Back in the old country after a full and challenging year. In honour of the switch to the southern hemisphere, the list returns to it’s original Summer title. There’s a lot of ‘funny’ this year. Lucky you! I’ve decided to put an asterisk next to pieces that I especially liked for those who prefer a slimmer list.

Academia

• Commuting: a life sentence for academics
• This Is How You Kill a Profession
• What is the point of a university press?

Anthropology/ethnography

• The Momo signal
• Who Is John Frum?
• How Many Bones Would You Break to Get Laid?
• Courtney Adamo, Amelia Fullarton, and Other Instagram Influencer Mamas Are Living the Dream in Byron Bay
• How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity
• *Do human beings have an instinct for waging war? – David P Barash | Aeon Essays  (Nice take on how ethnography is abused to make universalising claims)
• Why Symbols Aren’t Forever – Issue 76: Language – Nautilus

Ethics & the examined life

• ‘I’m Scared of Failure’
• Cishet Kismet
• The only metric of success that really matters is the one we ignore
• Mindfulness is loaded with (troubling) metaphysical assumptions – Sahanika Ratnayake | Aeon Essays
• More Than Friends
• *What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped? (I’m aware that this is a deeply controversial piece but it appeals to my fatalism and pessimism.)
• Friday essay: on the ending of a friendship
• Luscious
• *Modesty is not a cranky killjoy but a way to get more from life – Nicolas Bommarito | Aeon Essays (I thought this would be one of those boring essays centred around defining something, but I found it insightful)

Feminism

• The New Authoritarians Are Waging War on Women
• The fear that lies behind aggressive masculinity | George Monbiot
• The Best Abortion Ever

Funny

• This Workplace Is a Family Now, Dammit
• These Graphs Perfectly Capture The Rolling Hills And Sprawling Pastures Of Mama’s Girlhood, And O! How Sweet The Meadowgrass Smelled
• Poorly Researched Men’s Fiction
• *Allen Ginsberg’s “Who Let the Dogs Out” (I don’t know why but this makes me chuckle just thinking about it) 
• Oh, We Don’t Sell Food At This Restaurant — We Purvey Provisions
• The Helicopter Bunny
• How I Intend To Comport Myself In Paris
• In the not too distant future, when climate alarmists and identity politics have destroyed civilisation … | First Dog on the Moon
• 12 Stages of (Hetero?)Sexual Development
• The Myth of Super Mario by Albert Camus
• Just Another Minute, Please, Miss – Hoping That My Suit Might Not Prove Entirely Distasteful To Ye – I Make Ninepence A Shilling And I Saw A Dog Once’t

History

• What China Can Teach us about Premature Ejaculation
• Levantine Love of Yerba Mate Tells a 160-Year Trans-Atlantic Tale – Inside Arabia
• Garfield phone mystery solved in Brittany – 35 years later
• *Leave No Trace – Believer Magazine (Madeleine Watts is miles too talented for her tender age)
• The Origins of the Humble Yet Mighty Apartment Kitchen
• Was Shakespeare a Woman?
• Reading Bruce Pascoe | Tom Griffiths

Investigations

• We Saw Nuns Kill Children: The Ghosts of St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage
• *The Harvard Professor and the Paternity Trap (Gotta be one of the strangest and hardest-to-report tales I can imagine)
• What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane
• *The Jungle Prince of Delhi (A complex story told beautifully and in a very compact way)

Journalism

• The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story
• News Corp: Democracy’s greatest threat | Richard Cooke
• Revisiting the Role of the Science Journalist

Kids & parents

• Let Children Get Bored Again
• When School Calls to Say Your Kid Has Lice, Don’t Make the Mistakes I Made
• The Cult of Homework
• Do Children Soak Up Language Like Sponges?
• What Did Summertime Parenting Look Like for Nathaniel Hawthorne? No Camp, Few Toys, and Lots of Lovely “Babbling.”

Language

• A new twist in the elusive quest for the origins of the word ‘bogan’ leads to Melbourne’s Xavier College
• A Cultural History of First Words

Politics

• It was never about Europe. Brexit is Britain’s reckoning with itself | Fintan O’Toole
• What Was New Atheism? | The Point Magazine
• The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani | Trigger Warnings by Jeff Sparrow
• Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people | Ijeoma Oluo
• *There is No Alternativelessness (To the outsider, German politics is deceptive in its apparent civility. This is a really good explainer)
• I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.
• Jeremy Vine: My Boris story – Reaction
• *Left and Right are both gripped by an identical fear: homogeneity – Holly Case | Aeon Essays (Political science commentary at its finest)

Science

• Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?
• How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution
• Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?
• To Fix the Climate, Tell Better Stories – Issue 75: Story – Nautilus

Sex

• Consent and refusal are not the only talking points in sex – Rebecca Kukla | Aeon Essays
• *On Tinder (A true tale that reads like a Jennifer Eagan story)
• Love without jealousy | Aeon Essays
• How a hackneyed romantic ideal is used to stigmatise
• Sex Education Needs to Be Less Straight

Technology

• Opinion | A Better Internet Is Waiting for Us

Work

• Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?
• America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable
• The key to loving your job in the age of burnout
• Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think

Writing & writers

• *My Life (An unsettling short, short story)
• O, a meaning!
• The Great Silence – Issue 75: Story – Nautilus
• *American Poetry Review – Nicole Sealey – “Object Permanence” (This poem is sublime. I know it wasn’t published this year, but I only just found it)

Most overrated crap

• Craig Emerson’s ‘Tribalism is blighting Australia’ is the same endlessly recycled essay promoting both-sidesism that we have been reading for decades now. And yet it was plugged by no less than Annabel Crabb, as if it contained brilliant intellectual insights. Read instead Greg Jericho’s ‘Centrism is a dead weight in politics‘

[How I made this (a note to self). Favourite articles were archived using instapaper and then downloaded as html via the settings page]

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