White Fragility: Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism (The Good Men Project, April 2015). If you're white, like me, this spells out some of the assumptions you've absorbed from the surrounding culture. It's US-based, but much of it applies to Australia. Come to think of it, a lot of it applies to feminism as well, with the ( Read more... )

The Hidden Bias of Science's Universal Language (The Atlantic, August 2015). Talks about some of the problems for scientists worldwide caused by the hegemony of English. I would have liked more specifically about how this affects scientists' thinking - for example, more about why it matters that many languages just transliterate English terms like ( Read more... )

Working on a short story and making a complete hash of it. Went back through my collection of print-outs and hand-written notes on how-to-write advice for a most helpful refresher. Here's some of the stuff that's still up online, plus stuff from Writing With Color, a Tumblr bursting with useful information ( Read more... )

1800RESPECT is national sexual assault / domestic violence service offering phone and online counselling. Lots of info at their Web site.

Support services for at-risk queer Aussie youth (Star Observer, 25 November 2016)

The planned repeal of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) in the US will leave 55 million women unable to afford ( Read more... )

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Three days in a hotel room with nothing but the novel and iTunes for company. (iTunes library now suspiciously well-organised.) Part Three is complete; Part Four is well underway (which means I can now see lots of rewrites which will have to be on Part Three, argh). Well on track for finishing the book, including major re-working of certain bits, ( Read more... )

Frankly, I'm knackered. Here goes ( Read more... )

Stephen Fry explains what he would say if he was 'confronted by God' (The Independent, 31 January 2015). "Now, if I died and it was Pluto, Hades, and if it was the 12 Greek gods then I would have more truck with it, because the Greeks didn’t pretend to not be human in their appetites, in their capriciousness, and in their unreasonableness... they ( Read more... )

Implicit racism in academia (Mindhacks, 7 September 2016): "Implicit bias" exists "where there is a contradiction between people's egalitarian beliefs and their racist actions." The question is, how aware is each of us of our own biased behaviour?

Millennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think (New York Magazine, 8 January 2015): "The fact ( Read more... )

Medical interventions for suicide risk isolating those without mental illness, inquiry hears (SMH, 26 March 2016): perhaps half of the adolescents and adult men who approach Mensline because they are suicidal do not have a mental illness, but are on the autism spectrum and/or have suffered a stressful life event; there's a lack of services for ( Read more... )