Meanjin publishes some of the best fiction and non-fiction around, and this piece from new Australian writer Joshua Badge about growing up in poverty and what it means to make it to uni is beautiful, honest, raw writing
An interesting perspective in the Guardian this week from German writer Dunja Batarilo about growing up with a sibling with Down Syndrome — and how this has affected her feelings about parenthood
This week in the UK, the Mayor of London unveiled a new campaign that FINALLY calls on men to change their behaviour, rather than telling women to keep themselves safe. More of this, please and thank you
Over on Twitter, the brilliant food writer Jack Monroe asked people to name their favourite simple sandwich recipe (“no 95 ingredient hand-pulled artisanal guff and nonsense'') and the epic 23,000 replies (!!!!) means we can never complain about boring sandwiches again
Speaking of Twitter, this thread went WILD this week. Is it normal to charge your friends when you invite them for dinner Y/N?
Have we been thinking about burnout all wrong?
…and here’s why you should ditch the guilt about taking time for yourself. Doing more things doesn’t make you a better person, it makes you a tired person
Covid tests / pregnancy tests (“I post a picture of my positive Covid test on Facebook, joke that every time I see it I think I’m pregnant, and everybody knows exactly what I’m talking about. Friends who lost pregnancies or babies or were lost themselves to years of the turbulent nothingness of the trying-to-conceive nightmare roller coaster to nowhere used the term PTSD, and they were not exaggerating.”)
One of our favourite newsletters, My Sweet Dumb Brain, asked readers to reflect on the past two years of the pandemic, and the responses are thoughtful and wise. Read them here (you’ll need to scroll down a bit)
If you’ve been wondering why the collective internet freaked out this week about the new (and seemingly sweet and innocent) Pixar film Turning Red, this piece does a good job explaining what all the fuss is about
In tech news… there’s new IG Live functionality incoming that includes the ability to assign moderators and schedule to feed (every social media manager is weeping with joy right now), Facebook is testing out a new desktop layout, Substack now has an app, LimeWire is now pedalling NFTs, Instagram will soon have NFTs too (welp), and the world’s first dating app for NFT enthusiasts has launched (welp welp)
On using public toilets as a trans non-binary person (“Despite the female pedigree granted by my birth certificate and the vagina between my legs, I’m always nervous to step inside public bathrooms. On first glance, most people perceive me as a man… I don’t have much in the way of hips and usually bind my breasts. I am trans non-binary, but since there aren’t widespread unisex restrooms, I choose the women’s restroom, the safer of two evils, to do my business.”_)
Two wonderful essays about the importance of seeing yourself on screen: Kate Hagen shares her joy at seeing fat women on film, and Maybelle Morgan explains what it means to finally see an animated Asian character
Annnnnddddddd…. when you’re just born and you don’t like anybody, here’s a video of a chihuahua doing Swan Lake, this life sounds nice, the best Inventing Anna spoof we’ve seen, a Judy Blume doco is in the works (!!), the #NightLuxe aesthetic is taking over TikTok and Instagram, there’s going to be a Sixteen Candles reboot, extremely into #GoblinMode, nuns playing soccer in Italy, a long list of Wordle-like games that aren’t Wordle, a crowd-sourced guide to tried and tested doctors you can *actually* trust, crowd-sourced lessons for first home buyers, every 2000s movie intro, one woman’s story of evacuating from Ukraine for Poland, and a wholesome story about how a library in NZ accidentally opened its doors on a public holiday without any staff and everything was… fine?
