Landlords, Performative Posting, and What I'm Buying

The giveaway is a copy of 'Time for Dinner' by Adam Liaw

Dear Readers,

Next week I’ll be placing the first ever Bibliocarta bulk book order for copies of the two required readings I’m setting for our Morocco travelling book club in May. I’m thrilled with the prototype for our (B Corp Certified) Bibliocarta drawstring library bags and cannot wait to get them and start stuffing them with books and posting them out!

If you’re still tempted to join us, we’re approaching the cutoff point for bookings. I know one more person who is just waiting to hear back from her boss about getting leave approved before she can book in this week (fingers crossed for you, Roshni!) and the good news is that there’s both a twin share place and a solo room place still free, so you can choose. :) Let me know if you’ve got any questions. And starting from next week I’ll be sharing information about the reading list with everyone here so that you can play along at home even if you can’t sip mint tea with us in Marrakesh.

I now have a small favour to ask. The Dymocks 101 is now open for voting, and actually it makes a huge difference whether or not an author’s book sits on that big wall, cover facing out, for an entire year.

Imagine a woman has gone into Dymocks for a gift and she sees the cover of The Work and she remembers she’s heard something-or-other about it being alright, and she thinks, ‘okay, I’ll give it a go,’ and KOWABUNGA!! she’s enjoying the blueberries with her partner. Voting for my book is basically an act of public service. Consider it your contribution to adult sex ed. At least together maybe we can stop Atomic Habits getting so many votes again? Take two minutes for it please and thank you.

Best wishes and happy reading,

Bri

Spoiler Alert

The next Spoiler Alert livestream is going to happen on Wednesday 19 February and we’re doing Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton and Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik. The votes from last week’s poll have also given us our juicy topic of conversation for the final ten minutes: Text Publishing being bought by Penguin Random House! Definitely something I am busting to discuss but can’t put in public in writing.

Got a thought about it? Send me a voice memo here—either naming yourself or anonymous—so I can play it when we’re live and we can all respond and discuss. You can watch previous Spoiler Alerts here.

Good News

1. Fuck predatory landlords and fuck landlords who don’t pay tax on their rental income. Can you imagine? You’re one of the 20% of the Australian population who own two properties, you’re renting the second one out, and you just decide that you don’t want to or shouldn’t have to pay tax on the income from that rent… well well well the ATO has announced: they’re coming for you. They’re setting up a data-matching program to claw back the $1.2 billion in missing revenue. As the Sydney Morning Herald report, ‘Previous ATO analysis found nine out of 10 landlords were getting their income tax returns wrong.’ Ooops!? You’re smart enough to hoard real estate and not smart enough to do your tax? I don’t think so! Truly the blood pumping through my veins at the potential for righteous and fair Robin Hooding here I just can’t deal.

   

2. Credit where credit is due: it’s important that we appreciate Peter Dutton’s promise not to back out of the Paris Agreement if he wins the election this year. As Samantha Maiden reported here, Dutton is going against the extreme fringe on his own side, as ‘South Australian Senator Alex Antic and Queensland Nationals Senator Matt Canavan [said] that it was “encouraging” to see the US President dump the Paris agreement in one of his acts’. The shadow energy minister told ABC Radio National ‘the Coalition is absolutely committed to the Paris agreement and we’re also committed to net zero.’ I hate that I have to write this, but I’m not confident about this year’s federal election, and at least this signals that a bad result here wouldn’t be as bad as what we’re seeing in the USA.

3. A baby swell shark was born in an aquarium in Louisiana. So what? Here’s what: the aquarium only held females and the females hadn’t been in contact with a male for more than three years. The Guardian report here that the baby shark has been named after the Native American Chumash people’s word for shark, ‘onyoko’, and is also a female. If she was indeed born of parthenogenesis (a rare form of asexual reproduction) rather than extremely delayed fertilisation, it could mean incredible things for resilience of this and other species. We take hope wherever we can find it when the natural world adapts.

   

Bad News

1. New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics is showing terrible trends in prison populations and spending. This article in The Conversation makes the salient points: our per capita imprisonment rate is higher than Canada, the United Kingdom, and all of Western Europe; operating and capital costs each year are now well over $6 billion which is double what it was a decade ago; and ‘As of January, the Northern Territory hit a grim milestone. More than 1% of the territory’s total population is now incarcerated in adult prison. This is the first time this has happened in any Australian jurisdiction.’ Importantly, these rising figures aren’t because crime is worse. The two key factors at play are longer sentences and the difficulty in getting bail. There’s a prison boom going on and it’s not evidenced-based; it’s cultural.

2. If you’re trying to get your head around the news about Nvidia losing $600 billion USD in value (the biggest single-day loss for a public company ever on record) I recommend this opinion piece by Dr Mihir Desai. He sets out how all these major tech companies are pumping each other up, and hypothesises that the snake is now eating its own tail. The new alternative to ChatGPT is CCP-owned DeepSeek, which reportedly doesn’t need the Nvidia chips, so people jumped ship. (Have a read of this Guardian piece about how it wouldn’t answer questions about Tiananmen Square and claims Taiwan for China.) The comments section on the Desai piece is good too.

   

3. Aid organisations in Ukraine are winding down since Trump’s announcement that he was halting foreign development aid. While his administration is doing its 90-day audit, The New York Times report that deliveries are stopping right in the middle of winter. ‘Yuriy Boyechko, the founder and chief executive of Hope for Ukraine, which works with U.S.-funded Ukrainian groups to supply firewood to frontline residents, said the impact of the halt in funding would be immediate… “This is just extremely harmful because you have millions of people in frontline areas near Kherson and Kharkiv who have been living without light for a long time. For them, firewood has been the only source of heat and a way to prepare food.” Remember when Trump promised in June last year at a rally that he’d end the war somehow? He’s now threatening to cut all aid permanently. Right, so, ending the war’s effect on him.

Good Reviews

1. If you enjoyed Trust by Hernan Diaz after my strong endorsement last week, take a deep breath and plunge into this rigorously-researched interview with him on Between the Covers. It’s a bit technical, so especially good for the writers amongst us. I’ve loved getting your DMs and emails about how much you’re loving Trust—keep em coming!

2. Sometimes a book review is so good it makes me cross my fingers to see if the reviewer is also an author whose work I can continue to gulp down elsewhere. Elaine Blair’s piece in The New York Review of Books is about two recent releases, both titled Consent, that are memoirs of women looking back on relationships from their younger years with older men; turning them over, examining them with new post-#MeToo attitudes. Comparing and contrasting the approaches, we wade right into the ugly grey areas of ‘what size age gap is suspicious’ and ‘where were her parents’ and ‘does it make a difference if the sex then transformed into a long-term marriage’? I would teach a class using this review. It is such a strong example of the form, and contains both critique and sensitivity. Blair’s only book I could find is a literary guide to St Petersburg but she writes for TNYRoB regularly. Totally fantastic.

   

3. On the weekend I realised I needed a new bra, so I went into Myer and bought the exact same bra I have been buying for over 10 years without looking at anything else and without even trying it on. I’ve been buying the same size of the ‘Barely There Contour Bra’ by Berlei and it is a rock-solid gold product. I am so grateful for its reliability. Apparently they sell one every minute. I have it in three colours. I wear it until it wears out. I buy a replacement. And it got me thinking… what else is that good? My joggers. Recommended by my podiatrist for people who walk a shitton, and I just buy a new pair and wear em out and replace them: the ‘Ghost’ series by Brooks. What else? Every year I get an identical Moleskine Weekly Notebook Diary in X-Large. So, over to you! Please share the thing you buy again and again and again. I don’t care how boring and useful. I want your real recommendations.

This Week’s Group Chat Hot Topic: Performative Positing

Note: For years now I’ve given away my weekly bad reviews, essays, rants, and gripes for free. The trouble is, News & Reviews is no longer a fun little sneaky thing. Substack won’t let me cull low-engagement subscribers so we’ve hit 11,000 readers and despite my efforts, that number keeps growing. I was also inspired by this recent interview in which Tina Brown says ‘The irony is that you need to be really good to do the 800 word pieces.’ People like regular editions because they’re insightful but also snappy. So! I’ve swapped the order and I’ll keep the good reviews up high above the paywall but I’m putting the bad reviews/juicy stuff and the giveaways down below. I’m experimenting with what to call it but the vibe is definitely ‘group chat hot topic’. As always, if you’re high enthusiasm and low funds, just reply to an email and I’ll comp you for six months. :)

I’ve been watching people do the internet advocacy dance since 2018. The game has changed a lot in the last six-ish years but a few core icks remain the same; the strategic silences around when advocacy becomes lucrative is one, and the pressure on people to take positions on all issues at all times is another.

Many years ago I pretty much stopped sharing anything serious on Instagram. This newsletter was a place where the terrible and wonderful things in life could be acknowledged simultaneously, but the jarring and rapid visual feed on Instagram flattens everything onto a single field that can be mindlessly scrolled past. I’m not saying the platform doesn’t have value for advocates. The invasion of Gaza is a clear example of how individuals with their own pages and accounts were doing critical legwork that major news outlets either couldn’t or didn’t want to.

But when I think about what I call ‘performative posting’ I’m thinking not so much about embedded journalists, and a lot more about the regular punters who have sort of incidentally become influencer-adjacent, or feel good when they share the ‘right’ things.

This week we watched another Invasion Day celebrated as Australia Day, and I was asking myself: what is the difference between walking in a march and posting something on your Instagram stories? When does allyship and solidarity actually mean something and when is it just performative?

And then I saw Anthony Albanese say that Grace Tame’s FUCK MURDOCH shirt was ‘was clearly designed to get attention’ and found that very interesting…