The exercise, conducted in international waters by a cruiser, frigate and replenishment ship, involved what is said to have been poor notice given to Australian authorities on February 21. But the matter has rapidly burgeoned into something else: that what the Chinese task fleet did was mischievously remarkable, exceptional and snooty to convention and protocols. It is on that score that incontinent demagogy has taken hold.

Media outlets have done little to soften the barbs. A report by ABC News, for instance, notes that Airservices Australia was “only aware of the exercises 40 minutes after China’s navy opened a ‘window’ for live-fire exercises from 9.30am.” The first pickup of the exercises came from a Virgin Australia pilot, who had flown within 250 nautical miles of the operation zone and warned of the drills. Airservices Australia was immediately contacted, with the deputy CEO of the agency, Peter Curran, bemused about whether “it was a potential hoax or real.”

Defence Chief Admiral David Johnston told Senate estimates that he would have preferred more notice for the exercises – 24-48 hours was desirable – but it was clear that Coalition Senator and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson wanted more. Paterson had thought it “remarkable that Australia was relying on civilian aircraft for early warning about military exercises by a formidable foreign task group in our region.” To a certain extent, the needlessly irate minister got what he wanted, with the badgered Admiral conceding that the Chinese navy’s conduct had been “irresponsible” and “disruptive”.

Wu Qian, spokesperson for the China National Ministry for Defence, offered a different reading: “During the period, China organised live-fire training of naval guns toward the sea on the basis of repeatedly issuing prior safety notices”. Its actions were “in full compliance with international law and international practice, with no impact on aviation flight safety”. That said, 49 flights were diverted on February 21.

Much was also made about what were the constituent elements of the fleet. As if it mattered one jot, the Defence Force chief was pressed on whether a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine had made up the task force. “I don’t know whether there is a submarine with them, it is possible, task groups occasionally do deploy with submarines but not always,” came the reply. “I can’t be definitive whether that’s the case.”

The carnival of fear was very much in town, with opposition politicians keen to blow air into the balloon of the China threat across the press circuit. The shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie warned listeners on Sydney radio station 2GB of “the biggest peacetime military buildup since 1945”, Beijing’s projection of power with its blue-water navy, the conduct of two live-fire exercises and the Chinese taskforce operating within Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone off Tasmania. Apparently, all of this showed the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to be “weak” for daring to accept that the conduct complained of was legal under international law. “Now that may be technically right, but that misses the deeper subtext, and that is China is now in our backyard, and they’ve demonstrated that we don’t have the will to insist on our national interest and mutual respect.”

There are few voices of sensible restraint in Australia’s arid landscape of strategic thinking, but one could be found. Former principal warfare officer of the Royal Australian Navy, Jennifer Parker, commendably remarked that this hardly warranted the title of “a crisis”. To regard it as such “with over-the-top indignation diminishes our capacity to tackle real crises as the region deteriorates.” Australia might, at the very least, consider modernising a surface fleet that was “the smallest and oldest we’ve had since 1950.”

Allegations that Beijing should not be operating in Australia’s exclusive economic zone, let alone conduct live-fire exercises in international waters, served to give it “a propaganda win to challenge our necessary deployments to North-East Asia and the South China Sea – routes that carry two-thirds of our maritime trade.”

The cockeyed priorities of the Australian defence establishment lie elsewhere: fantasy, second hand US nuclear-powered submarines that may, or may never make their way to Australia; mushy hopes of a jointly designed nuclear powered submarine specific to the AUKUS pact that risks sinking off the design sheet; and the subordination of Australian land, naval and spatial assets to the United States imperium.

Such is the standard of political debate that something as unremarkable as this latest sea incident has become a throbbing issue that supposedly shows the Albanese government as insufficiently belligerent. Yet there was no issue arising, other than a statement of presence by China’s growing navy, something it was perfectly entitled to do.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

It’s been really nice. I’m grateful to my publicist in particular who has been holding my hand throughout this entire process. I’m going to keep writing books so I can continue having her send me a schedule every day with everything I’m supposed to do. I published what I thought was a novel before, Homesick, which is called a memoir in the U.S. It was with Unnamed Press, a small press in L.A., and I did a tour but I didn’t do as much publicity and marketing.

As Olga Tokarczuk’s translator, for a long time I was desperately trying to get people to read her. And then we won the Booker and she won the Nobel Prize, and all of a sudden we were in the spotlight. I always hated public speaking and things like that but I got a little bit used to it.

What do you think about the marketing of a memoir versus a novel?

I’ve never resolved that question. I mostly read novels and I haven’t really read that much memoir, so I was surprised to learn that I might have written one. I think there’s a lot of discomfort, maybe specifically in the US, around defining what is strictly true about someone’s life and there’s a push to force them to acknowledge that truth or untruth. In other places I translate from, like Argentina, it’s totally fine to write the classic semi-autobiographical novel. And I don’t think people call into question your authenticity just because you say that it’s a novel. I think readers should call anything anything, and probably authors should get to choose how they label their own book.

I recently read Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors, and in it a character says, “I don’t like novels, I like books.”

I mean, whatever works. My preference is for breaking down those kinds of boundaries. I like prose poetry, I like multimedia and experimental works. And that’s kind of the direction that literature is heading in.

The Extinction of Irena Rey is definitely blending the real and the imagined. It’s about a famous Polish author and her translators, told from the perspective of one of them and “translated” by her fictional colleague. And it’s in this very surreal woodland setting. What was your research and development process like?

I went to the Białowieża Forest in 2017, which is when the book is set. I had heard about what was happening in the forest, which was that the Polish government had started logging in the national park and there was widespread concern that habitats were being destroyed in a way that had never really happened before. The trees themselves were being taken out of the forest and what was being planted in their stead was just oaks, which is a Polish national symbol but not historically or naturally the predominant tree in the forest. So there was just a lot going on, and I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

I was in the reserve part of the park, talking to a park worker who mentioned in passing this fungus that was growing on a diseased tree. And I thought the look of the fungus was so striking. It looked like a horse’s hoof, it was huge and hard, like a disembodied thing from an animal that was sort of floating on a tree. And he told me this whole story about amadou, which was for a very long time the title of my novel. And I got really, really fascinated by it, in itself and as a metaphor for translation. I saw both the incredible power of translation to regenerate a cultural ecosystem, and the potentially darker side of translation that involves erasure and destruction along the way to that regeneration. Obviously, all of my work as a translator played into that, and my getting to know other translators of Olga. But it was really the image of this fascinating little creature that I wanted to have as the underpinning of the whole book.

That does feel like the distillation of the essence of the story, which it takes time to get to. I was so distracted by the characters before I started to see the bigger picture. They could be a whole sitcom cast.

Definitely some of the inspiration comes from TV. Alexis is kind of based on Alexis Rose from Schitt’s Creek. They do all represent some version of things I’ve thought about translation at some point over the course of my career. The two main heroines of the book, Alexis and Emelia, represent the stereotypical opposite poles of translation philosophy. Emi is super faithful, obsessively so. Alexis, who is of course the U.S. translator, is a little bit more… I mean the nice way of saying it would be that she’s a “freer” translator and potentially a criticism that could be leveled at her is that she is arrogant and feels like she has every right to change whatever she wants. I don’t know any translator who is as extreme as either of them. When I started out as a translator, I was probably closer to Emi: very devoted, a bit more cautious. Now I wrestle with the temptation, especially with writers I’ve been working with for longer, to buy into the idea that this is a collaboration maybe a bit too much. I find myself wanting to rewrite certain things or even be tempted to make certain cuts. Writing Alexis was probably a way of working that out in my mind and trying to restrain myself a little bit more. Some of the other characters I wrote purely because I thought they’d be a great person to have around in this situation. Freddy the Swedish translator is straight out of a sitcom. Sorry, I had to sacrifice the Swedish language for the sake of humor.

Did you come out on the other side of the writing feeling like your thoughts about translation had been clarified in some way?

I hope to keep consistently reflecting on my own cultural preconceived notions about style.

What do you think about the novel as a format for ideas? You could have written a long essay about translation. What does fiction allow you to do that nonfiction does not?

The goal is to reach a wider readership. If I were to write a long essay or a book to be published by an academic press, I would just be preaching to the choir. What would be the point? What I want to do is advocate on behalf of translator visibility, but also visibility for the original language and for collaboration in general. These are goals that I see as being important in cultural and environmental terms. I don’t want to work hard for years to publish something for a dozen people who I already know and who already agree with me.

The fictional plot allows the reader to inhabit some of these questions about translation philosophy, to see them getting dramatized to the absurd extreme. I decided to make it a structural part of the book, too, to have the story be told supposedly by Emi in Polish, which is not her native language, and then translated into English by her arch nemesis. Because the translator is constantly interjecting through the footnotes, the reader is forced to always question what they’re hearing. When you are reading a book that’s been translated, every single word that you’re reading was chosen and written not by the author whose name is on the cover, but by the translator. Really thoughtful and wonderful readers of a lot of international literature might not have stopped to reflect on that particular question before.

You have been an advocate for putting translators’ names on the covers of books, and your refusal to take on a translation project without the promise of adequate credit has inspired thousands of others. You wrote an open letter addressing this in 2021; how does it feel a few years on?

I definitely have seen a shift in publishing towards crediting the translator more. I don’t know if it impacted my own career hugely, but I just feel like the field of translation is very clearly expanding in really healthy ways. There are some editors who are keeping up with all of these shifts, and the remaining thing we need to do is to help bring on the others who are not yet on board. Then finally we might reach a really wonderful place where international literature is more commonly mixed with U.S. literature. I want true diversity in literature, like biodiversity in a forest, as well as a celebration of difference formally. That would be so beneficial to readers, future writers, and society at large.

What is your approach to collaboration and your opinion about being on different ends of it?

My editor, Daniel Loedel, who’s an amazing novelist himself, pushed me hard between the draft of Irena Rey that he bought and the next, more polished one. I completely overhauled a lot of elements of the plot and the timeline. I was forced to think in a way I don’t think I’ve ever done. I spent a month deeply rethinking, and that was really hard. I had newborn twins at the time. But it was all so magical and rewarding once it felt like things were falling into place. That is the kind of editing collaboration that you cannot have when you are the translator—at least not in a traditional publication process—because you wouldn’t rethink how a character is depicted, or whether or not this scene should occur in this place. In general, you don’t even get asked to make cuts, even when you can see that the editor might prefer that the book be a little bit shorter, which seems like it’s often the case.

There’s also a flip side. I didn’t have a buddy to work with, that other team member or partner in crime. I think that resulted in me feeling more dependent on the characters themselves. Obviously I recognized that they were fictional! I wrote my first draft when I was at a residency in Switzerland, in the middle of nowhere and mostly not talking to other human beings because it was the fall of 2020. That allowed me to immerse myself in the world and have weird conversations with my characters, which made it feel collaborative even though it was just me collaborating with me.

Did suddenly becoming a person with twins impact your writing?

I was in this immersive writing state and then I did the opposite, where I couldn’t write for more than three minutes without somebody screaming. The main concern that came between the first and second drafts was that there were whole sections that could only be clear to me what was going on, because I was so in it. Being a person with a three-minute time limit forced me to clarify a lot of things about the work to myself and hopefully to other people. The other impact of my twins is that I probably won’t write another book for a few years.

What does balance look like for you?

I am obsessed with my children and it feels like nobody wants to hear that when I’m speaking in professional contexts. But I find my kids so fascinating. Conveniently for me, as someone who’s really interested in language, they’re at this point where they’re experimenting not just with words but grammar. You can actually see the wheels turning. And that’s actually all I care about at the moment. I’m not doing as many translations. I also didn’t have an academic job in the past, which meant that I had to earn money as a freelancer, which means working triply hard to get commissions outside of doing the assignment itself. I do have a translation coming out in the fall, The Plains by Federico Falco, an experimental novel about grief that I’m really excited about.

Some people want to pretend that their work is the only thing in their life, and I so appreciate you acknowledging that it’s not the case. What is your ideal work setup, with kids or without?

I do really need isolation. I’m so jealous of my husband. You could literally put him on the ground outside and he would be perfectly productive, would have no idea that cars were driving by. I need an assurance that I won’t be interrupted. If it’s just a room, that’s fine as long as I can close the door. That’s why I love residencies. I mean, I love them for other reasons. I’ve made really great friends, met artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise. But the ideal space would be this luxury treehouse, at the Jan Michalski Foundation. That’s literally the ideal for most people, I would think. Anything that has a little bit of access to nature so that you can take a walk when you need a break.

You’re married to another translator, right? The dynamic is very interesting to me as a writer dating another writer.

I never dated writers and I used to swear I never would date a writer. Then my husband came along. I think translators are nicer people than writers in the sense that they’re not quite so precious about their egos and not quite so competitive. That’s been my experience, anyway.

I translate from Polish and he translates mostly Ukrainian writers from Russia. They’re close enough that we can ask each other questions. I’ve studied Russian, he studied Polish, we’ve both studied Ukrainian. But our preferences in terms of what we translate and what we read are different. I like contemporary women’s prose, especially fiction, and he’s interested in formal poetry above all else and early-20th-century writers. It never feels suffocating. We live our own creative lives, then eventually give each other something to read.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Greta Rainbow.

Jenn: I’m a very steady writer. My ideal is to write every morning, first thing. Patient, slow, deliberate, tortoise-like—really opposite from Chris.

Chris: I’m pretty streaky. I’ll go long periods in my head before I work, and then tend to work pretty quickly once I’m on a project. Early on in a project I’ll struggle, but then I’ll find the stance or vantage point that unlocks it for me, and after that I’m pretty quick.

Is it useful, in terms of household balance, that you don’t both need the same exact hours to work every day?

Jenn: Yeah, it is. Some of this is job stuff, too, but in recent years, I’ve been able to work pretty regularly, and if a kid needs to go to the doctor in the morning, Chris will say, “I can do that so you can write.” But when Chris is deep in a project, he’s there mentally a lot. When I’m done writing, I stop thinking about writing until the next morning, unless I’m walking. But I free him up for distraction in the sense that I’m on the home beat once I’m done writing.

Chris: This probably strays into an area you’re not quite asking about, but I knew intellectually about gendered differences in emotional or mental labor, but those gaps were never more apparent than when we worked together. We’d work in the morning, and then I’d see Jenn shut it off. I’m sure she would love to continue to be an art monster and think about work through the day, but there’s just a lot that she was keeping in her head for our home to run. That stark, gendered difference was really evident to me while we were writing Dayswork.

How did you start writing Dayswork* together?*

Jenn: We just—not quite fell into it, but found ourselves doing it. The project started with my obsessive reading about Melville and trying to figure out how I might write about this material myself. Because we were home together during the pandemic, we talked about it a lot more regularly, really daily, than we would have under our normal working conditions. Eventually, we realized we were writing sentences together. We’d be sitting there looking at something that I might be thinking about, and then it just dawned on us: we’re doing this together. And then we had a conversation about it and decided to formalize it—and once we’d decided we were truly collaborating, we started over.

How did that conversation feel?

Jenn: It felt like a decision. Even though we’d fallen into doing it, it still felt like a decision and a leap of faith on both of our parts. I also felt very liberated by it. It was an immediate feeling of freedom and excitement.

Chris: For gender reasons, I didn’t want to be coming in and taking over the book. It wasn’t like that at all. She was sharing her research, and getting me involved, and interested, and curious. We were deliberate about the conversation, but this was a surprise—though in a way it seemed inevitable, too. We’ve been married for 21 years, and we’ve been increasingly involved in each other’s work as first readers and editors. During the pandemic, we had both that built-up trust and a level of time that made collaboration possible. We could just enjoy the process, the dailiness, the activity of thinking a book together sentence by sentence.

Jenn: I’ve wondered too about the pandemic angle on this. We spent more time alone and isolated, and so how much did we really want to be alone while writing, too? It was appealing to write in a less solitary way during that stretch of time.

Did you write every sentence in the book together?

Chris: Every one of them.

Who typed?

Jenn: I typed.

Final control?

Jenn: Maybe so. We’re contemplating a companion book to Dayswork, and we were deciding whether to have Chris type. But the plan now is to stick with me typing, but change font.

I’m obsessed with font and I’m having a font issue—so please, tell me about your relationship with font and font changes.

Chris: I write in Times New Roman on my Dell computer. That’s who you’re dealing with here.

Jenn: I’ve had some font changes through the years, but I usually stick with one font for a long period of time. But I do like that I use one font for my creative writing at home, and then a different font at work. Garamond at home, Calibri at work. You need some kind of change. You know, the poet Heid Erdrich gets a new chair for every book she writes. When she finishes a book, she gives the chair away.

How did you know Dayswork was done? Did you know separately or together?

Jenn: We knew together.

Chris: We were remarkably in sync on this book. We shared a vision for this book, even when our vision was wrong. Solo, this happens all the time: you have a vision you’re trying to execute, it doesn’t work, and it shifts on you. But the same thing happened for us here. We were both all in on the wrong vision, and then switched it together, and then had a real sense of when it was coming to a close.

Jenn: We did do a fairly substantial revision for our editor, who wanted it in chapters. It wasn’t in chapters when we submitted it, and that was a great change. I’m so glad we did that. It opened up a lot of possibilities in the book that we hadn’t seen. So when we thought we were done, we weren’t done— but we both thought we were done at the same time.

How do you reset when you realize your vision is wrong?

Chris: I’m often resistant at first, but then once I get into it, the change seems liberating. I often try to convince myself something’s working when I know it’s not—and so the minute I start over, I can fully admit to myself that the previous way wasn’t working. So it’s a struggle at first, but then fun to reimagine a project, and a relief to get away from something that just wasn’t quite right.

What’s the relationship between creativity and time, for each of you?

Jenn: For me, the gift of time breeds creativity. Time is essential to my being able to feel creative. And time is also a teacher. If I have time to let something sit, that’s the best way for me to see it.

Chris: Jenn is, as she said earlier, deliberate, patient, daily. If something needs to start over, she just starts over. If something needs to be revised, she’s not precious about it; she’s just into the long process of making. I’m less patient in that way. I want to move things along. In this project, both those attitudes were necessary. We had a productive tension in which Jenn would slow us down beneficially, and I would speed us up beneficially.

What, again for each of you, is the relationship between parenting and creativity?

Jenn: In a way, this goes a little counter to the way Chris was just describing my process, and I’ve described my process. But parenting did put some pressure on me to use my time more efficiently and to be more flexible as a writer. It showed me that my conditions didn’t have to be exactly the way I thought they had to be in order to write, and freed me up in a way that was really beneficial. Parenting has also made writing essential to me. I need to quarantine myself mentally for some space in the day in order to write.

Chris: There are ways in which parenting is directly opposed to creativity, and destroys creativity. It robs you of your creative time and energy, and certainly takes away books you would’ve written had you not had children. But I’m less interested in that than in the way that parenting makes your imagination richer and more complicated, and so makes you a different creative self.

As a parent, I wouldn’t trade anything for being a parent, but as an artist, I wouldn’t trade it either. Parenting has made my concerns and my approach to art different and more interesting. It’s complicated my thinking. In my books, there’s a pretty stark line between pre-kids and post-kids. And I’ll just say that a lot of men, for as long as they’re able to, just get up and think about themselves. Getting married and having kids taught me not to think about myself immediately.

What are the effects of teaching and being in a university writing community on your creativity? If not what you write, then how you write or how you think about writing?

Jenn: On the one hand, it can be inspiring and generative to be around other writers and listening to visiting writers come through. On the other hand, it sometimes makes me feel like the last thing the world needs is another writer, or another creative writer in the academy. I’m lucky enough that I’ve never been trying to write for tenure considerations, so I’ve never had my writing clock be influenced by the academy, which I know happens to a lot of people and they can feel rushed.

Chris: In general, teaching books in a very smart community of readers is exciting to me. Reading their work is exciting too, but just teaching books in a small community of really smart people and great readers is pretty energizing. A great part of the job.

Reading Dayswork, I thought a lot about about marriage itself as a creative act. Does that resonate with you, or did I put that into the book because I just got married?

Chris: Partnership showed up in the book in ways that were surprising to us. It was our process, and then it showed up as a subject and as a theme in surprising ways. We’re certainly interested in the relationship between art-making and partnership in good and bad ways throughout the book. But I love this idea of marriage as a creative act. Outside of the book, we certainly felt this delight and surprise to be doing a brand-new thing after we’d been married for 19 or 20 years. It underscored the ways in which marriage is this growing, evolving thing that can constantly—just like art—surprise you, and develop in surprising ways.

Jenn: Just like each person has their own narrative, I think a marriage has a narrative too, which the two people may or may not agree on. For us, this unexpected collaboration showing up was a new and really wonderful wrinkle in our narrative. It’s a culmination of the ways we’d been working together, but it was on a whole new level, and felt totally different. And it was just really neat to have my writing practice be changed, and also to have our way of relating to each other get a new facet. It was just a great thing that happened.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lily Meyer.

I try to balance promoting other writers or helping other writers and working for myself. I get a lot of the same energy I get when I’m in the writing zone, when I’m editing someone else’s work, or when I’m promoting someone else’s work that I believe in, so I definitely get something back from helping other authors. It’s really easy for me to promote other people. And I enjoy doing it. There really isn’t any formula to it, but each day I like to spend my time either editing student papers or promoting someone else’s book or reading a draft of someone’s work. Then spend a couple of hours a day on my own work.

I totally agree that there is so much energy that being part of community gives. And in some ways I feel like that’s where I go when I need inspiration. But I also feel like sometimes, when I’m having a creative block with my own work, it’s procrastination, or just a fear of returning to my work. How do you make sure you keep coming back?

I’m probably not doing this well. I hear you on the procrastination aspect of it. And so, sometimes you’re dreading going back to your own work or reading it again. But I’ve been trying to make deadlines for myself.

I’ve realized how important other people’s work is for me, but I’m trying to learn how to value my work and carve out time for myself. I just spent a week in Joshua Tree where I tried not to use my phone. I really blocked out everyone else’s work. And for one week I just focused on my own work. I couldn’t believe how much I got done.

Honestly, if I got my phone out of the way I would get so much more done. I think that my distractions are more like Instagram and being on my phone than other people’s work because their work keeps me in the zone. When I’m editing someone else’s work I can really see clearly what they’re doing wrong or how they’re not evoking emotion. But when it’s my work, I’m like, “Oh, I can’t tell,” But I can learn from someone else and I come back to my work. It really balances out.

How do you stay level-headed or right-sized when you’re editing your own work? I hear you saying that reading other people’s work you can see clearly areas for suggestion, but how do you do that for yourself? How do you stay editorial while also being kind to yourself?

I feel like in some ways that’s easy for me because I do think everyone’s story is important. I really do just believe in self-expression. I have a genuine enthusiasm for other people’s work that I think I’ve always had.

I’m studying craft all the time to teach a lesson to my class. This week we’re talking about the “descriptive pause,” and how to add tension with no action. As I’m teaching this lesson I can see the class’s head exploding like, “Oh my god. That’s an amazing trick or move.” And then, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, let me go back to my chapter and find the tense place and create this descriptive pause.” And then it’s like, “Oh, this is fun, it’s working here.” I feel really lucky that it’s all communicating with each other.

Yeah, of course. I know that on top of all the creative work you do, you’re a mom, which is a big theme in your short story collection, The New Low. How do you balance your writing and editing with your other adult responsibilities?

Now my kids are older, but what I will say is that most of the collection was written in my car waiting on a soccer field. I got a lot of it written in these small increments of time. Most of my graduate school classes were at night to 7:00 or 9:00. And I’d come home and write until 1:00 in the morning, when everyone was asleep. So, for a very long time, I lived with little sleep. I needed that intellectual fill to become a better mother. A lot of motherhood was trying to be present for it because I knew my writing would always be there.

The moms you write about are not your typical mom characters. They’re sneaking cigarettes and taking edibles in Palm Springs and having these existential identity crises about how to be a parent and a person. What was that process of writing into some of those more nuanced spaces of parenting?

That’s it exactly. Compartmentalized motherhood. I do think we were all so many other things before becoming mothers. When a man becomes a dad, he continues to be all those things. There is a tone of resentment in the stories I tried to explore a little bit. I think there’s been so much balance in the world because of conversations like this. And because of stories like this. I felt like there’s a whole different batch of mothers. So here are these people [asking], “What is motherhood? Is motherhood just driving kids around? Motherhood has changed a lot? And is motherhood providing care and providing love? Does motherhood means staying home with your kids?” I don’t really have any of the answers. But I’m just trying to show this variety of mothers and how in some ways everyone felt like they’re failing because they’re not this ideal mom.

An idea that kept coming up as I was reading your collection was the split-self. The character Amme comes to mind. She’s this yogi, but then she’s doing all these drugs and smoking. I think that’s something a lot of people could probably relate to—this idea of trying to become more than one thing. What drew you to that particular topic?

I think a lot of it that I explore is contradictions. Can you be a yoga teacher and still smoke cigarettes? It’s like the image you’re projecting and the reality. I think a lot of the times where there’s so much fragmentation is when there’s this diverse image that you’re protecting in reality. But can there be this whole self? Can we hold space for these two different things? Can you be a flawed mother without being absolutely torn apart? Is there a space for you to be imperfect and be a mother and trying to be an artist and trying to make money from your art because you have to live in the city?

One of the things that I hear a lot is this sense of imposter syndrome that comes with how one spends their emotional time versus all the unpaid or low paid labor that comes with a creative practice. How have you found balance between those two things?

When I became a mother, I think I was so present with it that when I was having conversations with people, I didn’t necessarily have to talk about it all the time. I feel like there’s so much work with motherhood that it becomes all-consuming. When I go out in the world I don’t want to talk about those things. I want to keep some identity of myself as an artist, as a writer, and as a human. I was 28 when I had my daughter, but a lot of people I hung out with in the world weren’t mothers yet. In fact, some of my friends are just starting to be mothers now.

When did you know that you really wanted to commit yourself to being a writer and to doing the work?

I always knew I wanted to write. I just loved reading. I love the craft of storytelling. And then, you have to go through this like, “Am I good at this?” kind of questioning. But I really did commit to writing every day. I think I did The Artist’s Way writing pages for like five years in a row. I would write those three pages before I did anything else. A lot of that, for me was just organizing my thoughts. But I committed to it. Some of the stories in my collection I started 18 years ago. So, I’ve committed to writing for probably more than 20 years. Writing has always been a love of mine.

What was the moment where writing those stories shifted and they became a book? What was that shift like?

A lot of it was just studying collections and asking “What is a short story collection?” It’s usually just what we can get away with. I think when I read Olive Kitteridge, and saw it had the recurring characters, I was hooked on that. The thing about a short story is you may love it, but at the end the characters are done. The 14 stories in my collection are standalone, but the characters come back and you get to see them again. I had a lot of fun and they arc like a novel in some ways.

What is your process like when you’re writing a story?

I’m not an outline writer at all. I’m definitely more of a “seat of your pants” writer. I like finding out the story from within the story. For many of the stories in my collection I was like, “I want to do a craft move, I want to do a monologue.” So, I practiced a monologue. For some others I wanted to write an omniscient narrator or I wanted to play around with point of view changes. I probably have my own process, but I’m definitely, not someone who has an outline and says, “This is where it’s going to start. This is where it’s going to end.”

What is your revision process like?

I mean, there’s a lot of play. I love dialogue, so much of it is asking when something becomes dialogue and when dialogue becomes summary. A lot of it for me will start with dialogue, going back and forth, and then coming back to the scene and then realizing 90% of that dialogue I did was unnecessary and not needed, and then scaling back the dialogue, and putting in more of the scene. How I revise is different for each story depending on what I’m trying to do with it.

A major theme that I saw in the book was around the relationship between youth and beauty and becoming. I think about this a lot with art where there’s all these “best under 35” or whatever lists. What do you think that obsession with youth and productivity and blooming as early as possible is?

I think I’m just picking up on something like this cultural pressure. I’ve overheard conversations with people saying, “If I’m not published by 30 I’ll kill myself.” There is this pressure to make a great piece of art while you’re still young and attractive enough for the book cover or whatever it is. I do feel there’s a cultural pressure. I think in general people believe we lose our intelligence or our work decreases with age. I don’t think any of those things are true. Those are false beliefs that have been pumped into our heads, maybe for women more so than others. There’s this fear of irrelevance—that we’re losing something. I guess in my mind, I feel quite the opposite. I feel I’ve become more empowered. I’ve become more whole. I’ve become more connected to myself and my work. I’ve carved out that time for myself. That’s been a really great thing about getting older.

If you were getting a lot of that messaging, did you ever feel the pressure to publish by a certain age or finish something by a certain age? And what was your relationship with that messaging?

I do trust in divine timing of things. Even with the stories. I’m really happy they came out so much later, that I have this distance from them, and I can approach them differently. I don’t know. I’m not in a huge rush. But with that said, talking about the novel, I also feel like, “Okay, I need to put a little bit of fire under my butt to keep myself accountable, keep myself on these deadlines.” Because the novel is good and I want it to be out in the world. And it’s fun having people engage in your work.

How do you get to that place of having a bit of pressure to stay accountable, but not so much it makes you crazy?

I’ve had a meditation practice for around five years. I’ve been doing that 20 minutes, twice a day situation. I think that helps me a lot. I am a big believer of not being precious with my words, of just writing a lot, because I know I’m going to write more. I try not to be attached to the result. Of course, I want it to be good. But I also know that there’ll be another book after this book, and I’m constantly improving.

What are some of the ways that meditation has shown up for you in your writing?

I can give the example. I was in Joshua Tree working on my novel, and red-tailed hawk flew into the glass window, there were no stickers on the window, and it flew into the window where I was sitting typing. It just sounded like a brick, and it fell on the earth. I was looking for some metaphor of how this character felt and I was like, “Oh, we felt like a red-tailed hawk blindly hitting a glass window.”

I guess I allow the story to come to me more. I try to be a vessel for the story. In a way, I never felt that writing was something I was doing. It’s something I’m witnessing. If you’re quiet, sounds are going to appear. You can use the sounds that you’re hearing to put them into your work. A lot of it is just being present.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shelby Hinte.

On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine on the company for transferring the data of EU users to the United States. In so doing, the company had breached the General Data Protection Regulation, which has become something of a habit for information predators from Silicon Valley.

The data in question is the bread-and-butter of such companies, packed with the names of users, email and IP addresses, message content, viewing history, geolocation and the whole gamut of information used for targeted advertising. As the European Data Protection Board’s Chair, Andrea Jelenik, stated, “the EDPB found that Meta’s IE’s [Meta Platforms Ireland Limited’s] infringement is very serious since it concerns transfers that are systematic, repetitive and continuous. Facebook has millions of users in Europe, so the volume of personal data transferred is massive.”

The outcome resulted from a binding decision by the EDPB of April 13, 2023, which instructed the Irish Data Protection Authority (IE DPA) to revise its draft decision and impose a fine upon the company, despite initial reluctance to do so. The board also instructed IE DPA to order Meta to bring its “processing operations into compliance with Chapter V [of the] GDPR, by ceasing the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US of personal data of European users transferred in violation of the GDPR, within 6 months after notification of the IE SA’s final decision.”

The implications for Meta, beyond the inconvenience of a fine, is the operational difficulty of removing the transferred data. “This order to delete data is really a headache for Meta,” reasons Johnny Ryan, senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. To remove the digital material gathered from millions of EU users stretching back a decade posed seemingly insuperable problems regarding compliance.

The response from Nick Clegg, President of the company’s global affairs arm, and Chief Legal Officer, Jennifer Newstead, is coldly practical on the issue. (Clegg, former UK Deputy Prime Minister, has long been on the dark side.) Data is key; data is everything. Privacy, goes the insinuation, is an impediment, a needless intrusion by sentimental bleeding hearts. “The ability for data to be transferred is fundamental to how the global open internet works. From finance and telecommunications to critical public services like healthcare or education, the free flow of data supports many of the services that we have come to rely on.”

A favourite argument is mustered by the knight-in-digital-armour: the idea of an internet balkanised and fractured in the face of meddlesome regulations and bureaucrats. “Without the ability to transfer data across borders, the internet risks being carved up into national and regional silos”. This would leave the “citizens in different countries unable to access many of the shared services we have come to rely on.”

Clegg and Newstead also lament those privacy business bodies in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), who dared invalidate the Privacy Shield mechanism agreed upon between the US and EU on the transfer of personal data to the US. “This [2020] decision created considerable regulatory and legal uncertainty for thousands of organisations, including Meta.”

What the court left intact was the Standard Contractual Clauses mechanism, which could function on the proviso that various safeguards were put in place regarding data processing. (An agreement reached on EU-US data transfers between Brussels and Washington on a revised Privacy Shield has yet to be signed off by European officials.) Meta proceeded to use these “believing them to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).” While the Irish Data Protection Commission initially found that Meta had acted in good faith and that no fine would be necessary, moans the company, the Data Protection Board thought otherwise.

Clegg and Newstead also expressed aggrievement at Meta being “singled out when using the same legal mechanism that thousands of other companies looking to provide services in Europe.” Brazenly, they praise the US for doing much “to align with European rules via their latest reforms, while transfers continue largely unchallenged to countries such as China.” The company intends filing appeals on both the substance of the decision and its orders, seeking a stay in the courts.

Other US tech behemoths have also drawn the ire of the EU, demonstrating the divergence of views between the money hungry dictates of the information market and the importance of a user’s privacy. Between 2017 and 2019, Google caught their attention in the only way it could. That attention, based on the sheer scale of the company’s market dominance, brought the ledger of fines to 8 billion euros. In 2021, Amazon received a 746 million euro fine for violating data protections.

Despite the coos of satisfaction coming from EU officials, such companies have integrated the occasional spanking fine into their operating models, the laceration nullified by a thumpingly large financial base to work from. An economy of data transgressions has emerged, one permitted to thrive, despite the punishments and orders. That penalties run into the billions of euros or dollars hardly affects the overall business rationale. As a consequence, the respective world views of US corporatism and EU data protection find some peculiar, if uncomfortable accord, an economy that tolerates surveillance capitalism while occasionally punishing its excesses.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

We speak with writer and filmmaker Jennifer Fox, whose 2018 movie The Tale dealt with childhood sexual abuse. She has now come forward to name her abuser. The film is a narrative memoir based in part on Fox’s own life experience about being abused by a coach as a young girl. While the main character is named Fox, the name of the abusive coach was fictionalized. Now Fox has revealed the man who abused her as Ted Nash, the legendary Olympic rower and coach who died in 2021. Nash took part in 11 Olympic teams as a rower or coach, and USRowing, the national governing body for the sport, is now investigating the allegations. Fox recently revealed Nash’s name to The New York Times and tells Democracy Now!, in her first broadcast interview since the story, that he began abusing her when she was 13. She says her inner voice told her she could not rest until she publicly named Nash. “It’s very important to bring this other story out to the world now and to show this other part of the man that people put on a pedestal and made into a god,” says Fox, who adds that more women may still come forward about Nash. “It’s a very important act to stand up to power in this way, for me and for others.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Mainly because of the mindset of the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock – the world’s biggest asset management firm – and the economic system they profit from and promote.  

In 2011, Fink said agricultural and water investments would be the best performers over the next 10 years. 

Fink stated:  “Go long agriculture and water and go to the beach.”

Unsurprisingly then, just three years later, in 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, were capitalising on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class. 

Funds tend to invest for a 10-15-year period, resulting in good returns for investors but often cause long-term environmental and social devastation. They undermine local and regional food security through buying up land and entrenching an industrial, export-oriented model of agriculture.

In September 2020, Grain.org showed that private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – were being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world. 

This money was being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. Offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had targeted Ukraine in particular.

Western agribusiness had been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. A 2015 article by Oriental Review noted that, since the mid-90s, Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council have been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.

In November 2013, the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation drafted a legal amendment that would benefit global agribusiness producers by allowing the widespread use of genetically modified seeds.

In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month, strings-attached $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine. 

Even before the conflict, the World Bank incorporated measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”

It is interesting to note that Larry Fink and BlackRock are to ‘coordinate’ investment in ‘rebuilding’ Ukraine.  

An official statement released in late December 2022 said the agreement with BlackRock would:

… focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channelling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy.

With more than $813.5 billion invested in arms manufacturing companies, BlackRock is in a win-win situation – profiting from both destruction and reconstruction.

BlackRock is a publicly owned investment manager that primarily provides its services to institutional, intermediary and individual investors. The firm exists to put its assets to work to make money for its clients. And it must ensure the financial system functions to secure this goal. And this is exactly what it does. 

Back in 2010, the farmlandgrab.org website reported that BlackRock’s global agriculture fund would  target (invest in) companies involved with agriculture-related chemical products, equipment and infrastructure, as well as soft commodities and food, biofuels, forestry, agricultural sciences and arable land.

According to research by Global Witness, it has since indirectly profited from human rights and environmental abuses through investing in banks notorious for financing harmful palm oil firms (see the article The true price of palm oil, 2021). 

Blackrock’s Global Consumer Staples exchange rated fund (ETF), which was launched in 2006 and, according to the article The rise of financial investment and common ownership in global agrifood firms (Review of International Political Economy, 2019), has: 

US$560 million in assets under management, holds shares in a number of the world’s largest food companies, with agrifood stocks making up around 75% of the fund. Nestlé is the funds’s largest holding, and other agrifood firms that make up the fund include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Walmart, Anheuser Busch InBev, Mondelez, Danone, and Kraft Heinz.

The article also states that BlackRock’s iShares Core S&P 500 Index ETF has $150 billion in assets under management. Most of the top publicly traded food and agriculture firms are part of the S&P 500 index and BlackRock holds significant shares in those firms. 

The author of the article, Professor Jennifer Clapp, also notes BlackRock’s COW Global Agriculture ETF, has $231 million in assets and focuses on firms that provide inputs (seeds, chemicals and fertilizers) and farm equipment and agricultural trading companies. Among its top holdings are Deere & Co, Bunge, ADM and Tyson. This is based on BlackRock’s own data from 2018.

Jennifer Clapp states:

Collectively, the asset management giants – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and Capital Group – own significant proportions of the firms that dominate at various points along agrifood supply chains. When considered together, these five asset management firms own around 10%–30% of the shares of the top firms within the agrifood sector.

BlackRock et al are heavily invested in the success of the prevailing globalised system of food and agriculture. 

They profit from an inherently predatory system that – focusing on the agrifood sector alone – has been responsible for, among other things, the displacement of indigenous systems of production, the impoverishment of many farmers worldwide, the destruction of rural communities and cultures, poor-quality food and illness, less diverse diets, ecological destruction and the proletarianization of independent producers.

Due to their size, according to journalist Ernst Wolff, BlackRock and its counterpart Vanguard exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined. 

BlackRock currently has $10 trillion in assets under its management and to underline the influence of the firm, Fink himself is a billionaire who sits on the board of the World Economic Forum and the powerful and highly influential Council for Foreign Relations, often referred to as the shadow government of the US – the real power behind the throne.

Researcher William Engdahl says that since 1988 the company has put itself in a position to de facto control the Federal Reserve, most Wall Street mega-banks, including Goldman Sachs, the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset and now the Biden Administration.

Engdahl describes how former top people at BlackRock are now in key government positions, running economic policy for the Biden administration, and that the firm is steering the ‘great reset’ and the global ‘green’ agenda.

Fink recently eulogised about the future of food and ‘coded’ seeds that would produce their own fertiliser. He says this is “amazing technology”. This technology is years away and whether it can deliver on what he says is another thing. 

More likely, it will be a great investment opportunity that is par for the course as far as genetically modified organisms in agriculture are concerned: a failure to deliver on its inflated false promises. And even if it does eventually deliver, a whole host of ‘hidden costs’ (health, social, ecological, etc) will probably emerge. 

And that’s not idle speculation. We need look no further than previous ‘interventions’ in food/farming under the guise of Green Revolution technologies, which did little if anything to boost overall food production (in India at least) but brought with it tremendous ecological, environment and social costs and adverse impacts on human health, highlighted by many researchers and writers, not least in Bhaskar Save’s open letter to Indian officials and the work of Vandana Shiva. 

However, the Green Revolution entrenched seed and agrichemical giants in global agriculture and ensured farmers became dependent on their proprietary inputs and global supply chains. After all, value capture that was a key aim of the project.

But why should Fink care about these ‘hidden costs’, not least the health impacts? 

Well, actually, he probably does – with his eye on investments in ‘healthcare’ and Big Pharma. BlackRock’s investments support and profit from industrial agriculture as well as the hidden costs. 

Poor health is good for business (for example, see on the BlackRock website BlackRock on healthcare investment opportunities amid Covid-19). Scroll through BlackRock’s website and it soon becomes clear that it sees the healthcare sector as a strong long-term bet. 

And for good reason. For instance, increased consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019 according to a recent peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The findings are significant not only for Brazil but more so for high income countries such as the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, where UPFs account for more than half of total calorific intake. Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes. This means the estimated impact would be even higher in richer nations.

Due to corporate influence over trade deals, governments and the WTO, transnational food retail and food processing companies continue to colonise markets around the world and push UPFs.

In Mexico, global agrifood companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items. In Europe, more than half the population of the European Union is overweight or obese, with the poor especially reliant on high-calorie, poor nutrient quality food items. 

Larry Fink is good at what he does – securing returns for the assets his company holds. He needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall. He needs to accumulate capital (wealth) to be able to reinvest it and make further profits.

When capital struggles to make sufficient profit, productive wealth (capital) over accumulates, devalues and the system goes into crisis. To avoid crisis, capitalism requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand. 

And that means laying the political and legislative groundwork to facilitate this. In India, for example, the now-repealed three farm laws of 2020 would have provided huge investment opportunities for the likes of BlackRock. These three laws – imperialism in all but name – represented a capitulation to the needs of foreign agribusiness and asset managers who require access to India’s farmland. 

The laws would have sounded a neoliberal death knell for India’s food sovereignty, jeopardized its food security and destroyed tens of millions of livelihoods. But what matters to global agricapital and investment firms is facilitating profit and maximising returns on investment. 

This has been a key driving force behind the modern food system that sees around a billion people experiencing malnutrition in a world of food abundance. That is not by accident but by design – inherent to a system that privileges corporate profit ahead of human need. 

The modern agritech/agribusiness sector uses notions of it and its products being essential to ‘feed the world’ by employing ‘amazing technology’ in an attempt to seek legitimacy. But the reality is an inherently unjust globalised food system, farmers forced out of farming or trapped on proprietary product treadmills working for corporate supply chains and the public fed GMOs, more ultra-processed products and lab-engineered food. 

A system that facilitates ‘going long and going to the beach’ serves elite interests well. For vast swathes of humanity, however, economic warfare is waged on them every day courtesy of a hard-edged rock.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

In addressing the Australian National Press Club, Robinson’s address, titled “Julian Assange, Free Speech and Democracy”, was a grand recapitulation of the political case against the WikiLeaks founder.  Followers of this ever darkening situation would not have found anything new.  The shock, rather, was how ignorant many remain about the chapters in this scandalous episode of persecution.

Robinson’s address noted those blackening statements from media organisations and governments that Assange was paranoid and could leave the Ecuadorian embassy, his abode for seven years, at his own leisure.  Many were subsequently “surprised when Julian was served with a US extradition request.”  But this was exactly what WikiLeaks had been warning about for some ten years.

In the Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he has resided for 3.5 years, Assange’s health has declined further.  “Then last year, during a stressful court appeal hearing, Julian had a mini stroke.”  His ailing state did not convince a venal prosecution, tasked with “deriding the medical evidence of Julian’s severe depression and suicidal ideation”.

The matter of health plays into the issue of lengthy proceedings.  Should the High Court not grant leave to hear an appeal against the June decision by Home Secretary Priti Patel to order his extradition, processes through the UK Supreme Court and possibly the European Court of Human Rights could be activated.

The latter appeal, should it be required, would depend on the government of the day keeping Britain within the court’s jurisdiction.  “If our appeal fails, Julian will be extradited to the US – where his prison conditions will be at the whim of intelligence agencies which plotted to kill him.”  An unfair trial would follow, and any legal process citing the First Amendment culminating in a hearing before the US Supreme Court would take years.

The teeth in Robinson’s address lay in the urgency of political action.  Assange is suffering a form of legal and bureaucratic assassination, his life gradually quashed by briefs, reviews, bureaucrats and protocols.  “This case needs an urgent political solution.  Julian does not have another decade to wait for a legal fix.”

Acknowledging that her reference to the political avenue was unusual for a lawyer, Robinson noted how the language of due process and the rule of law had become ghoulish caricatures in what amounts to a form of punishment.  The law has been fashioned in an abusive way that sees a person being prosecuted for journalism in a hideously pioneering way.  Despite the UK-US Extradition Treaty’s prohibition of extradition for political offences, the US prosecution was making  much of the Espionage Act.  “Espionage,” stated Robinson, “is a political offence.”

The list of abuses in the prosecution is biblically lengthy.  Robinson gave her audience a summary of them: the fabrication of evidence via the Icelandic informant and convicted embezzler and paedophile Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson; the deliberate distortion of facts; the unlawful surveillance of Assange and his legal team and matters of medical treatment; “and the seizure of legally privileged material.”

Much ignorance about Assange and the implications of his persecution is no doubt willed.  Robinson’s reference to Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, was apt.  Here was a man initially sceptical about the torture complaint made by Assange and his team.  He had been convinced by the libel against the publisher’s reputation. “But in 2019, he agreed to read our complaint.  And what he read shocked him and forced him to confront his own prejudice.”

Melzer would subsequently observe that, in the course of two decades working “with victims of war, violence and political persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law”.

The concern these days among the press darlings is not press freedoms closer to home, whether they be in Australia itself, or among its allies.  The egregious misconduct by Russian forces in the Ukraine War or China’s human rights record in Xinjiang are what counts.  Villainy lies elsewhere.

The obscene conduct by US authorities, whose officials contemplated abducting and murdering a publisher, is an inconvenient smudge of history best ignored for consumers of news down under.  The Albanese government, which has continued to extol the glory of the AUKUS security pact and swoon at prospects of a globalised NATO, has shelved any “political solution” regarding Assange, at least in any public context.  The US-Australian alliance is a shrine to worship at with reverential delusion, rather than question with informed scepticism.  The WikiLeaks founder did, after all, spoil the party.

On a cheerier note, those listening to Robinson’s address reflected a healthy political awareness about the tribulations facing a fellow Australian citizen.  The federal member for the seat of Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan, was present, as were Senators Peter Whish Wilson and David Shoebridge.  As Ryan subsequently tweeted, “An Australian punished by foreign states for acts of journalism?  Time for our government to act.”

Others were those who have been or continue to be targets of the national security state.  The long-suffering figure and target of the Australian security establishment, Bernard Collaery, put in an appearance, as did David McBride, who awaits trial for having exposed alleged atrocities of Australian special service personnel in Afghanistan.

Such individuals have made vital, oxygenating contributions to democratic accountability, of which WikiLeaks stands proud.  But any journalism that, as Robinson puts it, subjects “power to scrutiny, and holding it accountable”, is bound to incite the fury of the national security state.  Regarding Assange, will that fury win out?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Dr. Eberhardt is an expert on issues of race and inequality. The author of the critically acclaimed book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We, See, Think, Do, she uses science to expose the extent to which racial imagery and judgments shape actions and outcomes in our criminal legal system, neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In 2021, Dr. Eberhardt became the first Black president of the Association for Psychological Science, a global organization with more that 25,000 members world wide. In 2014, she was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow and one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. Two years later, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the National Academy of Sciences

“It is an honor to welcome Dr Eberhardt to the Innocence Project Board of Directors. Since its inception, the Innocence Project has used science to free the innocent, expose the fallibility of the criminal legal system, and promote structural reforms that make the system more accurate, fair and equitable. Jennifer’s research and expertise aligns perfectly with our mission and will bring hugely valuable insights, perspective and leadership to our work,” said Innocence Project Board Chair, Jack Taylor. 

“Jennifer Eberhardt is a trailblazer, an innovative and influential thinker, who shares the Innocence Project’s commitment to using science to advance criminal and racial justice,” said Christina Swarns, Executive Director of the Innocence Project. “ Her deep knowledge about the ways in which race can and does influence decision making will strengthen our efforts to prevent wrongful convictions and create fair, equitable and compassionate systems of justice for everyone.”

Dr. Eberhardt joined the faculty at Yale University in Psychology and African & African American Studies after receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1998, she joined the Stanford faculty where she is currently a Professor of Psychology, the Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy, and a Faculty Director of Stanford SPARQ (a university initiative to use social psychological research to address pressing social problems). 

“It is an honor and a privilege to join the Board of the Innocence Project, one of this country’s leading criminal justice reform organizations,” said Dr. Eberhardt. “My work is deeply aligned with that of the Innocence Project – we both share a commitment to revealing the pervasive and unjust effects of racial bias in wrongful convictions and, most importantly, to finding effective and long lasting solutions to prevent it.”

Over the years, Dr. Eberhardt has been invited to speak about her work at the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, the State of California Department of Justice, the Supreme Court of California, and the California State Capitol, among other places. 

The post Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Social Psychologist and Stanford University Professor, Joins the Innocence Project Board of Directors appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Justin Chan.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.