Strong Verbs Are Just Better

• Secondbestkitchen (blog), Listless: My body feels very, very tired, but my brain feels as if I’ve done basically nothing for months now. That’s a hard combo for me: the sluggishness combined with the guilt over not doing much. Most days I do a little and spend a lot of time feeling bad about not doing more. This is, I think, a common plight for academics.
  
• Jennifer Ouellette (Ars Technica), No, someone hasn't cracked the code of the mysterious Voynich manuscript. (See also J.K. Petersen, Cheshire reprised, for a thorough takedown of Cheshire's terrible palaeography skills and indeed non-existent linguistic expertise; and a live-tweet of the Cheshire article by Ben Cartlidge.)

• David Crowe (SMH) on the Bill Shorten's Mum media moment: why this was the most compelling moment of this election campaign. Bonus points because, as it turns out, it... wasn't. As probably anyone could have told you if they thought about it at the time, the people feeling unaccustomed sympathy for Shorten and his mum were primarily people on the left, people normally *fed up* with Labor; not people who needed persuading that Labor are preferable to the liberals.
  
• Helen Razer (own Patreon post), The Yard Glass is half empty: in which Razer takes, well, a razor to the memory of the (very recently late) Bob Hawke. TL;DR, Labor's great leader massively reduced union protections for workers. (This counts as election special because Hawkey saw fit to die right before the election, in a last doomed effort to get Labor over the line)
  
• ABC news, A dozen Aboriginal communities. Thousands of kilometers. 400 votes: a look at the Electoral Commission workers who, by light aircraft, take a pre-poll voting booth around remote WA the week before elections.
  

• Nevada voted to remove some restrictions on abortion. (NPR)
  
• Vermont is moving to enshrine abortion as a fundamental right
  
  You all know the related Not Good News stories, I'm sure, I shan't link to them.

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

  It is hard to imagine what it is like to be told that there is no right way you can protest against this treatment. Violent resistance is obviously out of the question. But so, apparently, are non-violent forms of resistance, such as the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which the US is trying to make illegal. The only acceptable thing you can do as a Palestinian, it would seem, is just shut up and die. And, for God’s sake, do not protest against Eurovision!

  
  
• Jane Rawson (Overland), Just award the Vogels already.
  

  Not awarding the Vogel’s this year is downright cruel. Mediocre books get published all the time, and some of them even win multiple awards: who cares if you give the Vogel’s to a manuscript that isn’t a work of utter genius? The people who’ve submitted manuscripts have found a way to carve out time and space to write. They’ve dedicated themselves to a craft that has almost no financial or social reward. They’ve put their hopes on the line. Choose the best of the bunch and shortlist them: give one of them a prize. Maybe it will be the only money and recognition that writer ever gets, or maybe it will be the encouragement they need to go on to write better books. Either way, who cares: anything is better than the big plate of nothing most writers are served. And while you’re at it, prize-giving-organisations, how about setting up a prize for emerging writers over forty? How about one for an emerging writer whose career has been delayed by raising children, caring for parents, making a living, getting an education, being sick.

  
  I particularly liked the addition I saw to this on Twitter (by whom I cannot recall) to the effect of 'if you don't think mediocre books win awards, I regret to inform you you are probably the author of a mediocre book'.
  
• Alexandra Dane (The Lifted Brow), A Gloomy Shade of Death: The Australian/Vogels Literary Award. Adds to the above an interesting history of Australian literary awards and their tendency to, I quote, 'flex' by refusing to shortlist.
  
• Jacinta Koolmatrie (Guardian Indigenous X), The Western world is just catching up to what we know.
  

  Warratyi is located in Adnyamathanha country, my country. As an archaeology student at the time, these dates were amazing to hear. If you were to tell anyone from my community that their history extends back 49,000 years, they probably would not be that amazed. Because it would not be news to them.

  It is what we have been trying to tell scientists for years.

  
  
• Colin H. Kahl and John B Wolfstahl, It's John Bolton's world and Trump is just living in it:
  

  In February, it was Bolton who reportedly pressed Trump to take an uncompromising line on denuclearization with North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, leading to a fruitless summit and an escalation of tensions. More recently, Bolton has taunted the Iranian regime, including issuing a dire warning last week of impending U.S. military action. And, closer to home, he has become the point person for the administration’s efforts to oust Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela.
  While these may seem like disconnected responses to pressing global events, they are not. Rather, they reflect Bolton’s longstanding grudges against North Korea, Iran and Cuba (Maduro’s patron), and his deeply held beliefs regarding the futility of diplomacy, the benefits of regime change, and the wisdom of military action.
  Bolton — an unrepentant champion of the disastrous Iraq war — has never met a rogue state he didn’t want to isolate, topple and attack — and North Korea has long been at the top of his hit list.

  
  
• Sally Young, The Secret History of NewsCorp. In case you thought the Murdoch press came innocently by its anti-unionist pro-coal agenda... turns out the parent company (predating the Murdoch family ending up in charge) was a shell company founded to buy up local papers and pump out anti-union 'news' in Broken Hill and Port Pirie.
  
• John Pilger, own blog, The forgotten coup: how America and Britain crushed the government of their 'ally'. Advances the theory that the CIA and British authorities collaborated nefariously in the sacking of Whitlam. The British authorities part I've heard before (Buckhingham palace still won't release their half of the correspondance between Kerr and HMQ), but the CIA is a new one. I am... skeptical of Pilger's biases here, but I think we can probably rely on his assertion that the CIA referred to Kerr as 'our man Kerr'. Likewise, I would hope, the claim that Whitlam was going to table a motion in parliament re Pine Gap at about the time he was removed- that should be easily verifiable by fellow journalists, and he *is* a very respected journalist. So. Hmm. I would like to know more and I would like it to be provided with proper citations and editorial oversight, not a personal blog.
  

• commodorified post from 2017, How to Bootstrap Almost Any Relationship. Like many commenters, I have Deeply Ambivalent Feelings but it's probably sound.

• Triple J Hack offers News Stories You May Have Missed, including:
  Second success at stem-cell therapy treatment for AIDS, global poverty at it's lowest rate in recorded history, and Australia on track to wipe out cervical cancer in the next twenty years.
  
• Jock Collins (ABC news) argues there is good news in Australian immigration policy, if you look at facts and not at ScoMo's favourite talking points. Although ScoMo is talking big about immigration reduction, the actual number reduction is very small, and - this part is what really delighted me - there are several new initiatives to encourage immigration to, and incentivise int'l students toward, regional Australian centres. Oh, and we effectively doubled refugee intake in 2017, which policy has worked out well, not that you'd hear much about it from the then-PM or his successors.

• Guarav Sharma (Stuff.co.nz), Measure Our Response To Racism and Terror not in Flowers but in Action
  
• Lamia Imam (Radio NZ website), I cannot forgive the rhetoric that got us here
  
• Palavi Singhal (SMH), Ramsay Centre under fire for speakers. In unsurprising news that's yet worth commenting on, if only to keep it in the public eye, a 'research centre' offering degrees in 'western civilisation' is inviting some rabidly terrible speakers.
  
• Gina Rushton (Buzzfeed News), Postal abortion service that sent RU486 to thousands of women is closing. Because there are restrictive regulations requiring doctors to have special training before being approved to prescribe RU486, there are few GPs who can do so, and even fewer in remote Australia.
  
• Real Social Skills, Non Violent Communication can be emotionally abusive. The RSS blogger has a real beef against NVC (which seems to be much more widely espoused in their social and/or internet circles than in mine), but they're not wrong here: conflict resolution strategies that insist on maximum emotional intimacy can get pretty icky pretty fast.

• Dennis Norris II (Electric Lit), T Kira Madden's Memoir is a love letter to misfits. Conversation with the author of 'Long live the tribe of fatherless girls' - some interesting perspectives on talking about damaging family experiences when you have chosen not to bundle the whole thing, or even any single individual, as 'all bad'.
  
• Hannah McGregor (Electric Lit), Liking Books is Not A Personality.
  

  There is nothing new in this link between loving books and conspicuously consuming them. There is a long, classed history of book consumption as social posturing. As American culture scholar Lisa Nakamura points out, displaying books for others to view has long been “a form of public consumption that produces and publicizes a reading self.” But contemporary bookish culture extends conspicuous consumption beyond books themselves, to a range of lifestyle goods that have, in fact, played a significant role in the recent revival of independent bookstores (and in the expansion of Canadian book retailer Indigo into the U.S.). It is also more complex than a simple display of cultural or institutional capital, rooted as this culture is in a deep emotional investment in books that consumers have been taught to express through consumption. And we can see it playing out through the history of book-buying, from early bibliophilia to the midcentury Book-of-the-Month Club’s offer to help you build a personal library to millennial-aimed blogs that turn bookishness into consumer behavior.

  
  
• Amal Awad (Meanjin blog), The Ongoing Threat of Minorities.
  

  In my research on Arab women, one woman who worked with Muslim women told me something I never forgot: racism is exclusively about power. There are layers. Stories. The human race is multi-dimensional, capable of feeling deeply in one extreme way or another, of experiencing contrast—hate or indifference, fear or love. We are less interested in a way of introspection, or compassion, in allowing for individualism that breeds a more united whole. You get flack for suggesting individualism is worthwhile, because we are tribal and interested in the power that comes with it.

  
  
• Malachy Tallach (Boundless), The heart of beyond. Reflections on the fiction of remote places and the politics involved in writing somewhere as 'remote'.
  

  Philip Larkin was once asked in an interview why he chose to live in Hull, ‘so far away from the centre’. The poet responded with a rather more sensible enquiry: ‘The centre of what?’ As Larkin understood, the question of where is central and where remote is not so much a geographical one as it is political: a matter of perspective backed by power. ‘The centre’ is where decisions are made. It is where people and money are concentrated. ‘The centre’ is the voice to which everywhere else must listen.

  But Larkin’s question also has artistic implications. Because to write well about a place, to see and to show it as it truly is, it is necessary to rid oneself of the illusion of ‘remoteness’. Cliches must be cast aside, distance dissolved. The peripheral must become central.

  
  
• Sandra Newman (Electric Lit), What if you can't afford 'A Room of One's Own'.
  
• Osmond Chiu (Meanjin blog), Eliminating Racism, or, as we call it, Harmony:
  

  Thursday March 21 is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. You may not have heard of the day before. It is commemorated in Australia as Harmony Day.

  Harmony Day was a creation of the Howard Government twenty years ago, a response to research conducted for the federal government about the causes of racism. It was a deliberate choice to not focus on ‘anti-racism’ but rather emphasise the importance and value of ‘harmony’.

  
  
• Charlotta Forss (Notches Blog), Some Like It Hot: Sex and the Sauna in Early Modern Sweden.
  

  Indeed, in report after report, early modern travellers to Sweden wrote home about the undress they had witnessed in the saunas. For instance, the Italian naturalist and diplomat Lorenzo Magalotti included a scene from a sauna when illustrating his narrative of his visit to Stockholm in 1674. In Magalotti’s sketch, a fully unclothed man rests on a bench at the back of the sauna while in the foreground, two female attendants wearing linen garments tend to the bathers.

  With accounts and illustrations like Magalotti’s, early modern travellers to Sweden voiced both fascination and a moral distancing from the local custom. In this way, the sauna provided travellers to Sweden with the curious and strange that was expected in an early modern travel narrative about foreign lands. At the same time, the sauna created an actual and conceptual space where the traveller could both join in with and comment on the local variability of eroticism.

  
  
• Sandy Allen (them.us), Marie Kondo helped me sort out my gender
  

  I eventually ran out of the one makeup item I still sometimes wore, red lipstick, and now found myself incapable of making the trip to Sephora to buy more. ( A month later, kneeling and sobbing before my Marie Kondo discard pile, it felt silly ... this book had finally done it. )

  
  
• Sirena Bergman (The Independent), How the use of the 150 year old speculum puts women off smear tests. What I found most interesting was the discussion of several innovations on the speculum (an inflatable one! One that opens in a different direction! One made of sex toy silicone!) that have simply not got off the ground. Bergman reports that doctors aren't interested / don't have time to train in using new tools, although I would be interested to know if there are other factors.

• I have been enjoying Look At Me, a Guardian podcast hosted by Ben Law and Chris McCormack, in which Chris explains unsual animals to Ben, Ben interprets them through the Queer Agenda, and then they talk to researchers and citizen conservationists.

• The Independent has photos of ice shards on lake michigan as spring breaks up the ice shelves
  
• John B Murdoch: Bar Chart Race: most populous cities in the world
  
• Emma Taggart (My Modern Met), Artist creates balloon art based on real birds. His name is Terry Cook, and he is careful to collect all balloons after his photoshoots, and often reuses them.

• You may have heard about the study reporting links between gum disease and Alzheimers. The NHS breakdown is worth a read. TL;DR version: study not unreliable per se, but the projections toward a vaccine are very speculative and note that they're coming from the study members who work for the lab that hopes to make the vaccine.
• BBC report on the Pitt Rivers returning anthropological specimens. Not a revolution, more an acceptable minimum, but it's nice to know the Pitt Rivers are being half-decent.
• Vox.com video on how marginal tax brackets work is useful if you're confused about tax policy and/or your personal finances, and sort of soothing even if you know how this works already. Examples are US brackets, but the system is similar in Aus and (afaik) anywhere else I've paid tax.
• Jade Alburo, Twitter thread on archival bias, reporting an story told by Prof Long T. Bui about the Vietnam Center and Archive in Texas.
  

  When he tried to look for materials on their catalog for Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, he couldn't find anything. When he asked the librarian what's going on, he was told that he has to use the term "gooks." 2/

  — Jade Alburo (@JadeLibrarian) January 31, 2019

  
  
• SBS news, Three month religious service stops as asylum family pardoned: bit more complex than the headline suggests (the family haven't had final confirmation they can stay), but Dutch law prevents authorities from interrupting a church service. So when an Armenian family sought refuge, the congregation conducted non-stop worship for three months, keeping the family safe. A Good Use of a religious privilege.
• NY Times reports that one Brooklyn jail has been running on minimal to no heating during the polar vortext. Somehow I doubt this will be fixed by Monday.
• Behrouz Boochani wins Australia's richest literary prize for 'No Friend But the Mountains'. His translator accepts the award for him, because, of course, Boochani remains unable to enter Australia.

• Ana Valens (Daily Dot), Mastodon is crumbling and many blame its founder. TL;DR, not the paradise for queer users that some Tumblr refugees described. Although I gather that Mastodon is not the same thing as the 'fediverse' at large and Federated Fandom might be gravitating to Hubzilla (?).
• Gina Mei (Electric Lit), Learning to cook for one.
  

  Can loneliness be taught? Can it become a habit? Can it be unlearned? I’m not sure — but for me, it has always been a safety blanket.
  
  ( Unlike Anita Lo, however, I hate cooking for myself )

• Jonathan Amos (BBC science), Colonisation of the Americas cooled the earth's climate (Colonisation kills, depopulation leads to reforestation for formerly agricultural lands, creates carbon sink)
• Steve Down (The Saturday Paper AU) profiles Joel Bray, Wiradjuri dancer and choreographer.
  

  Dancer and choreographer Joel Bray nervously greets 20 of us at the door of his Sydney city hotel suite and ushers us inside. His underwear is strewn about the room and he asks us to put on a hotel-issue black dressing gown over our clothes and take a seat wherever we can find one. His lithe, nude body is sheathed in an identical robe.
  
  Bray meets our apprehension with studied anxiety, nervously pouring us drinks before crumpling at all angles on the floor, his face frozen in a rictus. He bounces up and dashes onto the bed in the adjoining room, holding up a Holy Bible as though it is a haloed digest of forbidden hunks, which, depending on your taste, it may well be.

  What the opening paras of the profile don't say is that this hotel encounter is in itself the theatre piece, not just what happens when you interview Joel Bray.
• Kathryn Vandervalk (Electric Lit), Stop assuming that I'm just writing about myself, an essay that covers the problematic fact that marginalised authors (and the author notes that as a white woman she's hardly the most marginalised) find their work reduced by audiences to assumed autobiography. It goes on, though, to some comments on the really interesting character/author boundary: if you assume what happens to the character is what happened to the author, are you also assuming that what the character thinks is what the author thinks?
  

  Once, I read a piece in workshop where the protagonist with the same “sandy blonde hair and erudite glasses” as the author was also a Christ figure with an exceptionally large penis. ( That personal myopia is different from the myopia an author constructs when writing from the perspective of a single character )

  I don't really have a pithy comment here, but this is a problem I think about a lot in so many contexts.
• Peggy O'Donnel (Jezebel) The settler fantasies woven into the prairies dress
• Lily Cho (Hook and Eye) has an essay on crying at work that says all the usual things you'd expect about gender, emotion, and types of work. It's conlcuding paragraph says something about the way Cho experiences emotion itself, that struck me (although I'm not sure I understand it fully):
  

  “Unlike replicants,” Terada argues, “zombies don’t experience themselves as though they were someone else” (Terada 2001: 157). There is something noble about the zombie’s undivided desires, the clarity of it, that I would like to replicate but I know that I can’t maintain it. I can’t feel without division. The best I can do is to recognize that the expression of intense emotion — let’s call it crying in a meeting for now — is a deeply alienating moment where I am experiencing myself as though I were someone else. It is not fun to feel this way but it is a discomfort that I have to hang on to because I want to be alive to the difficulties and the deeply divided desires at the heart of all the good fights that I want to keep fighting.

• Simon Caterson (Meanjin Blog) Present tense: W.B. Yeats' The Second Coming at 100
  

  While ‘The Second Coming’ arises out of the unique creative partnership between Yeats and Georgie, there is another aspect which makes it universal and timeless and which is not private and abstruse at all but universal and indeed may seem obvious once it is pointed out.

  Quite simply, what gives lyric poetry of the kind revived and mastered by Yeats so much of its power is the mere fact that it is written in the present tense.

  ( the poem is always happening, the prophecy endlessly experienced )

  I love that poem and I love my problematic weird uncle Yeats.
• Hana Pera Aoake I'm not single or taken I'm at the gym. Has a real way with words, for talking about depression. May not be safe reading if you have weight/exercise/etc issues (or it may be therapeutic. Mileage may vary.)
• Lucie Shelley (Electric lit) interviews Kirsten Roupenian about her short story collection (from which the viral hit Cat Person was drawn).
  

  KR: ( Universality is in the mind of the reader )

  if I read and loved Stephen King when I was an eleven year old girl who’d never seen a monster, why shouldn’t some theoretical crotchety old man be able to enjoy a book about monstrous teenage girls?

• Meet the four cats playing Captain Marvel's pet cat Goose.
• Tessa Smith (tesselationsinnature blog) consults with zoologists Jack Ashby and Kotaro Tokana to rank toy wombats by scientific accuracy. Jack Ashby, he of 'it's like someone shaved a hedgehog and made it have babies with a seal' is really funny both about accurate and inaccurate wombats.
  

  Jack Ashby: The shape is great: the head sags glumly downwards, the back and bum are round, the legs are barely discernible from the body. I love it. They mixed the lighter ears of (some) common wombats with the lighter eye-rings of (some) hairy-nosed wombats, and the toe-count is wrong again, but its overall wombattiness is excellent.4.5

• Siderea, Rent and reputation, on why US landlords consult credit scores but your rental history doesn't contribute to your credit score. First few parts baffling but interesting if you're not from the US; the last of 5 parts gets into some of the interesting theory of surveillance.
  

  This is one of the regular issues with surveillance systems. It's potentially bad for you if someone amasses a dossier of data about you, sure. But it's potentially even worse if that dossier represents itself to be complete but is not.
  
  Then you wind up in situation like this one, where people discriminate against you in business dealings, due to absence of positive data - or simply absence of data.
  
  One of the problems with surveillance systems is that they can, as they become normalized, perversely drive people to "opt in" to those systems, to make sure the surveillance system has enough data, as well as the right data.
  
  This is one of those two-level attitude things, where you might hate the idea of this information about you being tracked and traded, but if it is going to be tracked and traded, you want to make sure its as favorable as possible.
  Unfortunately, this situation drives people to maximize their exposure to data collection.

• redsnake05 has another post of fashion spreads interpreted. This time Annie Lennox's repressed doppelganger works in an office.
• muccamukk has a post of Questions About Federation (the social media system, not Australian politics), including key questions such as:
  

  • What happens if whoever runs that instance flounces? Does the pictures go bye? If not, where does it go, and who pays for hosting?
  • How does the "We'll spread the server cost!" thing fit into this?
  • I post a picture of an eagle, where is that picture hosted, who is paying for it, and who has the ability to remove it?

  The comments have a lot of people echoing these questions, and some answers, of which I recommend impertinence's thread here.

Draco grabbed Pansy's arm and pulled her behind the nearest tapestry. 'We've reached peak flag,' he said. 'It's on!'

It was the matter of moments to explain the situation to Crabbe. Most of them belonged to Malfoy: 'I feel our styles are divergent: you're all classic Death Eater, I'm more complex anti-hero with a possibility of later redemption. It's just not working for me. Also, I've been planning your public downfall since you rolled me four years ago and I can't think of a better time than four days before you meet the criteria for your Prime Ministerial pension supplement.'

Pansy's message was simpler: 'You're dumped, Crabbe. And you're taking Goyle with you.'

Even Rita Skeeter couldn't argue, epsecially when Malfoy fronted the media with his hair glinting perfectly in the afternoon sun and with no phalanx of flags to make his argument for him, but rather words, more than three, constructing an actual argument. Draco looked earnestly into the camera. 'We need advocacy,' he said. 'Not slogans. We need a different style of leadership, one that respects the people's intelligence."

Two hours later, Crabbe replied. 'We're not the Labor Party!' he declared. 'We are not the Labor Party! WE ARE NOT THE LABOR PARTY!

'Alas,' muttered the Australian Voting Public, remembering well that – mad as they may have been, and in all honesty they put cut snakes to shame – the Labor Party under both Harry and Hermione had provided stable government, passing legislation, negotiating intelligently with the opposition and cross benches and rarely embarrassing us on the international stage.

For hours they pretended there was still a decision to be made. Goyle announced: 'We cannot and we must not become a carbon copy of the Australian Labor Party.'

But it was all to no avail. Of the 99 votes, Draco received 54, Vince 44, and Kevin Andrews drew a picture of a penis.

Crabbe was out, having served less time than any Australian Prime Minister since the one who was eaten by a shark*.

*Probably

You say it can't happen -- the system is too rotten.

It won't happen if you wallow in the comfort of your cynicism. But it will happen if you and others like you get fired up.

We've done it before.

I remember when progressives joined with African-Americans to get enacted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. I remember when progressives stopped the Vietnam War. When women finally got freedom of choice over their own bodies. When the Environmental Protection Act became law.