Progressive culture since 1954
In March, the US Senate passed a bill known as the Fight Sex Trafficking Online Act (FOSTA), with ninety-seven votes in favour and only two opposed. This bill and its predecessor, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), seek to address widespread concerns about child trafficking in the sex industry by targeting internet platforms deemed to facilitate trafficking, particularly Backpage.
Every dollar of the $88 million the Department of Defence is contributing towards the Monash Centre is a dollar not spent on, say, bettering the material and mental lives of Australian veterans, 325 of whom suicided between 2001 and 2015 (almost six times as many as Australian Defence Force personnel have been killed in conflict since 2001).
Most critiques of awards like the Vogel centre on the age restriction.
My argument relates to a much broader issue, and one that these earlier critiques assume: the persisting myth that the Vogel sets up a literary career.
Promise is a company that aims to reduce the population of people detained while awaiting trial because they cannot post bail (what Australians call being on remand). There are currently 450,000 people in the US in this category. Through a variety of technical tools, from tracking devices to intelligent calendars, Promise would allow the state to keep tabs on these people, but without the need to keep them in jail.
The Mexican dream went something like this: Talia’s dad is dead, and what’s less like a dead dad than Pina Coladas on the beach, maybe some Mayan ruins, some of the less morbid ones. It was supposed to be just me and Maggie but we needed to get her out of it, her shredded family, the eulogies suggested by every park and school and supermarket. The whole city full of so sorry with Talia in the middle, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen bench among the funeral programs and the flowers, gorging herself on cheeses sent by the sympathetic.