Liz is on a writer’s retreat right now and so it’s mostly Steph scrawling all over everything in glee.

(The picture is a painting Steph commissioned for her housemate’s birthday by the amazing Mia)

Steph loves this article: The Case Against Colorblind Casting

But his success hasn’t come without compromises. Isaac is open about the choices he’s made in his career including dropping his last name, Hernández. “Starting out as an actor, you immediately worry about being pigeonholed or typecast,” he said to the magazine In. “I don’t want to just go up for the dead body, the gangster, the bandolero, whatever. I don’t want to be defined by someone else’s idea of what an Oscar Hernández should be playing.”

What to do when you’re not the hero any more

Capitalism is just a story. Religion is just a story. Patriarchy and white supremacy are just stories. They are the great organising myths that define our societies and determine our futures, and I believe – I hope – that a great rewriting is slowly, surely underway.

I’m just going to talk about how capitalism is a story forevvvvver.

Nothing new, but following the murders of the Littles, in case you need something new to give you words to describe male violence: It’s extreme masculinity – not love or despair – that drives a father to kill his children

Masculinity is not some fragile butterfly on a wheel. It depends on reducing other people to objects. The solution is not to recreate an imaginary golden age in which said objects were – so we tell ourselves – more pliable and less likely to disrupt the narrative.

Steph loves this dude

It pisses me off that Asian food has to be cheaper. Why? Not one person has given me a reason why. All the ingredients that we’re getting are top quality, and just as expensive as any other restaurant. Look at the version of cacio e pepe we’re serving here. The only expensive ingredient we’re not using is parmesan—and guess what parmesan is? MSG. We’re replacing the parmesan with our own fermented chickpea paste that took us six to nine months to make. So fuck you guys. I’m not getting on the phone and ordering a wheel of parmesan. Don’t tell me that I can’t charge like Italian food.

Speaking of parmesan and other cheese-related matters:

Inside the World of Black Market Cheese

(We hope you’re picturing a Mission: Impossible style heist on a cheesemonger’s!)

(Australia relaxed its ban on raw milk cheeses in 2015.)

Apparently 2016 is the year to embrace vegan cheese, but who knows how much is available in Australia?  Answer: probably Stephanie.

The real problem is not the lamb ad but the militarisation of Australian nationalism

In fact, Lee Lin Chin’s participation in the lamb campaign illustrates the limits of the left’s increasing preoccupation with symbolism and representation. Meat and Livestock Australia didn’t create the new nationalism and neither did Chin. A country consistently engaged in armed conflict for close to 15 years will inevitably develop a belligerently jingoistic culture – and there’s no necessary incompatibility between that and the kind of official multiculturalism championed by SBS.

This is an excellent article arguing against the removal of welfare/government assistance in Australia, for those of us who have family members who like to claim that poor people deserve to be poor/aren’t working enough: Poverty in colony and metropole.

A really good post, not really new, but sometimes it needs to be said again, when your hero does a terrible thing: replying to some of the most common arguments about david bowie and lori maddox.

How are you commemorating Invasion Day? We hope it’s not with racist underwear!

Not in my name: On racist white knight rubbish

As a white Australian, I want to draw attention to one specific underlying message of the Knox piece. The article is written on the assumption that a white man is permitted – nay, welcome – to use the technology of racism to mock a black man, presumably to defend a white woman sports journalist.

It is possible that Knox thinks he is defending all women. Yet given the gross racial stereo-typing of the piece, we can be reasonably sure that Knox’s thinking did not extend to Indigenous, black, women of colour. No. He implicitly presumes to be writing in defence of white women.