuse, there ARE reasons to stop talking to people over their private morality!), and over... political morality? Ethics? Something?

Siderea doesn't get into that particular distinction, but DOES contend that the "left", broadly defined, abdicated the field of morality-as-politics in the 80s, and is now hampered by that loss. And makes this very useful (for talking with older generations, at least) distinction:

And a good bit of that, I seem to recall, was back then it was less universal that the attraction of either party was moral positions. There were lots of people in both parties who were motivated by a purely pragmatic sense of public policy, and voted for the party or even the candidate whose policies they thought would be most effective for bringing about changes they thought were personally advantageous. For instance, one might believe a laissez-faire approach to markets was the best thing for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Republicans who advocated a hands-off policy towards the economy; or one might believe that government intervention was better for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Democrats who argued for that. Back when I was a frosh in college, that was actually a really common way young people aligned themselves politically!

As best I can tell that's completely untenable now. It doesn't matter what you think about monetary policy, your choices are the party which believes that extrajudicial killing of peaceable innocent citizens by the police is murder and the party that does not. And, as I explained above, morality overrules other considerations, like which approach to market regulation is most efficacious for prosperity.

The nature of the conflict we are now in is moral. And we need the conceptual tools of morality to even see it clearly, much less have any leverage on it.

The "pragmatics" approach to voting took longer to become untenable in Aus, and now we also have the problem where BOTH major parties hold some morally abhorrent policies because it's a race to the bottom.* And with the relatively lower profile of, eg, extra-judicial police homicide (it happens, it happens primarily to Indigenous people, followed by Middle Eastern and African Australians, but it's less frequent on a sheer numbers level, shifted toward less visible modes - deaths in custody - and simply getting less traction because, on a percentage level, Australia is whiter and more complacent), and the _not quite as bad_ wealth gap, means that it's possible to still be complacent middle class (perhaps especially if, like my parents, you achieved that status over your working life: things went right and are still going right for you) and think of political choices as matters of pragmatics and priorities.

*For that matter, I'm not convinced by Siderea's presentation of the 'extrajudicial murder of innocent citizens by the police: okay or no' as something that one US party firmly opposes and one supports. Are US democratic politicians actually putting forth platforms to end qualified immunity, or is it "fund the police more to take more anti-bias training, and ho and hum?"

Meanwhile, I got back into work with a six-hour binge in Eighteenth Century Collections Online. I give you: one of the odder things I found, a long poem entitled "Bibliotheca, a Poem Occasioned by the Sight of A Modern Library. With Some Very Useful Episodes and Digressions", by Thomas Newcomb:



The text is online here. It isn't very good.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: Greenwald's 'Cleanness', but very much on hiatus.
Non-fiction for personal interest: 'The Body Keeps the Score', also hiatus.
Lit Mag: Nothing right now
Poetry: Ditto. I did very much enjoy the poem My Queer by Emma Rhodes, in Plenitude Magazine, not least because I, too, named a doll after a very beautiful little girl of my acquaintance.
For work: Not nearly enough, but for mixed work-personal reasons I started Jen Manions "Female Husbands: A Trans History". I'm really enjoying it, although Manion's use of "to trans gender" as a verb grates, and I really don't think it was contexualised early enough, or given a strong enough justification when it was addressed.

Recently Finished: For certain values of 'recent'.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I liked this a lot, but I didn't find it as utterly arresting as I had expected - I think because, ultimately, I've been reading in a post-Carter world since my teens.

I was surprised, and delighted, by the DuMaurier-esque feel of the title story. My favourites were probably the weirder ones toward the end - The Erl-King, and the triple sequence of Red Riding Hood-and-or-werewolf tales that come last, of which, the weird sexy 'The Company of Wolves' would be my favourite.

Anne quitte son île by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read this in the RadioCanada Oh!Dio audiolivre version. Loved it, as usual - although LMM sure does over-sell the ease of convincing two tomcats to cohabitate with one another!


Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature by Nicole Nolan Sidhu

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really interesting, and I'm having a productive and challenging time wrestling with the wide difference between her take on the Reeve's Tale and that of other feminist scholars.

Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak by Helen Davies

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This wasn't actually what I was after, research-wise, but had some cool stuff in it anyway, especially an essay by Kate Fox, in the form of a dialogue, on the topic of autistic stand-up comedy.

Anne au Domaine des peupliers by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another really enjoyable audiolivre from Radio Canada. And as usual when re-reading this one as an adult, I'm really uncomfortable with the number of abusive parents who feature in the "humourous" community plots. It's also notable that the abusive mother is agreed to be not a NICE person, whereas Anne ends up concluding that both the abusive fathers are decent chaps after all. :s

Online Fiction:

Megan Arkenberg, In the City of Kites and Crows reprint/podcast at Glittership

Megan Arkenberg, All the King's Monsters, Clarkesworld, with audio.

Megan Arkenberg, Lessons from a clockwork queen, reprint/podcast at Glittership

Sarah Gailey, Tiger Lawyer gets it right, EscapePod

Aimee Ogden, In September, Podcastle

E.P. Tuazon, Barong, The Rumpus. I did not fully understand this but I liked it!

Bryan Washington, Foster, The New Yorker. A good cat story.

Erin Kate Ryan, The Girl Was Already On Fire, VQR.

Kavita Bedford, The Daintree.

Up Next: You know what this section gives me anxiety, let's cut it out entirely. No more 'up next' bits. Henceforth this section shall be...

Recently added to the endless TBR: Tempted to break my nigh-moratorium on both modern-setting romance novels and m/f romance novels for For the Love of April French by Penny Aimes; delighted to find a nerdy travelogue by someone who isn't a white man, namely, Monisha Rajesh's Around the World in 80 Trains.

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Some links!

Susan Misicka, SwissInfo, I hear if it's not running: a profile of Martin Horath, who's worked on the Mt Rigi cogwheel railway for 25 years.

Justin Myers, British GQ, The Friend Zone has more meaning than you think.

Sarah Scire, Nieman Lab, Someone wrong on the internet? Correcting them publicly may make them act like a bigger jerk.

Carissa Harris, Aeon Mag, 800 years of rape culture. Smart public writing from feminist medieval studies.

Emillie Colyer, Meanjin blog, What I'm reading. I liked that she talked about the fragmentary nature of writing as an academic: "Because I’m doing a PhD, I am reading a lot of different things all at once, greedy for the thoughts of others".

Jonathan Parks-Rammage, Electric Lit, 7 queer books with heart-stopping twists

Dianna Anderson, Rewire News, Purity Culture as Rape Culture. Been following Diana for a while now, and finding their takes on evangelical culture very insightful.

Hilary Brenhouse, interview with Elissa Washuta, Guernica, Elissa Washuta: living inside this empire is all that I will ever have

That's by no means everything, but I have a kitten to exorcise. Happy Sunday, folks.

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -

• 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?

  
  

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -

• Peter Hannam and Anna Patty, Docks halt, electrical workers stop as Sydney's pollution worsens. I'm increasingly convinced that we will not get climate action until climate collapse threatens manufacturing and trade, and... we seem to be getting close to that point.
  
• 10Daily, 'I can't help my size': Jason Derulo says Instagram is discriminating against his huge bulge.
  
• Alexandra Smith (SMH), 'Powder keg of testosterone and alcohol: health workers want longer tram hours. I noticed while in Sydney that the 423 bus, at least, is now a 24 hour service.
  
• SBS news, Fears for drinking water as ash turns Sydney's beaches black. This was over a week ago; the drinking water seems to be holding up - depleting, as predicted, but not yet black.
  
• Linda Morris (SMH), Anti-war artworks removed in censorship row. The artworks, by Sydney artist Abdul Abdullah, are in a travelling exhibition, and have aroused the ire of conservative politicians, especially as they were to be shown on Remembrance Day.
  

Good News:

• PinkNews, German bishops declare that homosexuality is completely and utterly normal. Not good news because we should give two hoots what bishops think, but it speaks to a potential threat to the united Catholic front on this.
  

Longer political and/or climate science pieces

• Zeynep Tufekci (The Atlantic, November), The Hong Kong protestors aren't driven by hope:
  

  The two women weren’t sure whether they would win. That’s also something I’ve heard often—these protesters aren’t the most optimistic group. No rose-colored glasses here. “But we cannot give up,” one insisted, “because if we do, there will be no future for us anyway. We might as well go down fighting.”

  
  
• ABC health and wellbeing, How to manage bushfire smoke haze health risks.
  

Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other

• Captain Awkward aka Jennifer Peepas (Vice.com), How to survive going home for the holidays.
  
• Michael Waters (Slate.com), Life in a four-mom family. Subheading: "The 1970s saw a blossoming of alternative queer households. But how did those experiments work out for the children they raised?" (Answer: yes. Remarkably well.)
  
• Alexia Arthurs, interview with Carolina de Robertis (Electric Lit) Queer pleasure is a form of resistance:
  

  CdR: What I knew was that I wanted to write a book about liberation: what it means, what it costs us, why we need it, how we carve it from the world, how we get there. And perhaps this will sound radical, but I don’t think we’ll ever reach liberation—as women, or as queer people—without affirming our true erotic selves, or our right to joy. James Baldwin knew this; in Another Country, the most undersung masterpiece of the 20th century, he takes us deep into the connections between pleasure and agency, desire and survival. Audre Lorde knew it too, lying it out in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” I’m so glad you saw pleasure as a form of resistance in this book—along with all the other forms of resistance the women pursue.

  
  
• Oliver Reeson (Lifted Brow, transcript of MWF 2019 Brow Talk), Masculinity Crisis: how it feels when you start to look like them. UGH this was amazing.
  

  I was interested in violence as part of masculine identity and so I read the book I mentioned earlier, Amateur by Thomas Page McBee. McBee is a journalist and a transman. The narrative starts when one night McBee is accosted by a man who is trying to pick a fight. McBee notices in himself his own aggression in response, his own fists clenching, his readiness to fight. This impulse confuses him, McBee himself was physically abused as a child by his stepfather. He considers himself a feminist. He doesn’t understand where this drive is coming from. In America, there is an established ‘tradition’ of charity boxing matches. Amateur boxers get in the ring for three rounds to raise money. McBee decides to train for one of these matches and pitches the accompanying story to his editors. He undergoes an immersive research experience. He works with a professional coach and ends up fighting someone way out of his weight class in front of a packed audience in Madison Square Garden. Through his relationship to his coaches, to his sparring partners (both male and female) and to the other men he encounters in change rooms, McBee investigates this male impulse for violence.
  To reap the rewards of masculinity you have to pass as cis. I am not approaching masculinity from the same history as a cis man but if I ever have an appearance that passes as cis male, I will be afforded privilege and I never want to be someone who denies that privilege or manipulates it. However, this privilege is different from cis male privilege even if it comes from being seen as a cis male. This privilege relies on your capacity to pass and the knowledge that one is passing is often hand in hand with the knowledge that if you ever slip up the threat of violence worsens. Because you’ve been ‘deceitful’.
  In the gym, McBee becomes a different sort of person as he passes.

  
  
• Mistress Snow (Chronicle of Higher Education), I told my mentor I was a dominatrix: she rescinded her letters of recommendation. This was briefly out from behind the paywall, and boy, was it a read. You can find the author on Twitter as MistressSnowPhD
  
• Eloise Grills (Victorian Writers Trust), If you want my burn out and you think I'm sexy, come on sugar wear me out.
  

  Is there a grant I can get for working so hard, for being so willing to spray personal secrets like aesthetic vomit? My limbs feel like tightly coiled snakes. My brain is soggy spaghetti. The light jumps out of the sun and pours down like tequila sunrise, bounces off my skin like bouncy balls… no. I cannot write anything without imagining an audience. Hello…you. How many times can I write about myself before it gets old and ugly? How many times will I throw myself off the end of the pier before I will learn to swim? Just kidding, I’m swimming right now. Just kidding, I’m writing this.
  Hello, you. Tell me I’m a good girl. Now: mean it.

  
  
• Oliver Mol (Sydney Review of Books), Train Lord. This is beautiful, and a must-read if you love: a. trains b. evocative personal essays about mental health and other issues or c. writing with a strong sense of place.
  

  Sometimes it felt like Sydney was a microcosm of the world, and the world was falling apart. One night, around 2am, I was on break getting a kebab when this guy walked in asking for scissors. Got any scissors? Need to get this thing out of my ear. Then he showed me his ear – there was a headphone jack pushed all the way in. It was like one side of him had sealed up, and I thought he looked like a doll. Stupid headphone jack, he kept saying. Then he grabbed a plastic fork someone had left on the counter and tried to fork the headphone jack out, but it wouldn’t come. Eventually he turned to me and asked me what I reckoned. I reckon you should go to hospital, I said. Yeah, hospital, he said. Naa. Maccas will have scissors. Then he threw the fork back on the container and walked away.
  I didn’t have many friends at work, and this suited me fine. I wasn’t there to make friends – I was there to go around and around for as long as I needed to figure out my problems, and to work out if it might be possible to love myself again.

  
  
• Jane Ratcliffe, interview with Lilly Dancyger (Guernica Mag), Lilly Dancyger: there are so many different ways to be angry. Dancyger has edited a collection on women's anger.
  
• Graham Oliver, interview with Robert Gipe (Guernica Mag), A cure for despair: on writing the Appallachian south.
  

I have, as usual, many more links. Will try to catch up before the end of the year, and then change my style - posting ALL the interesting things has been Too Much.

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Laurel Walmsley (NPR), Utah Woman charged with lewdness after being topless in her own home. There's... a lot going on here.
  
• 7News, Hero doctor sucks passenger's urine for 37 minutes in incredible mid-flight rescue. That. That certainly is a thing that happened.
  
• Peter Hannam (SMH), Climate Change Fund bankrools Warragamba dam wall raising, 'an outlay critics say is unrelated to the fund's original purpose.' Also not good for the black-throated finch.
  

Good News:

• David Copithorne (HearingTracker), Clear window surgical masks are a lifesaver for patients with hearing loss
  

Longer political and/or climate science

• Russell Marks (Saturday Paper), George Pell's appeal to the High Court:
  

  But this is not how the criminal law is supposed to work. The High Court has said as much for 25 years. It has consistently overturned state appeal courts that have confirmed original guilty verdicts at trial, in cases where the state appeal courts have engaged in reasoning inconsistent with the High Court’s approach since a case it decided in 1994, M v The Queen. What’s surprising is how often state appeal courts depart from this approach.

  
  Marks goes on to explain that the HC has set out the 'M Test' that should be applied in state appeals; few state appeals (Pell included) have done so. The case law precedent thus would look to be on Pell's side; if the HC upholds the Victorian verdict it effectively overturns M, which would make it easier to prosecute historical cases, but may have other consequences.
  

Longer historical, cultural, scientific, misc

• Francine Russon (Spectrum News, 2018), The costs of camoflauging autism.
  
• Angel Wilson (The Geekiary, Sept 2019), The psychology of fandom hyperfixation.
  
• Mia Sato (The Verge), Dial up!: How Hmong Americans turned a conference call into a radio of their own. This is fascinating, do recommend.
  

  When Lori Kido Lopez, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Asian American media, first moved to Wisconsin, she began researching Hmong media consumption and production. She first observed that though towns with larger Hmong populations might have a community newspaper or the rare community radio segment, it was difficult for Hmong people to find robust and consistent media about their community. She was missing what she would later find to be the most popular form of mass media for the Hmong.
  “[The Hmong I talked to were] just like, ‘Oh, you know, it’s Hmong radio or the cellphone show.’ Wherever the name they have for it,” Lopez says. “And you’re like, ‘No, there is no name for it. That’s how rare it is.’”

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -

• Emmett Stinson (Conversation AU), The open-access shift at UWA publishing is an experiment doomed to fail. In particular, while it may boost access to academic research, it is a death knell for the publisher's literary and cultural arm.
  
• Gina Rushton and Hannah Ryan (Buzzfeed AU), The identities of rape and assautl survivors were accidentally revealed in #MeToo documentary. The details will be blurred before final release on the ABC, but as the info was in screenshots of emails to Tracy Spicer, who was collecting stories from the media industry, well. Revelations in an advance release to the media are, in fact, A Problem.
  
• Anne Davies (Guardian AU), NSW public servants at climate conference told not to discuss link with bushfires. Thisisfine.gif.
  
• Mark Humphries-Jenner (Conversation AU), Why Australia's first securities class action judgement sort of cleared myer. The court ruled that Myer HAD lied to shareholders/the share market generally, but not that this had harmed anyone, because it found no one had really believed them anyway.
  
• Janet Stanley (Conversation AU), Mr Morrison, I lost my home to bushfire. Your thoughts and prayers are not enough.
  
• Naaman Zhou (Guardian AU), Former Australian Fire Chiefs say Coalition ignored their advice because of climate change policy.
  
• Ben Doherty (Guardian AU), Behrouz Boochani, voice of Manus refugees, is free in New Zealand. Details on how he got from PNG to Christchurch (where he is appearing in a literary festival) are necessarily vague. He has a one-month visa for NZ, but does not intend to stay. He hopes to take up resettlement in the US, but that deal may have fallen apart when he departed PNG.
  
• Ben Doherty (Guardian AU), Behrouz Boochani, bruised but not beaten by Manus, says simply: "I did my best."
  
• Reuters via Guardian AU, Sweden's central bank dumps Australian bonds over high emissions. Some Canadian bonds are likewise gone.
  
• Emily Alford (Jezebel), The straw man of the teenage girl:
  

  The idea that the decision not to include a single YA novel on a single booklist is automatically the work of the patriarchy creates a straw man of the teenage girl, oppressed by college coursework that is not interested in her experiences or her feelings. This teenage girl, regularly conjured up in the name of fighting sexism, is failed by an elitist literary world that denies her the only books she cares to read—young adult novels with characters who look and think like her. But what happens when the teenage girl does not enjoy books that authors insist are written for them? Does that girl’s or young woman’s opinion matter less? Dessen’s book did not give Nelson pleasure. Perhaps Nelson was dismissive in saying the book was written for teenage girls, but the book was, in fact, written for teenage girls. One woman, still in her early twenties, wanting the books included on a college booklist to be written at the college level does not warrant a two-day public shaming by some of the highest-paid authors in the industry whose criticisms are emulated and amplified by hundreds of thousands of fans.

  
  I am somewhat baffled at the whole Discourse. It seems to me to be simultaneously possible that Nelson's motivation in joining the Common Read selection committee (specifically to agitate against Dessen's works) and her words to the press were dismissive, insulting, and the product of internalised misogyny, *and* that a handful of well-paid authors and their fans are blowing it out of proportion and flexing their popularity muscles, *and* that it's deeply Typical that this blowup has turned into 'Sarah Dessen deserves to be on/a candidate for the Common Read' in a year that a black man's book on contemporary court justice was selected.
  

Good News:

• ACLU news release, Federal court rules suspicionless searches of traveller's phones and laptops unconstitutional. That's US Federal, btw.
  
• Matthew Weaver (Guardian UK), UK government loses supreme court fight over bedroom tax. "Judgment will restore full housing benefit to at least 155 partners of disabled people."
  
• Danielle Paquette (WaPo), Why a tiny African country is taking the Rohingya's case to the world court. Gambia has lodged a case with the International Court of Justice against Myanmar. Abubacarr M. Tambadou, Gambia's AG and justice minister, has the support of Gambians for the move, because they feel a strong sense of responsibility as part of their recovery from an autocratic regime. The case is funded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and backed by US law firm Foley Hoag.
  

Longer political and/or climate science pieces

• Peter Goss (Conversation AU), Reading progress is falling between years 5 and 7, especially for advantaged students. It seems like, while up until y 5 schools have an incentive to push their higher-achieving students to continual progress (to raise the school's NAPLAN average), once they have completed the last NAPLAN test at that school, those who achieved above the benchmark (especially if their school is a well-off and advantaged one) are not the focus of continued personalised improvement work. To which I, a high achieving reader as a child, say: is anyone SURPRISED?
  
• Kate Doyle (ABC weather), Fire weather: cold front drags in hot, blustery air and sudden dangerous wind changes. This is no longer current affairs (Tuesday did not go so catastrophically as initially predicted), but it is a good explanation of why cool changes are not always good in fire weather.
  
• Emily Atkin (Heated, personal newsletter), Trump's EPA says air pollution can't kill you. And Australian pollies say climate change isn't contributing to bushfires. *headdesks forever*
  
• James Furland and David Bowman (Conversation AU, October 2017), To fight the fires of the future, we need to look beyond prescribed burning.
  

  Yet our research, published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, modelled thousands of fires in Tasmania and found that nearly a third of the state would have to be burned to effectively lower the risk of bushfires.
  The question of how much to burn and where is a puzzle we must solve, especially given the inherent risk, issues caused by smoke smoke and shrinking weather windows for safe burning due to climate change.

  
  
• Teague, Culnane and Rubenstein (Pursuit, by U. Melb), The simple process of re-identifying patients in public health records:
  

  The first step is examining a patient’s uniqueness according to medical procedures such as childbirth. Some individuals are unique given public information, and many patients are unique given a few basic facts, such as year of birth or the date a baby was delivered.
  We found unique records matching online public information about seven prominent Australians, including three (former or current) MPs and an AFL footballer.

  
  

Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other

• Michael Janda (ABC news), Is hard work enough to lift anyone out of poverty? This question divides the nation. This draws from the Australia Talks survey, which is... hmmm... let's say, a fascinating set of data on how many people in Australia believe wrong things.
  
• Anglia Ruskin University news release (EurekaAlert), Autistic adults thought they were 'bad people'. This study is believed to be the first looking at *middle-age* diagnosis (most studies of adult diagnosis look at people in their 20s).
  
• Douglas Brown (Conversation AU, February 2019), How a bushfire can destroy a home. Good breakdown of the vulnerable points of contemporary home design.
  
• Alex Mayyasi (Atlas Obscura), The oddly autocratic roots of pad Thai:
  

  As World War II approached, Thailand was in a precarious position. For years, the country’s leaders had clutched their independence closely, worried about the French and English, who had colonized neighboring Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. Now, Japan was expanding imperially into East Asia, having invaded China in 1937.
  In response, Plaek Phibunsongkhram’s government took action. As part of a national campaign called “Noodle is Your Lunch,” the Public Welfare Department gave Thais free noodle carts and distributed recipes for a new national dish: pad Thai.
  At the time, the dish was little known, and no one called it “pad Thai.” In rice-centric Thailand, then known as Siam, the dish seemed more Chinese—similar noodle dishes likely arrived in Thailand centuries earlier with Chinese traders. But Thailand’s prime minister, who first rose to power as part of a military coup against the longtime monarchy, had spoken. As part of his strident nationalism, he wanted all Thais to eat pad Thai.
  A noodle project may seem trivial in the context of world war. But Phibunsongkhram, better known as Phibun or Pibul in the West, thought it was the very seriousness of the situation that demanded this response.

  
  
• Rachel Charlene Lewis (Bitch Media), What happens to queer people who don't have a chosen family?. I particularly liked the quote from Leah, a 63 year old lesbian who left the Hasidic community as an adult:
  

  I left with such a communal sense of myself that my “I” was almost a “we.” I felt gloriously free to choose my own community and assumed having one was essential. I never found that community. I’ve assembled a network of friends, and I stumble [upon] a lesbian from time to time, but I’ve found little or no sense of LGBTQ community. I left [the Hasidic community] 15 years ago. At first, the loneliness was astounding, as if without a community I wasn’t quite sure who I was. But over time, I learned how to be alone and came to treasure—even love—being alone. I learned to assume I was usually going to be the different one in the crowd. I carry that differentness quite happily; it’s a pride.

  
  
• Andrew Whitehouse (Conversation AU, October 2018), New autism guidelines aim to improve diagnostics and access to services. On an attempt to standardise diagnostic practices across Australia. Doesn't actually say WHAT the changes are.\
  
• Andrew Whitehouse (Conversation AU), It's 25 years since we redefined autism: here's what we've learned. Apparently it wasn't until DSM IV that autism was defined as something other than an exclusively childhood disorder, and recognised as occurring in some people without significant language delay or intellectual impairment. That's 1994. That explains a *lot*.
  
• Anglia Ruskin University press release (Medical Express), People with autism have an altered sense of self. I was particularly fascinated by the fact that autistic study subjects did not experience the "full body illusion", wherein neurotypical subjects using a VR headset identify fully with their virtual avatar. ""The findings of our study show that the 'bodily' self is less flexible in people with autism and their brains may combine sensory information about their bodies in a different way." I would be interested to know how that meshes with poor prorioception, though.
  
• Gouri Sharma (AlJazeera), How did the fall of the Berlin wall impact Germans of colour?
  

  But for Aikins, a German Ghanaian, and other people of colour living in the country, the reality of reunification was different.
  "The patriotism that followed reunification centred around Germany being one again, but unfortunately, what surfaced soon after that was a seriously racist dynamic," Aikins said.
  "There was a surge in far-right youth movements and activism, which led to an increase in outwardly and aggressively racist violence. Slogans like 'Wir sind ein Volk' (We are one people) and 'Wir sind das Volk' (we are the people') which had been used in the peaceful revolution and reunification movement were now appropriated by the far right.
  "Nazi ideas of the German Volk as a project of homogeneity and superiority were evoked. Such talk was laced with threats of racist violence.
  "We were witnessing this and I began to question what this meant for the country I was born in."

  
  
• Mimi Lok (Electric Lit), 10 intimate stories about love and loss. I added some to my to-read list.
  

For once, I have caught up with all my links.

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Caroline Kitchener (The Lily), Who is Jenny B?:
  

  For the last week, women across America have been receiving almost identical versions of this card. Many women had the same experience that I did. Instead of going to their current address, the card was delivered to the house where they grew up, a false-alarm for one of life’s most emotional declarations: Mom, Dad, I’m going to have a baby.

  
  In other news, capitalism is terrible.
  
• David Crouch (Guardian), Post-term pregnancy research cancelled after six babies die. The Swedish research on post-term babies aimed to compare the health outcomes of pregnancies either induced at the beginning of week 42, or allowed to continue for a further week (unless it occurred spontaneously). After six babies in the second group died (the article says infants, but does not specify whether they died before or after birth), the researchers considered it unethical to continue the trial.
  
• Allie Conti (Vice.com), I accidentally discovered a nationwide scam on AirBnB.
  

Good News:

• Dan Collyns (Guardian), Student in Peru makes history by writing thesis in Inca language. Roxana Quispe wrote and defended her thesis on Quechua poetry, in Quechua.
  
• UK Govt reports that sales of vetinary antibiotics halved in the past four years. Pre-emptive dosing of herd beasts is believed to be a major factor in antibiotic resistance, so, good news here.
  
• Francesca Valdinoci (SBS), After almost 30 years in italy, a bottle of sand from Uluru returns home. The former tourist entrusted the souvenir to a friend currently travelling to Australia. The friend had the sand inspected and sifted at border control, before taking it on to Uluru.
  

Longer political and/or environmental affairs pieces

• Henry Kha (Conversation AU), The family court does need to reform, but not the way Pauline Hanson thinks:
  

  Contemporary family disputes that end up in court often involve child abuse, family violence, drug and alcohol issues and mental health problems. An effective family justice system requires information sharing and a coherent response.
  But family violence orders and child welfare are exclusively managed by the states and territories. This means the Family Court has limited investigative powers to follow up allegations of family violence and child abuse.
  One of the major recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission is to abolish the federal-based Family Court in favour of creating separate family courts in each state and territory. There’s only one state-based family court in Australia, in Western Australia.

  
  
• Sara Kaine and Emmanuel Josserand (Conversation AU), Working conditions in aged care homes are awful, largely because the work is done by women.
  
• Peter Kalmus, How to live with the climate crisis without becoming a nihilist.
  
• Cairns et al (Conversation AU), Dingoes found in New South Wales but we're killing them as wild dogs. "We performed DNA ancestry testing, much like the ancestry tests available to people, on 783 wild canines killed as part of pest control measures in NSW. Roughly one in four of the animals we tested were pure dingoes, and most were genetically more than three-quarters dingo. Only 5 of the 783 animals we tested turned out to be feral domestic dogs with no dingo ancestry."
  
• Claire G Coleman (Meanjin blog), They want me dead whether I fight them or not. On white supremacism in Australia.
  

Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other

• BBC Science, People more likely to feel pain on humid days. Featuring this years winner of 'best study name': 'Cloudy with a Chance of Pain'. This resolves the conflict between folk wisdom (arthritis > rain / cold) and the pattern a physiotherapist friend of mum's was remarking on, where many patients suffer worse in summer. Logically, since Australia is humid in summer.
  
• Celeste Liddle (Eureka Street), Going carless is still a privilege in Australia:
  

  When you look just at the rail networks elsewhere it becomes apparent why. Not only is every Australian city planned around a CBD with all lines going into and out of it and almost nothing going around it, but the sheer size of our cities shows that they were built purely for cars. Not having a car, rather than being a sign of poverty, is actually a sign of privilege in Melbourne. I live near enough to the CBD to have multiple modes of public transport at my doorstep and the existing routes suit where I mostly need to go.
  Many in the Melbourne mortgage belt simply do not have that option. There are suburbs with no trains, inadequate station parking and irregular bus services. With the sheer size of our Australian urban sprawls, it is unlikely the situation will change for these people any time soon. The situation is even worse in the country.

  
  
• Kassandra Vee (The New Inquiry), Work Sucks:
  

  But many of our comrades who are significantly less confused about history still have a bad case of activism-ism. They will tell you, their voice backed by the sounding of trumpets and the singing of angels, that revolution means “doing The Work.” Like good Calvinists, they know the real revolutionaries are the ones seen working hardest at it, the ones raising more money, getting more signatures, winning more votes, taking more arrests, getting more retweets, selling more papers, organizing more demos, breaking more windows, sitting through more meetings, etc. etc. etc. Though more common among nonprofit types, activism-ism (or its sullen asshole cousin, militantism) is not limited to any particular political tendency. Bad news for those comrades too, however: The revolution will not be a job fair. No one is gonna check your CV.

  
  
• Laura Turner (Buzzfeed), I started vomiting while I was pregnant. Two years later, I'm still sick. On anxiety and physical symptoms.
  
• Robyn J Whittacker (Conversation AU), Hell no, halloween is not Satanic: it's an important way to think about death. I prefer Copperbadge's reading of Halloween as an inversion festival, but the two factors I think are related.
  
• Peter Newman (Create Digital, March 2019), Are trackless trams here to solve our light rail problems. Found this while googling to find out what a trackless tram is (a very long trolleybus that uses... lasers, I think, to run on painted lines instead of a track, but has stations like tram stops rather than bus stops). Has some good comments on the urban planning / density benefits of trams over buses.
  
• Emily James (Guernica), The space between us. "My daughter was five days old when I realized the love I had for her would fall short."
  
• Keri Phillips (ABC Radio National), Asylums to antidepressants: a short history of mental illness in the West.
  
• Claire Lindsay (ABC Coffs Coast, June 2019), Narina Carter's rare disease causes her disability, but NDIS says no to funding.
  

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -

• Sam Jordison (TLS), What happened?. Still on the Booker Prize debacle.
  

  That Wednesday, Afua Hirsch wrote in the Guardian that she was “proud” of the way that the judges had reached their decision. She also gave an astonishing insight into how they did it. “How do you judge the titanic career, the contribution to culture of Margaret Atwood, against the sheer beauty of Elif Shafak’s Istanbul?” she wrote. As Ron Charles from the Washington Post responded: you don’t. “You had one job”, he tweeted, “and that’s not it.” The rules state that the prize is about individual books, not a career. “How do you pit the phenomenon of Salman Rushdie against the quality and consistency of Bernardine Evaristo, who was in my view hitherto hugely underrated?” Hirsch went on. What did Evaristo’s “consistency” and the feeling that she had been underrated have to do with her current novel?
  It’s one thing to feel bad about losing. It’s another to feel you were never in the game. I’ve seen Elly cry four times in twenty years. One of them was when she read that article. This prize had taken over our lives. We had put everything into it. And now, it seemed that we had not had a hope from the start.

  
  
• M. Lynx Qualey (Book Riot), Literary prizes should not have co-winners. 'Wood said, of the 2019 judges: “They have actively broken the rules. It’s not that we accommodated the jury, it’s that the jury actively chose to reject the rules. They effectively staged a sit-in in the judging room.”'
  
• The Sydney Anglican diocese has been wearing its ass as a hat again. I didn't save the link to the reports of the archbishop asking queer allies to 'leave the church', but here's some similar stinking nonsense: 'Our legal advice is actually to quote the bible': Anglicans introduce new trans policy to avoid discrimination claims.
  
• David Batty (Guardian UK), University racism study criticised for including anti-white harrassment. I'm concerned by the EHRC commentator groups anti-semitism, anti-Traveller/anti-Roma prejudice, and anti-English sentiment together. One of those things is not like the others??
  
• Peter Nickeas (Chicago Tribune), 9 year old boy appears on murder charges for house fire. Aside from the wtf of charging a nine year old, I'm confused about why this is a *murder* charge. Does Illinois not have manslaughter offences???
  
• Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian (Foreign Policy), Abominable highlights hollywood's China problem: neighbouring countries are boycotting the film over a map shown that affirms China's disputed claim to the South China Sea.
  

Good News:

• Josh Halliday (Guardian UK), Manchester museum to return artefacts to indigenous Australians.
  

Longer political and/or climate science pieces

• Sarah Emmerson (Vice Motherboard), How Facebook bought a police force.
  
• Julia Quilter and Russel Hogg (Conversation AU), Over the top policing of bike helmet laws targets vulnerable riders.
  

Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other

• Annabel Crabb (ABC), What Makes an Australian? It's not what you think:
  

  The Australian story is a loud and unruly one, full of individuals who looked at the world around them, and decided to break the rules.
  Which it's why it's so surprising that when asked to nominate the key element of what it means to be Australian, the most widely agreed-upon response was this: "Respecting our institutions and laws".
  Forget larrikins. To be Australian — according to the recipe written by more than 50,000 respondents to the Australia Talks National Survey — the big thing is to follow the rules of the place.

  
  I mean, as a queer person, or just as someone who's been awake in the 21st century, this does not surprise me at all.
  
• Two things I didn't fully understand, on x-chromosome inactivation:
  
  • Ballaton, Cotton, and Brown, 'Derivation of consensus inactivation status for X-linked genes from genome-wide studies', Biology of Sex Differences 6:35 (2015) doi:10.1186/s13293-015-0053-7.
    
  • Abstract of Lyon, MF, 'X-Chromosome Inactivation and Human Genetic Disease', Acta Pediactra. Suppl. 2002.
  
  
• Rose Stokes (Refinery 29), I got pregnant after taking the morning after pill. (TL;DR, as well as weight related inefficiencies, neither morning after pill works if you've already ovulated. The only reliable option if you've already ovulated but cannot yet confirm pregnancy is a copper IUD.)
  
• Tracey Sernack-Chee Quee (The Conversation AU), Step Into Paradise review: from koala jumpers to the Sydney Olympics, Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson defined Australian fashion.
  
• Rebecca Morrison (AHRC blog. 2018), Eighteenth-century fast fasion: how the quick tricks of the mantua maker made sustainable gowns.
  
• Sue Davenport and Peter Johnson, obituary for Yuwali (SMH), Western desert woman told of first contact with europeans: Yuwali's family were 'cleared out' from the area near Woomera prior to the Blue Streak rocket tests in 1964. They had never encountered white people before that point.
  
• Callie Little (Conversation AU), Don't blame the teacher: student results are mostly out of their hands. Used twin studies methods to determine that other factors (family, school environment, class, etc) had bigger effect on student performance than individual teachers. Notes that while everyone remembers a particularly good teacher they had, it's unlikely such a teacher was transformatively good for *everyone*.
  
• John Wertheim (CBS), Rare Christopher Columbus letters stolen from libraries around the world, and replaced with fakes. The letters are early printed copies of the letter, which was translated into Latin for circulation. The fakes all have identical smudge marks.
  

Managed neither this post nor a health update yesterday, on account of... well, health. Teeth, mostly.

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Nick Baker (SBS news), Kurdish refugee Behrouz Boochani warns of genocide in northern Syria.
  
• Sam Leith (UnHerd), The booker judges had one job. More than just these two books, the situation flouts an explicit ruling and opens up for further shenanigans down the line.
  

Good News:

• Chapatte cartoon celebrates Vague verte en politique Suisse.
  
• SwissInfo.ch, Landslide Greens gain tips Parliament to the left. It's not a complete about-face: the centre-right UDC/SVP still hold the largest number of seats per party (no one has an outright majority), while the green vote is split between two Green parties whose capacity to work together is not fully tested. But the numbers are such that there could be a case for ONE of those parties (with the support of the other) to put forward a candidate to the Executive Council.
  

Longer political and/or climate science

• Emma Kathryn White (Guardian AU), We can't drought-proof Australia, and trying is a fool's errand.
  
• Amy Remeikis (Guardian AU), Religious discrimination bill would create barrier's to women's healthcare, advocates warn.
  
• Kevin Blowe (copwatcher, Medium blog), It's not just a bunch of flowers: "This is why for me, supporting Extinction Rebellion in a spirit of cooperation and friendship over the first week of its protests has, at times, been extraordinarily difficult — particularly due to its invariably tin-eared insensibility about the nature of policing and the state."
  
• Jeff Sparrow (New Matilda), Anti-Vietnam War protests also outraged politicians, conservatives and media. Offers historical comparisons and perspectives to contextualise XR protests and reactions to them in Australia.
  

Historical, cultural, scientific, misc

• Cat Pausé (The Conversation), Changing the terminology to 'people with obesity' won't reduce stigma and may in fact worsen it.
  
• Indiana Seresin (The New Inquiry), On heteropessimism:
  

  “Heterosexuality is a prison!” a chorus declared, vocalizing one of heteropessimism’s central maxims. Many of those who seized the opportunity to mock Straight Pride and its appropriately drab flag were, unsurprisingly, queer, yet a sizable number of straight people could also be found in the fray. A quick Twitter search of the phrase “heterosexuality is a prison” reveals that it is attached just as often to complaints made from within heterosexual experience as to queers thanking their lucky stars they were born gay.
  Confronted by Straight Pride, many are keen to emphasize that they are not that kind of heterosexual, that they are, in fact, ashamed of being straight, and that, not to be dramatic, they see heterosexuality as a prison within which they are confined against their will. (The prevalence of the prison metaphor could be taken as a reassuring indication of abolitionism going mainstream or a worrying reminder of how easily incarceration is still trivialized in the popular imagination.) Their disavowals are akin to white people making jokes about “stuff white people like,” a connection that makes sense given the sinister intimacy between Straight Pride and white-supremacist organizing. Yet while trying to redeem oneself from whiteness or heterosexuality through performative distancing mechanisms might seem progressive, the reality is usually little more than an abdication of responsibility. If heteropessimism’s purpose is personal absolution, it cannot also be justice.

  
  As a bi woman with a growing (?) preference for women, I... have a lot of feels about this. I sure am pessimistic about dating (straight?) men, but I take that as a sign that, well, I shouldn't... do that then? I am both sympathetic to and alienated by Straight Women Complaining About Heterosexual Life. (And likewise by many spiels about how their *particular* marriage is different.)
  
• Josefin Waltin (personal blog), Flax retting. Now I know how flax is processed.
  
• Jude Rogers and Ammar Kalia (Guardian UK), Grassroots music: the rebirth of political folk. Grace Petrie's wish is granted and the Guardian believes that she exists.
  
• Gastro Obscura, Moose cheese at the Elk House. Where to eat moose/elk cheese: Sweden.
  
• Minda Honey (LitHub), Finding the freedom to rage against our fathers.
  
• Cynthia Graller, (Electric Lit), Literary lists are records of female desire:
  

  Are women’s literary lists intrinsically different from men’s? It’s tempting to see them as a part of a larger effort by female authors over the centuries to claim agency through fragments like diary entries or letters. Unlike a collection, which subsumes parts in a whole, a list yearns with each entry, honoring its disparate items. In the case of many female lit listers, their catalogs desire to transform both author and readers through that longing.

  
  
• Katie Simon (The Lily), The sexual abuse I experienced as a young girl was overlooked. After 20 years, I found a story that speaks to me.
  

I am having a Time with routines right now. If the disintegration of my extracurricular habits corresponded to getting more work done, it'd be one thing, but... it doesn't.

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Lizzie Dearden (The Independent, 30 Sept), Twitter's 'head of editorial' for the Middle East is officer in the British Army's Information Warfare Unit.
  
• Sally Whyte (Canberra Times), Salvos manager bullied queer volunteer, group alleges.
  
• Hidden Europe, Lyria ruffles Swiss feathers by ending the Jura route from Paris, and the Geneva-Marseille route.
  
• Noel Towell (The Age), 'Sinful and dirty': fears for women under new religious freedom laws.
  

Good News:

• ABC news, Copenhagen opens artificial ski slope on top of waste incinerator. The incinerator produces energy from waste combustion.
  

Longer political and/or climate science

• McKenzie Funk (NYT), How ICE picks its targets in the Surveillance Age. Chilling.
  
• Jordan Weissman (Slate Moneybox), $20k health insurance is the new normal. Americans are getting ripped off.. And people WANT to Americanise the Australian system, or the NHS. The illogic.
  
• Rick Morton (Saturday Paper), Exclusive: aged care sector at risk of collapse.
  

  The $320 million was the minimum amount needed to prevent some of the biggest aged-care companies in the country from defaulting on their loan covenants or facing a hike in their borrowing costs.
  The government was particularly worried about private multinational Bupa, which currently faces sanctions or serious risk notices over a third of its 72 facilities around the country. Liquidity was also an issue for Japara, Estia and Regis, the three aged-care giants listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.

  
  

Longer historical, cultural, scientific, misc

• Lynne Buckler Walsh (Now and Then blog, June 2013), Florence Mary Taylor, architect. Didn't design Regent Street Station, was a pretty cool person.
  
• Richard Smyth with Mark Cocker (History Extra, May 2018), The fight for the right to ramble. More on the Kinder Scout trespass
  
• Michelle Boorstein (WaPo), During the Jewish high holidazs there's a growing awareness that not all US Jews are white.
  
• Caroline Kitchener, interview with Sarah Hill (The Lily), What does the astonishing lack of birth control research mean for our bodies?
  
• Amrhein, Greenland and McShane, with signatories (Nature.com), Scientists rise up against statistical significance. I don't know enough about stats to know if their proposed alternatives are sound, but I recognise some of the key problems (my stint in compensation policy for the govt was an eye-opener for statistical significance).
  
• Jayshri Kulkarni (Conversation AU Curious Kids), Why does my older sister not want to play lego with me anymore and stays in her room? This is just an excellent example of sensible balanced advice.
  
• Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Meanjin blog), The Paradox of Dependence:
  

  The paradox of dependence is that men tell us in big and small ways that they cannot bear the thought of us depending on them, so we perform non-dependence because it is the only way we can hold on to our human need for connection. For women, this performance is a prerequisite for love. And because we are human, and because we have needs, we need love just like everybody else does.
  I use the phrase ‘non-dependence’ here because I need to make desperately clear that we are not talking about independence, not really. ‘Independence’ is the wrong word for this evasive quality we are taught to chase. It is not independence at all because true independence is inward-looking and self-defining. What is being asked of us here is wholly dreamt up by others.
  Performing non-dependence is not about us at all, but rather about reading him carefully enough to know exactly what kind of un-needy-ness he—ironically—needs.

  
  I'm still waiting for a decent queer essay in this genre, but as far as Straight Women Writing About Dating Men goes this is a pretty good one.
  
• Leah Schnelbach (Electric Lit), 11 books to read if you miss being a horrible goose. I regret to report that I enjoy the Cultural Phenomenon of the Horrible Goose more than I enjoy actually playing Horrible Goose, but boy do I enjoy the Cultural Phenomenon.
  

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -

• BBC news, Adopted Romanian orphans still suffering in adulthood. Talks about how many UK adoptees of the 90s who came from Romania experience adult mental health problems - but not all, and why that might be.
  
• Peter Hannam (SHM), 'Barbaric': Adani's giant coal mine granted unlimited water license for 60 years
  
• Kathleen Ferguson (ABC Central West), Trains deliver water to drought-affected NSW coal mines. To the mines, not the towns, you'll note.
  
• Wickham and Al-Othman (Buzzfeed UK), Female MPs accuse Boris Johnson of putting their lives in danger.
  
• CBC, April 2019, Autumn Pelitier named chief water commissioner by the Anishinabek Nation. This came up as a result of some twitter threads about indigenous teen climate activists who don't get the kind of coverage Greta Thunberg does.
  
• Lara Webster (ABC NSW Country Hour), Trial Indian mustard seed crop defying drought in NSW.
  
• Amelia Hill (Guardian UK), Supreme court litigant advised to buy stab vest after death threats. That's Joylon Maugham QC, one of the co-litigants in the Scottish case.
  
• BBC, Microplastics: premium teabags leak billions of particles.
  

Amusements:

• Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Shatner Chatner), I am the horrible goose that lives in the town.
  

  Where is the boy for me to disrespect? I am his least friend. I see his games an I contempt them. I ruin his life! Glasses for him? No! Shoelaces for him? No! I make every escape. I am the pest of his whole awful body but my body is so smooth and good. My body works. My body is the softest triangle with a hose attached, strong and useful and all the way sweetheart. You need everything but I have it. I put my honk in a jar so there is more honk! I honk at you, I honk directly up to God, and I will never leave!

  
  

Longer political and/or climate science pieces

• Karen Middleton (Saturday Paper), The murky ethics of political donations: on Sam Daystari and Gladys Liu.
  
• Therese Henning (The Conversation AU), Why can't rape survivors in Tasmania reveal their name even when they want to?. Section 194K of the Evidence Act 2001 is currentlz under review.
  
• Melbourne-Thomas, McInnes, Bindoff and Abram (The Conversation AU), Landmark report confirms Australia is girt by hotter, higher seas but there's still time to act.
  
• Arthur Delaney (HuffPo Aus), Donald Trump has two whistleblowers to worry about.
  
• Clinton Fernandes (Saturday Paper), Witness K case and government secrecy:
  

  The aim of this power grab must be understood clearly, if it is to be resisted. The national security bureaucracy doesn’t want a police state. It is more ambitious than that. The hope is to return Australian culture to the conformity and political quietude of the 1950s.

  
  
• Mike Seccombe (Saturday Paper), NSW farmers class action on water. The Murray-Darling management situation at the moment is a Hot Mess.
  

Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other

• Ruth Pearce (Conversation UK), If a man gives birth, he's the father: the experiences of trans parents:
  

  However, participants in countries such as the UK and Germany described difficulties associated with being forced to register as the “mother” of their child. For example, Stefan asked the registrar: “How I should demonstrate or prove or verify that he’s my son with this birth certificate, because nobody would believe me.”
  For these people, having their gender appropriately recorded on their child’s birth certificate is a matter of basic dignity. But mostly importantly, it is a matter of respect and safety for the child. Parents such as Stefan echoed McConnell, who has stated that “protecting my child has always been … my number one concern”. In expressing fears for the future of their children, they note the potential confusion that can arise from a child’s documentation being inconsistent with that of their parents.

  
  
• Beatrice Alba (Conversation AU), Still serving guests while your male relatives relax: everyday sexism like this hurts women's mental health.
  
• James Maugham (BBC Health), Bacterial striptease evades antibiotics.
  
• Dorothy Kim (JStor Daily), The Question of Race in Beowulf. Worth reading, and I think I need to read Morrison's piece.
  
• Sam Dylan Finch (Teen Vogue), Doctors using a transgender patient's correct pronouns is a life or death matter. (CN: suicide, hospitalisation)
  
• Julia Wainwright (Sidings blog), Oral history: contains an interview the author did at a young age, for a school project, with a woman who worked in domestic service from the 1920s.