Excretory opening, ‘cloacally’ known as butthole
I wrote a draft more than a month ago on how to read a research paper, which I meant to include in this newsletter. However, every week, something big happened and I favoured that big story over the drafted guide. Now it is just something I keep in the ‘idea bank’ – a place to deposit completed work that is not time-sensitive that can be dispensed anytime when needed. This week, I thought it would be time to publish it, so I sent out a tweet that I thought would accompany it well:
But you know, I think the two articles themselves make for excellent reads, so the guide remains in the bank, maybe until next week. For now, here’s the research paper and here’s the news article.
Your body, your self, your surgeon, his Instagram ($)
Social media gave the Martin Jugenburg, a celebrity surgeon and doctor turned influencer, a stage on which to show off his masterworks. “But when cosmetic surgery becomes entertainment, who owns the story?” asks Katherine Laidlaw for Wired:
Laura says her surgery was streamed on Instagram Live that December day. Then, a few months later, as her body began to feel like her own again, Laura noticed a picture on Dr. 6ix’s Instagram. She recognized her long fingernails, her tattoo, the slight etch of her abs and her bare breast. This was not a photo from the operating room. Jugenburg had pulled it from her personal feed and reposted it to his. It felt like a step too far. When she asked him to take it down, she says he refused. (Jugenburg did not respond to a request for comment about Laura’s account.) Three years later, it’s still up. The tattoo along her ribcage just below her breast reads, “My body. My rules.”
The moderation war is coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse ($)
Alex Kantrowitz for OneZero:
Substack, Spotify, and Clubhouse’s current perspective on content moderation mirror how Twitter, Facebook, and Google once viewed the practice. Twitter executives initially called themselves “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” Facebook insisted it had no business touching political content. YouTube allowed Alex Jones and other wingnuts to build misinformation empires on its service. Now, Substack CEO Chris Best — reflecting the smaller platforms’ attitude on moderation — told CJR that if you’re looking for him to take an “editorial position” you should find another service.
Kantrowitz also writes about Big Tech on Substack, and my newsletter, too, is hosted on Substack.
Google threatens to leave Australia – but its poker face is slipping
In France, Google agrees to pay French news sites to direct traffic to the latter, yet in Australia, Google is threatening to shut down search services if they have to do the same there.
Alex Hern for The Guardian:
Unfortunately for Google, the company has a bad poker face. Even as it was warning Australian senators that it would have to pull out of the country rather than pay the newly levied fee, on the other side of the world in France, Google had agreed to do just that. In an agreement signed between Google France and the industrial body representing the country’s news industry, Google will pay licensing fees to individual news publishers to reuse their material online. Backed by France’s strong copyright protections for the news industry, Google had already negotiated with a few publishers, including Le Monde, but the new agreement sets a blanket precedent.
I have mentioned briefly in The 24th Block about the proposal to make tech giants pay for news.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Law Yao Hua’s guide for aspiring freelance science journalists in Southeast Asia because boy, do we need more of us – especially since I’m leaving the region soon. 🙃
I’m watching this silent movie-inspired short about housing challenges faced by queer people in Malaysia by Songsang Studios. Here’s Faris Saad’s writeup on the project for Queer Lapis.
Ps. I am looking for a long-term tenant for my place. I’m prioritising friends and I am a 🏳️🌈-friendly landlord.
I’m listening to lo-fi Bernie Sanders (City Eyes by Lewis Harris) and it’s terrific:
Chart of the week
Every day I look at charts like this to see if my near future is safer here or there. 🙃