“When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.”
—Lorrie Moore (via jessicalouise)
June 2008
98 posts
My friend Meredith has been chosen as one of Australia's 30 hottest radio journalists →
zooweekly.com.au
Just to be clear, she played no role in this, other than being born and having her photo taken for her work’s website. In any case, go vote for her!
“Jakob does get made fun of relentlessly but we’re all just learning out here in cyberspace about how to have real lives both on and off the computers. You weren’t meant to know what people say about you when you’re not around. Now it can easily be published in a ‘hate’ site devoted to you which remains forever and can be called up any time by anyone anywhere.”
—Dawn (via marco) (via claudia)
I agree with Jakob. →
jlarchive.tumblr.com
Or I sympathise with him, at least.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the past week the impact of our words upon the people we write about, and accordingly is and isn’t prudent to publish.
We’ve all bashed out an online diss at one point or another — snark is a core part of the currency by which we build relationships with one another online, amuse ourselves and others with our own cleverness, and engage in genuine arguments over our likes, dislikes and beliefs.
There can be good in that. But you’re an idiot if you think you can bitch about someone online these days without them finding out about it. And you’re an emotional dunce if you don’t think your words are going to have some impact on the person you’re writing about.
I’m not a Pollyanna by any means. Back in my student politics, I remember telling a highly diplomatic friend that I was sick of him saying everyone was “lovely” all the time, because sometimes people were just assholes, and he shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge that. Similarly, sometimes websites or books or songs or magazine articles are crap, and pretty much everything and everyone has its strengths and weaknesses.
Should we hold back the truth simply because it might make someone a little sad?
Professionally, I’ve gone with “no”. It’s my job to write what I perceive to be true — sometimes diplomatically, other times not — and it’s also part of my job to accept that people will tear apart what I have to say in that capacity on the internet.
In my other online interactions (and I decided this before Jakob’s departure), I going to veer the other way, though — or at least sticking to attacking arguments rather than people, even if those people are anonymous internet users on the other side of the world who I’ll never meet.
Because, well, they’re still people, and I don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s pain.
OMG OMG CHACE CRAWFORD AND ED WESTWICK ARE A COUPLE OMG →
perezhilton.com
Caroline McCarthy combines two of my favourite interests (Gossip Girl and tech) in the one sentence.
caro:
Nate and Chuck are the Charles Forman and David Karp of the teen entertainment world, clearly.
“Once you’ve mapped out your speech, remove 20 percent. In all my years of preparing and watching political and business speeches, I’ve yet to hear anyone say, “Gee, I wish that speech were longer.”
—
From Al Gore’s Chief Speechwriter: Simple Tips for a Damn Good Presentation (Plus: Breakdancing) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss (via jnunemaker)
All very good advice.
(via monkeytypist)
Absolutely. I have a rule for events I’m involved in that no speech should last for longer than 5 minutes, but I might just get bored easily.
“When a couple was “going steady” in the 1950s, the young man might have let his girlfriend wear his Varsity team sweater or given her his fraternity pin. But the 1960s swept aside those rituals. Now the Facebook link has become a publicly-recognized symbol of a reasonably serious intent short of being engaged or moving in together.”
—
If It’s Facebook, it’s love (via thesemodernsocks) (via allisonweiss)
I’m always tickled that being “facebook official” is now an important stage in most college-aged relationships. Not so much about it being absurd - because it is a really exciting and special point in a relationship - but in how nobody could have predicted it as little as five years ago and how strange this must all seem to my parents.
(via gregbrown)
(via sarahchristine)
I haven’t been in a serious relationship since I joined Facebook, but my instinct is to always leave my relationship status blank. Not because I don’t care, but because history shows that break-ups render me a mess, and the last thing I want in the midst of one is to make an announcement to my entire broader social circle that my heart’s been trampled on. I’d rather just crawl up in a hole, watch trash TV, bawl my eyes out to my friends, and ignore the world.
A bit hard to stick with that conviction in the flush of new love, though.
“Another possible problem, occasionally identified in the scribe’s idle imaginings, is that a couple of generations of journalists are emerging who’ve had no exposure to having to glean their basic information from yellowing files and stray flecks of fading memories. What would happen should someone snip Google’s crucial cable? Are there people doing journalism now who wouldn’t have a clue how to set about a story in the absence of electronic data assistance?”
—
Oh for days of yore when I had six weeks to file | The Australian (via somethingchanged)
Guilty as charged. I have to admit, I find Google an invaluable tool for backgrounding stories, although my present academic training is pulling me away from this (a little). Don’t use Google at all (well, almost at all) for the thesis!
I’m looking forward to reading the Nicholas Carr piece (in my newly arrived edition of The Atlantic) the spurred this latest bout of Google bashing.
Also from the Errol Simper (linked): “Sullivan touched on some internet-Google drawbacks, as quoted earlier. One he didn’t mention is the potential danger of journalistic uniformity. It has often occurred to the scribe in recent times that when journalists from News Limited, Fairfax Media or from the Seven Network set out out to do a story about essentially the same thing, then they’ll probably all perform the same research. Unless you’re formidably familiar with the background to a particular topic it’s become second nature, an automatic reflex, to Google up stories relevant to what you’re examining.
“What you find will very probably influence the questions you ask and which individuals you seek out for comment. It’s as though the internet has crafted a little journalistic suburb within whose boundaries the stories will largely be confined. The only thing that’s going to make one story different from another is the varying thought processes of the human condition. A potential problem, as Sullivan suggests, is that those processes may now be similarly conditioned.”
Play
Britticisms, on why she doesn't like saying hello to randoms on the street...
- Random perv: Hello!
- Brit: Hello!
- Random perv: Damn baby, you can't walk that hard. You're gonna break somebody.
- Brit: What?
- Random perv: You've got a nice ass!
- Brit: Leave me alone.
- Random perv: You wearin' panties?
- Brit: Fuck off!
- Rachel: Yep, that sounds pretty accurate.
The Dawn Chorus →
thedawnchorus.wordpress.com
Awesome. We need something like this.
I am very pleased to present to the world my new, collaborative baby - The Dawn Chorus is a new Australian feminist commentary blog. I would love all you awesome Australian feminists (female and male!) to have a look around, comment, and help it grow up big and strong. Together we can make it happen!
In other news, the sun just came out.
“People who engage with a TV show online before they see it on television are more likely to become loyal viewers of that program and encourage others to watch as well, according to a new study.”
—Web Interaction Drives Greater TV Viewership and Loyalty full report (via somethingchanged)
“It turns out that a woman’s physical appearance is the most powerful predictor of the occupational status of the man she marries. A woman’s appearance is more significant than her intelligence, her level of education or even her original socioeconomic status in determining the mate she will marry.”
—
Psychologist David M. Buss, after researching ten thousand people across thirty-seven countries. Quoted in the book The Dark Side of Man by Michael P. Ghiglieri. (via jackieheartsb)
Fortunately, this book was published nearly 10 years ago, but wow - that’s just depressing.
And actually, the more I think about it, the less I think it is true. I mean, how else do you explain all those silicon valley marriages?
Monica converses with her comment moderator
- Me: Who spells better and has better punctuation ... anti- or pro- Monica commenters?
- Bob: I think deep in your heart you already know the answer to that one.
- Bob: But pro-monica in case you don't know.
- (via kapookababy)
“
The political cost of this is real. In the end, a progressive politics without connection to unions and the world of work is inevitably drawn to the American model of cultural and symbolic politics. This limousine liberalism carries a heavy price and leaves the Centre-Left open to the charge that the progressive project is an elite activity.
Unions have suffered as well. They can only rise to the challenges they face if they are clear about their core purpose, and remember that their own credibility as political actors depends on their credibility as industrial actors.
” —David Coats on Labour-In-Politics. Ignore the foolish headline; the sub missed the gist of the article. (via monkeytypist)
“The dominant narrative may have had some truth to it in the pre–Madonna/Paris Hilton era. But it ignores several key changes in contemporary teenaged life—changes that the Gloucester posse has graciously illustrated for us. First, many young women who become pregnant these days either want to have a baby (as in Gloucester) or are, at the very least, open to the idea. In order for birth control to work, you have to use it religiously, and the only way you use it religiously is if you really, really don’t want to get pregnant. Yet researchers like Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefelas in Promises I Can Keep find that’s not the case for many low-income mothers. They describe young women who speak longingly about the “joys of motherhood” and who find the middle-class penchant for putting off motherhood until the later twenties incomprehensible. As rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy have increased recently among women with a high school diploma and even those with a year or two of college, the same thinking seems to have spread to working-class communities like Gloucester.”
—
City Journal on Gloucester Pregnancy Pact
Very interesting. Someone posted this but can’t find who it was now… so sorry for not giving credit :).
(via sarahchristine)
Interesting article. I was saying last weekend that one of my pet hates is when people call Jamie-Lynne Spears’s decision to continue with her pregnancy “trashy”. If you accept that some (lots of) teenagers will have sex, as most progressives do, then it follows that some of them will fall pregnant. Unless you enforce abortion, some of them are going to have babies.
As this article nicely shows, there’s a pretty strong correlation between cultural and economic class and what girls decide to do when they’re put in that situation (which both explains and dismerits the middle-class distate for teen pregnancy).
What message does your city send? →
paulgraham.com
I found this great post on cities, culture and ambition through Gala Darling last week.
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
According to the post’s author, Paul Graham, Cambridge (MA) values intelligence, Los Angeles fame (and beauty), Washington DC proximity to power, Berkeley pleasant living and Silicon Valley innovation.
No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there’s a concentration of smart people there, but that there’s nothing else people there care about more. Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens—till they start hedge funds or startups respectively.
It got me thinking what values and ambitions Sydney heralded most, and I found myself stuck.
What qualities would lift someone to the heights of Sydney society? Money, beauty, fame, a laid back lifestyle? A tan?
Sydney might have a national reputation for fast-paced superficiality, but none of those strike me as quite right. Perhaps we have too much urban sprawl, and too many subcultures, for any particular quality to reign supreme.
I mean, I don’t care much for any of the above, and I can’t say I feel like I misfit living here.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling that if I wanted to live in a city that embodied my own values, I’d be better off moving to Melbourne.
What values and ambitions does your city value?
Biennale of Sydney photos →
feeds.feedburner.com
Last week i had a tour of some of the works which form the Biennale of Sydney. Covering several venues, most notably Cockatoo Island, there’s over 180 works to see from now until the 7th…
Note to self: must check some of these out before it ends.
Make Our Future ****n Renewable →
getup.org.au
Love GetUp’s new FuelWatch ad.
Slut Sticks
The use of contraceptive implants among indigenous girls - known as “slut sticks” - has also found to be widespread, particularly among 12-year-olds, “making them a target of sexual attention”.
Many Aboriginal girls - notably 12-year-olds - are being given Implanon, a small plastic rod inserted under the skin of the upper arm, which stops ovulation. Men can feel under a girl’s skin for the rods, known as “slut sticks”, which signify that a girl is sexually active.- Sarah Smiles / The Age
That is revolting. Surely they’re being given the Implanon for protection, not because they’re “sluts”.
“We live in a world of constant “updates” and those who plan and plan will never arrive. As much as I desire to be perfect, I have an even stronger desire to succeed. To connect with people and to show the world what I have to offer in a big, big way. Therefore, I’m letting go and meeting my fear head on.”
—
Words worth keeping in mind in relation to my current Big Project.
June salon
Every few weeks, I invite a bunch of interesting people of my acquaintance and their friends to converge on a restaurant for lunch - you might call it offline social networking or, as I do (inspired by a Bust article back in ‘05), a “salon”.
Here are the photos from the latest one.
Michelle Obama's senior year thesis →
politico.com
An excerpt:
My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.
It’s stating the obvious, I know, but lady is smart.
Saved for future reading reference.
“The Huffington Post has a new feature on its Off the Bus section. It is posting all the campaign press conference calls, allowing you to listen in, for instance, to Obama’s (already near legendary) strategist David Axelrod spin the line.”
—
HuffPo “Off the Bus”: via The Times via Crikey (via somethingchanged)
Simply awesome.
Don't Write the Old Man Off Yet →
newmatilda.com
Michael O’Keefe reckons Obama is going to lose the Presidential election in November. I don’t agree with many of his arguments, but I do agree that victory is less than assured.
Listen
lenachen wrote:
Summer anthem: Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”
I like to call myself straight-flexible. Kennedy’s kind of the same. She adores the above song and we are definitely going to a Katy Perry concert back in the States. Also, we should probably just consummate this friendship with hot girl-on-girl action (this is something I’ve been working on since freshman year — no luck yet).
Around 1997 or so, my favourite singer/songwriter was Jill Sobule, who had a song with the same title (although my favourite song of her’s was always Supermodel). My friends and I liked to giggle and coyly inform the boys in our life whenever it entered our heads, as teenage girls are wont to.
A decade on, Katy Perry’s take on the subject is catchy and tuneful (onto my iTunes it shall go), but dare I say it, a little… heteronormative? I mean, “You’re my experimental game”, “It’s not what good girls do, Not how they should behave”?
It’s kissing, for god’s sake, not attempted murder. Not even Serena van der Woodsen would freak out about that one.
Rates steady, but rents rampant →
smh.com.au
Oh yays.
THE NUMBER of new houses and apartments under construction in NSW has slumped to its lowest yearly level in 38 years, with the weak property market likely to put even more pressure on rents.
…
The Senate report recommended lowering the grant for people buying existing properties, but increasing it for new properties to encourage more housing supply.
The real estate industry was quick to dismiss the idea, saying it would reduce choices available for people wanting to buy a home near jobs and infrastructure.
“It is not practical or equitable to suggest that first-home owners should be concentrated in new housing developments, often distant from schools and employment opportunities,” the Real Estate Institute of Australia president, Noel Dyett, said.
He’s right, as it stands. But if we concentrate housing growth in consolidation rather than sprawl? More apartments, taller buildings, etc. Then we can have new places to live that are located within easy reach of quality infrastructure and jobs, and reduced reliance on cars (smaller petrol bills, reduced carbon emissions) to boot!
“Beside the fact that we — and I mean here the whole crew of a dozen early employees — were all indispensable (and all above average!), Louis, Jane, John, Barbara and I were all unemployable by any real magazine. We had frittered our youth away living abroad, doing interesting things, doing anything in fact but holding down a real career. And now we were no longer young. Wired was the only place that would hire us, so we hired ourselves.”
—
- Wired, the Lucky Early Years, Kevin Kelly.
kapookababy wrote: If you’re a fan of the mag, you’ll enjoy Kevin reminiscing about Wired during its inception. After carrying out my current stint of professional media work, I plan on frittering away the rest of my youth because it’s recently occurred to me that there may never be another time I can live so free, go on adventures, make huge mistakes, or be a loser-nobody-weirdo-nomad.
I wrote: Le sigh.
Guys who include you in their mailing list →
twentysomethingtales.tumblr.com
Oh no, I do this! Or at least, I used to before the advent of Facebook. It’s rare that I can bothered going through my bloated gmail address book to create a list these days.
What's so great about beauty, anyway? →
alternet.org
Who needs to be beautiful? It won’t help anyone discover a cure for cancer, spot the billionaire-making investment, change the law, run faster, or write a brilliant book. Beauty doesn’t even convey opportunities to the extent some people believe — Oprah didn’t get to be a billionaire on her looks.
Judging by the number of size 12 women with flat chests, short legs, and beady eyes running around, it appears average looks have done just fine for millennia. For all of us to be here today fretting over how much plastic surgery we need, many an average looking foremother must have caught the attention of our forefathers. So I’m guessing there’s more to this mate-attracting thing than arousing every man who walks by?
Julia Allison goes global →
dailymotion.com
Click to see JA on a French news program, hot off the back of her German newspaper trifecta.
(via juliaallison)
Listen
I remember seeing Grates singer Patience Hodgson accept the Music award at the YEN Young Woman of the Year Awards in 2006 (I wrote the programme and script), and thinking she personified the kind of girl I’d be friends with.
Their music is awesome, too.
via butterflyeffect:
everythingontheinternetistrue:
Best Description of The Grates ever.
rach wrote:
The Grates - Burn Bridges
The Grates have been my go-to hyperactive Aussie trio (narrow criterion, true) since Gravity Won’t Get You High in 2006. They are so cute and bounce around the stage like little carebears shot up with taurine. New album is out in early August and this is single number one.
