Category: Life

[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Why 40 per cent of people are avoiding the news, according to a psychologist

Ali Jasemi, Wilfrid Laurier University

During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.

This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 69 per cent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.

Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.

As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.

Wired for bad news

Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.

The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.

This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.

A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.

Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.

Scanning the whole world

For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.

In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.

Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.

Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.

For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.

Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.

Looking away is not the fix

What’s the solution to news fatigue? Well, it’s not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.

Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We’re wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.

The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.

Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.

There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.

Finally, be wary of “rage bait” — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.

The news will not become less “heavy.” But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.The Conversation

Ali Jasemi, Lecturer, Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “[Reprint] Overwhelmed by Bad News? Looking Away is Not the Fix”…

The Importance of Fruit Cake

personby Gillian Polack
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I keep forgetting to introduce my books to you! Let me remedy this.

This week, someone (a very generous someone) posted about The Year of the Fruit Cake. They said lovely things about it and about my writing. While I ought to simply share the post, or at least repeat the words, this week I am terribly, terribly Australian. Just saying that someone said nice things is blowing my own trumpet in Oz. Tall poppy syndrome is one of our big cultural babies and so I cannot repeat things without feeling as if I need to be cut down. This is, of course, a really bad way of letting you know about my book.

The Year of the Fruit Cake won me a nice trophy and mentions in many places. I will never understand this, because it’s not that easy to read. It’s at the literary end of SF. I wanted to write about a difficult set of subjects (including perimenopause) and I wanted to do it with science fiction and I used so many of the things women experience at that time of life in Australia to shape the novel. Not just as the subjects dealt with in the novel, but in the storytelling itself.

When I went through perimenopause my body was unreliable, so the narrators are unreliable. Everything is personal.

My memory had blips, so my main character has major memory issues.

So many friendships had to be renegotiated, especially those with men and with younger women, who mostly had not idea of the magnitude of the changes and that hot flushes were not just an excuse to wield a pretty fan. Our society lacks story that explains these changes, so I turned one of my perimenoapusal women into an alien.

Eventually I discovered that one of the issues I and my cohort faced was gentle shifts along gender spectra. OK, not so gentle. Now I’m past it, my body doesn’t want to declare how very female it is one minute and that it’s increasing in testosterone the next. I have settled into being female, but not into being female in the same way I once was. The aliens in the novel with their twelve genders are closer to my physical reality than I like to admit. I gave them at least one shift that was delightful. I wish I could do the same for human women. Perimenopause was a nightmare for me, so I made those physical changes a nightmare for my alien-in-human-body.

Also, I wanted to write about othering. Australia is not good to older women, so I wrote about the process of becoming an older woman and having to find new ways of living in society. I had no idea the same thing (in a more extreme version) would apply to me right now as an Australian Jew. I had no idea that this year I would live in a year of Fruit Cake, with an uncertain future and a society I thought was stable turned chancy.

I entirely thought chocolate would remain important and I was totally correct about that, thankfully.

The novel is a slow read and I will never write one as difficult again… but I got some things far too right. I’m glad that one of them was chocolate.

Australia – again

personby Gillian Polack
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I am late! I am late and want to talk about Jewish matters.

The Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has just released the total number of submissions and it’s a lot higher than anyone expected. I predicted 10,000 submissions and everyone around me said that 5,000 would be a lot and would reflect what was happening in our country a lot more. Even 10,000 was considered an overprediction because of the way most people saw antisemitism in Australia, in other words. So what does 20,000 mean? That things matter. That people have things to say.

What the submissions give us is something amazing, especially given that this is a census year and that we can fit those submissions into a snapshot of Australia in 2026 (the last census was in 2021, and you can see what it shows about jewish Australia here: The-Jewish-Population-of-Australia-Report_2021-Census-1.pdf . There are issues with the way data was collected and how unsafe the collection made Jews, and that Judaism was not listed as a religious or cultural option ie people had to write it in manually, but it still gives some indication of who we are in Jewish Australia. We have a surprising number of old people, for instance, and an unsurprisingly high average level of education.

Put these 20,000 submissions into analysis the way that Mass Obersvation Project has done for the UK, and it becomes an enormous data base for research into one aspect of Australian life: how people see Jewish Australia and how Jewish Australia sees itself. What we are. Who we are. How we deal with hate. This will lead to insights into how Australia sees other cultural and religious groups in the country. It has the capacity to change Australia’s self-knowledge.

What’s really interesting is how silent the far left is about the number of submissions. We don’t yet know if those submissions reflect their views as leading or typical. I strongly suspect that their views are bigoted and hateful, but I’m willing to wait and see how the data presents itself. And I want to know what Australia does with all this information about how we think and feel.

Given that the trigger was the Bondi murders and there is a very strong likelihood that those murders were caused by links to certain terrorist groups, we can’t exclude the outside world. But we can take a close look at ourselves and find out who we are and what we want to be.

Australia is in a strange place politically. Everything’s changing. I suspect those 20,000 submissions are part of that change. Who we are and how safe we are and the paths we take are all up for grabs in this very interesting year.

Decisions, decisions

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s really hard to decide on what I should post about today. I have diversions.

The first is that I’m in the final throes of revising my thesis to meet the examiners’ comments. I thought it would be a much bigger task than it was. I’ve sent my revisions and comments to my supervisors and then I send the final in and, hopefully, by the end of the week it will be done and dusted save for graduation. I submitted the thesis over a year ago – even for Australia this is slow. I don’t know why it was so slow, but career-wise it doesn’t matter to me (this is not my first PhD and I’m in my sixties) so it’s better the admin slowness doesn’t apply to young students than it does apply to me. Also, between submission and graduation, my first PhD took 3 years. It was not my fault, but it cost me my first career. By me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

It’s rather nice that lateness doesn’t always carry such costs.

The second is that the submission period for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closed yesterday. Many of us are a bit overwhelmed. On 4 June (10 days before submissions closed) there were over 14,000 submissions, which was a record for Royal Commissions. No-one knows the final number yet.

The staff serving the Royal Commissioner is obligated to read every single one of them. And those of us keeping track are wondering what this means. That Jewish Australia matters? That haters have put in many thoughts? We know that haters have oput in some thoughts. We also know that Palestinian Australia put in a 259 page submission. I’ve seen the outline and need to read it because I cannot make sense of it. Or rather, I can make sense of it in and of itself, but not how it helps Australia handle antisemitism. It seems to be arguing that we’re making things up. This is why I have to check. I’ve been told by quite a few people this last week that antisemitism is fictional, but there are so many incidents right now that this is not a claim so much as a misdirection. I need to know why APAN feels the need to spend 259 pages backing that misdirection if that is, indeed what they’re doing.

What I’m supposed to be doing is writing fiction. I lay in bed last night working out things that needed working out, but today have only written a couple of hundred words. We’re in a weather trap and my bones hurt and I keep procrastinating and worrying about Jewish Australia and other groups being confined by wagon trains circling hate.

Let me leave you and go back to my big writing decision for this week: Lincoln or London in the twelfth century for a section of the novel. I want both, but I don’t think both will fit. I also want Cologne and Speyer. Both! Actually, writing this out has made me think: people travelled in the Middle Ages. Why don’t I have someone travelling to Cologne from Speyer? That would give me the words for Lincoln and London. I just need to check concepts and characters and plot and… all the things… except the history. I have most of the research for that at my fingertips because of the non-fiction I was working on recently and that still has no home. All this research pays.

Staying Safe

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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cover of Don't Fight Back, a book by Meg StoneI walk a lot for exercise, and on those days when I don’t get around to it in the daytime – not to mention those days when it’s hot – I often go for a neighborhood walk around 10 pm. I live just off Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, California.

I also either walk or take public transit when I go out at night to see a movie or meet someone for dinner or go to an event in San Francisco. I don’t like to drive to social events because I hate traffic, really hate to park, and also  might want to have a drink. I do this regardless of whether I’m going with someone or by myself.

I am a little nervous about one thing when I’m out at night, though.

Cars.

Not to sound all old and “get off my lawnish,” but I swear drivers have stopped paying attention to stop signs and even traffic lights. And some of them speed down residential streets. They completely ignore crosswalks, despite the fact that if you take the California written drivers exam at least three of the 20 questions will be about when you’re supposed to yield to pedestrians (all the time).

I’m scared of getting hit by cars. In the winter, when it gets dark early and lots of cars are still on the street, I try to remember my flashlight. And not only do drivers seem more careless than they used to be, but the cars are so damned big.

What I’m not scared of are other human beings on foot.

Unfortunately, other women are. And there are a lot of articles and social media posts and even purported self-defense classes that are aimed at making sure women stay scared.

I always try to debunk the post I see regularly on social media – the one about carrying your keys so that they’re between your fingers (which is only useful if you actually know how to throw a punch) and not going places alone and carrying pepper spray. I work at doing it gently, because people share it in good faith.

They’re scared. The trouble is, they’re mostly scared of the wrong things.

I look up the latest stats, remind people that the biggest risk of sexual assault against women is by people they know – acquaintances, exes, current partners, even family – not strangers. (Murder even more so.) I point out how to pay attention, suggest good self defense classes.

Now, though, I’m just going to tell everyone to read Meg Stone’s new book: Don’t Fight Back and 10 Other Myths About Crime, Personal Safety, and Gender-Based Violence. She’s covered everything I want to say and provided the reader with detailed facts, studies, and statistics to back it up. Continue reading “Staying Safe”…

Australian and Jewish… again

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m sorry I missed last week. Jewish Australia is a bit… different. There’s a Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. I’ve submitted 22 pages to it and keep thinking I missed critical things. Last week was the first of the public hearings, and by Monday morning 9,400 submissions had been made. There are so very many that the open period for submissions was extended by two weeks. This is a vast number, for the whole population of Australia and all its territories is significantly less than the population of California. We fit somewhere between the population of Florida and Texas. If you printed the submissions and handed them out to random Jewish Australians (using the Monday morning numbers, weeks before submissions close), one in eleven would receive an interesting document to read.

Antisemitism is pretty bad here, and whatever the Royal Commission decides will determine our future in many ways. In equally many ways, our future rests on how the rest of Australia feels on hearing just how difficult life has been for Australian Jews.

Even checking up on what is said in the first lot of public hearings was exhausting. So many reports had me nodding alongside, think, “Yep, that’s happened, and oh yes, that too.” I am still annoyed by the people who accuse Jews of complaining too much or of clutching pearls or of being perpetual victims, or of being guilty by dint of being Jewish. In a perfect world, they would stop and listen. They would also not tell me, when I quietly let them know some of the worst incidents, “But what about Gaza?” So many are saying, “If every Australian Jew disassociated themselves from Israel, then there would be no antisemitism.” This is oddly funny, because other times and other places when there have been hate we’ve been told the same thing. Convert to Catholicism was the argument in 15th century Spain. And then came the definitions of impure blood and Judaicising. Some of those who had done the denial as asked were burned alive as Christians because their denials weren’t believed.

It’s a very strange month.

Time and cold and other vagaries

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m taking a break from reality.

Canberra has almost winter weather, and we’ve not even reached the traditional time to change to autumnal linen and to turn on the heaters. That traditional day is a public holiday, which this year falls on a long weekend … and happens to be my birthday. I will turn 65. I have dinner with a friend the day before my birthday, and lunch with another friend the long weekend Monday, but that’s it. Most Canberrans will, I suspect, be down the coast, trying desperately to avoid below zero temperatures. The coast has a very mild winter and, by Australian standards, Canberra does not. (We don’t get down to zero Fahrenheit, just to reassure you, but we’ve already been below zero Celsius in April.)

Let me ask you all a question, then.

Since it’s a mug’s game to work on one’s 65th, and since the Dawn Service* (which I would’ve liked to go to) requires me leaving my flat before 3 am when the temperature will be below zero, I’ve decided to stay home and watch a sequence of streamed films on Saturday. Which films should I watch? The Lord of the Rings comes to mind, but… I’m not certain.

I was going to watch When Things were Rotten and Robin Hood, Men in Tights, but they require note-taking, since I’m writing an article about them in a few weeks.

Suggest something. All suggestions will be taken seriously.

* The public holiday is ANZAC Day, which is our equivalent of Memorial Day and is the sole day of the year when it is legal to play Two-Up. Two-Up is one of the most boring forms of gambling possible, but it is very, very Australian.

Living in the Ruins

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My current morning book is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

After reading the other morning, it occurred to me that we — in this case “we” means progressives who want a better country and are resisting the current destruction — keep trying to come up with fixes for our current messes that don’t change the system very much. So, for example, our ideas about health care are to imitate the European social programs and set up some kind of government-run single-payer system.

And while that’s not a bad idea as far as it goes and far more radical than anything that’s likely to happen anytime soon, I still have a feeling that we’re going to need something more than that, because our health care system is a colosal ruin.

Probably we have to start by recognizing how ruined things really are.

Tsing’s book uses the harvesting of matsutake mushrooms as a metaphor – or maybe a guideline – for dealing with with life in an area that has been ruined.

Matsutake only grow in the wild; they can’t be farmed. And they mostly grow in ruined forests, which is why there is a thriving business in them in the forests of Oregon, where the old growth forests were heavily logged. The timber companies replaced them with timber “plantations” of fir and lodgepole pine.

While this doesn’t make for the diverse and healthy forest that came before, it does provide an environment for the matsutake.

The matsutake are a delicacy in Japan, which provides a market.

There are many different kinds of pickers and also a variety of buyers who arrange the international sales. Many of the pickers are immigrants from various parts of Southeast Asia who were displaced by the U.S. war in Vietnam and other parts of the region, but even those come from different ethnic groups and have different approaches.

There are also immigrants from Latin America as well as some White native-born Americans, many of them war veterans who find holding regular jobs difficult.

But also – interestingly – there are Japanese Americans who approach this as a cultural activity, not a business. These are people descended from those who were interred in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. Their approach is quite different from that of the people doing it as a business.

The various immigrant cultures and their descendants are people figuring out how to survive after their worlds have been upended by war and economic crisis. Making a living finding mushrooms that grow in ruins makes sense in their world.

But for people like me, middle class though far from wealthy, the idea of surviving amidst the ruins that capitalism has wrought is scary. Still, when I look around me, I see those ruins everywhere.

I walk around Oakland, where ordinary houses sell for a million dollars (fancy ones for much more) and the rents for cafes and retailers are so exorbitant that far too many go out of business quickly. I see boarded up buildings everywhere alongside new apartment complexes — ugly ones, but still shiny.

Our city has been cut to pieces by highways running through it, tearing apart neighborhoods. Those highways and other badly planned projects add environmental ruin to the mix.

And of course, we have people living on the streets. Some have serious mental illness or addition problems, but a lot of them just don’t have the money for a place to live.

So much money and so much ruin, all at once.

It’s not just Oakland; I mention it because it’s where I live now and I know it. You can see it everywhere. Chris Brown’s book A Natural History of Empty Lots provides detailed looks at what creatures and plants are coming back in ruined urban landscapes, primarily in Austin, Texas.

Now I can see better ways of doing damn near everything and I would love to wave a magic wand and make those things happen. We have the tools, the resources, even the brainpower to make all this happen. Our problem has always been the will, particularly the political will.

But I think we’re only going to build this better world in the ruins of the capitalist state. Continue reading “Living in the Ruins”…

Some Thoughts on Cultural Exclusion

personby Gillian Polack
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This is a post from my blog, from 9 years ago. I’ve very mildly edited it. There are two reasons for sharing it with you.

The first is that I have an intermittent fever and that my body feels as if someone is attacking it with a sledgehammer. The illness will be gone in a couple of days, but today I’m not up to much.

The second is that sometimes it helps to see the paths our current problems have travelled. I’ve been dealing with some of the current issues all my life, and yet those who have not tell me it’s all Israel’s fault and our society has nothing to do with the discrimination it carries nor the hate embedded deeply. This is a snapshot of my Australia in 2017, when Australia was adapting some of the positions that dominate today. Most of those who saw me as painted now exclude me because I’m Jewish, for instance. Almost the whole Left (where I used to belong) tells me what I am and ushes me aside or, in some cases, do things that are much worse.  I was never given the academic support to sort everything out properly (I came close), but I have moved a lot further towards understanding. I may talk more about this when I explain my books. I’ve already been explaining what those 9 years have led to, for Jews – today you see one single aspect of how it came to be.

Next week I will try to return to talking about my own books, including the one that led to this post. First, however, I need to be less ill.

 

Right now, the results of my research force me to reassess the world around me. This reassessment shows remarkably clear indications of how perfectly nice and thoughtful people help set up a complex culture from which bigots can source hate. Now that I know a bit more about where it comes from, I need to take a pause in my research and digest it.

I’ve written a summary of key aspects of my latest findings for those who want, and that summary has tentatively been accepted for publication. Watch social media, for I will announce it when it emerges. Beyond those findings, the project might have to wait for years. This post is a bit about the project and a bit about why it’s delayed. And how I’m living the life… but not in the way anyone expected.

Quite simply, if I get the right kind of job then I can do the full academic shebang and hit the subject hard and sort it out. I know what I’m doing and how to turn it into a book. If I don’t get the right kind of job, then slow and gentle is all I can manage, with occasional reports like this one and very occasional conference papers. I’ll be able to teach from it, and each course will be exciting and amazingly useful. That’s all, though. No book. Very few articles.

For those who have seen my work so far and have said “But this is important”, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that kind of research in my current situation. Income matters. At the very least, some of my results will appear in my fiction, for my fiction continues without money. More slowly than if I had money, but it continues.

This knowledge is based on experience. Putting other peoples’ intellectual wishes first has not helped me get enough money to live on, so I now put my own needs first in my big life decisions.

There’s another reason for putting my own needs first in those big life decisions. My research has pointed to a bunch of narratives that set up society to exclude perfectly good people and to nurture bigots. I’m right now observing how it hits the disabled and the cultural and religious minority and gender minorities. I’ve now realised how much my own life in Canberra is affected by this.

It’s complicated, but there are two main outcomes.

The first is that many Canberrans exclude me by making decisions for me regarding what activities they expect from me in my life. Some of the reasons are probably excellent. I don’t know. I don’t know what those reasons are. I am to them sufficiently lower in status to not need an explanation or consultation.

The second is related. One of the most annoying aspects of being minority right now is that earned status is difficult to retain unless one is the token representative of that minority. So in Canberra (but certainly not in all other places) I often have to negotiate work as if I were new to the workforce. And I’m one of the lucky people in my lack of seniority, for who else at my level of the hierarchy has two PhDs and whose short list of publications is four pages long? (there is no long list – I dumped it when my short non-fiction hit the 500 mark, which was while ago) And I have friends, who help. And patrons. And I’ve managed to get to several conferences this year, despite living on around $20,000 annually.

Usually these two factors lead to both exclusion and silencing. I keep pointing out that other people who are excluded are silenced more effectively. I can be left off this list or that, but I still get invitations to write and I still have things to say. This is one of my privileges. (and now I’ve used loads of current jargon – such virtue!)

Taking things back to my research for a moment, I’m talking about these issues today because I found a gap in my knowing. I need to find out if that same gap is present elsewhere, especially in my interpretation of how wider culture affects story. I need to look at who is allowed in a group and who isn’t in novels and other long stories.

I noticed something interesting in The 100 today. Skin colour counts in US tales. This isn’t new. This isn’t what I noticed. What I noticed is that focussing on US definitions of racism and silencing and exclusion to assess who got killed under what circumstances made me miss something else.

In our fiction, our central characters have certain types of personalities. It’s as if they come from a range of action or emotional figurines. We take them out of the box and play with them. Those who lack those characteristics are painted figures on the back of the box. They don’t get full lives. Most people define themselves as the figurines when they place themselves in story, as people with full lives. What I think I’m seeing is how people define those who are merely figures. And I’m seeing the circumstances when I am a figure, left behind when the figurine is brought out to play but considered to be part of the backdrop. I’m not seen as excluded because of my painted role, but my role is limited to being in the backdrop of the lives of others.

Like all of us, I carry my own prejudices and see other people as active in my life (figurines) or as backdrop (painted figures). My personal need is to find out who I see as painted figures and give them the dignity of full lives if I’ve excluded them due to prejudices I bear. I also have to accept that a lot of people who were once close to me have, in the change of culture, shifted me to the painted figure category. They want me on the back of their box to illuminate their life, but they don’t want to have dinner with me. I need to accept that some of this is due to prejudice.

As ever, this is a simplification. I needed a quick and dirty overview so that I could start to think how we do what we do.

I wanted to use the circles shutting people out that are described in Joan G Robinson’s When Marnie Was There. Anna was excluded by these invisible circles and, re-reading the book today, they felt very familiar. The subjective feeling of being excluded by invisible circles, however, rests on whatever draws those circles. In my childhood, it was a primary school child whose name I mentioned the other day to my oldest friend. She laughed and remembered, with equal irony.

This is our old way of seeing it. It works when we move from circles to circles and when we see individuals as having to deal with being alone but assign them equal status as human beings. It’s well encoded and very well described. This means that it’s a part of what’s happening culturally right now. A part. Not the whole thing. For culture is changing. We need to encode the changes. That’s what I’m doing here, but it’s a rough sketch. I need something better than toy figurines and the drawing on the box.

This means it’s back to novels. We encode cultures in the nice straightforward framework of the novel. This means that I can find out a lot about what’s happening around me by looking closely at how we depict ourselves and what we write into a story without knowing. The most worrying discovery so far is the one I explained in my Helsinki paper. The Helsinki paper isn’t for publication yet. This isn’t because it’s bad research. It’s because that paper encapsulated the moment when I realised just how big the thing is that I’m doing and how large its ramifications.

I wish I had that fulltime academic job. I wish that researching this didn’t have to come at the end of the month, after everything else. I only do the amount I do because I’m efficient at it. I can’t spend large amounts of time in archives and libraries right now for I simply need to spend that time earning grocery money. That’s my lifestyle problem.

My scholarly problem right now is that, with this strange lifestyle, I’m carrying too much baggage. I can’t do the research partly because I need income, but the lower status lifestyle gets in my intellectual way. The life carries emotions with it. Every time I’m excluded I feel them come to the surface, for I need to explain them.

Those emotions are why I’m not making as much sense as I’d like tonight. I’m in the middle of big things, intellectually, and my life echoes them.

 

 

Things Happen

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late!

This is because Australia is antisemitism central again and I’ve been dealing. You don’t need yet another post on Australia’s problems, so let me tell you the story of a book.

Some years ago, I wrote a novel. A publisher signed it up but said “This should be a duology.” I rewrote the first book and added the sequel. Then they went bust.

Shortly after, another publisher fell in love with the duology but said, “I want the rest of the story.” I did the rewrite and the last volume and it became a trilogy. The COVID hit and the publisher ran into so much trouble. I’m still with them for other books, but we agreed I should find a new publisher for the trilogy.

A US publisher has taken on the first volume. If it sells well, then the trilogy will finally emerge. I so hope it sells well. I’ve been quiet about it because this book was having so much bad luck. Not as much bad luck as my cursed novel, but still, much bad luck.

However, we are finally in a “Watch this space” moment. The cover artist has Ideas and the editor is getting back to me very soon.

When there is an official announcement, I promise to share it. In the meantime, it’s about time I talked about my other published work. I might do a series of posts, to remind myself of novels written and books published.

That gives you two reasons to watch this space.