Weekly Roundup (August 1, 2023) (Patreon)

(Yes, this title is a joke now.)

Lord. Where do I start? Most of what I've been up to is showing up in my writing. Otherwise, I've been popping upstate to visit Janet and my parents and scraping through my penultimate semester of college. In December, I'll finally graduate and leave school behind. Where my work goes from there is a mystery whose answer will surface pretty quickly, I imagine.

If I manage to get work in the journalism industry, which seems quite likely at this point, my focus will largely shift to that. I can't imagine I'll abandon Patreon or Eruditorum Press any time soon, but they'll probably become an ancillary operation.

Anyway. The headlines:

Let's talk about Sinéad O'Connor, who date/cause of death is at the time of writing still unconfirmed. You simply don't get giants like her anymore; she was unparalleled. An utterly powerful fighter for the oppressed whose own suffering was both overlooked and mocked. Shirley Manson's tribute to O'Connor is beautiful, and Kaya Oakes' tribute from an Irish-American Catholic perspective is just essential.

The allegations against Lizzo are horrific, and my heart goes out to everybody who's shocked and hurt by these revelations. I can't say I'm surprised given Lizzo's track record of cruelty and classism on Twitter (she called for Rawiya Kameir to be fired over this excellent review of her album, which isn't even a negative review). But given the significance of a fat Black woman in pop music for so many people, learning that Lizzo is an abuser is mostly just sad.

Spencer Ackerman grills the Biden administration for its failure to curtail the surveillance state.

My long-time friend Jaime Rebanal wrote a lovely piece about graduating from film school in the age of the writer/actors' strike. 

While Biden is grandly fucking up in re: surveillance, he's actually doing pretty well at addressing sexual assault in the military. More action than I expected to see from a president.

The faculty at Texas A&M, my abusive bio-mother's alma mater, are raising the alarm bells about administration racism.

Oh yeah, and The New York Times reports that fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states.