Ocean Vuong: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
Leslie Jamison: The Recovering. Intoxication and Its Aftermath.
Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House.
Alice Bolin: Dead Girls. Essays on Surviving an American Obsession.
Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror.Natasha Lennard: Being Numerous. Essays on Non-Fascist Life.Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing.
George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
George Packer: Our Man. Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.
Stuart Schrader: Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
David France: How to Survive a Plague. The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS.
Fiction:
Seth Dickinson: The Monster Baru Cormorant.Rory Power: Wilder Girls.Becky Chambers: To Be Taught If Fortunate.Lisa Ko: The Leavers.Crystal Hana Kim: If You Leave Me.Esmé Weijun Wang: The Border of Paradise.Chloe Benjamin: The Immortalists.
Tanwi Nandini Islam: Bright Lines.
Andrea Lawlor: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.Ausma Zehanat Khan: The Unquiet Dead.Elizabeth Hand: Generation Loss.Laura McHugh: The Wolf Wants In.Kristen Lepionka: The Last Place You Look.Paul Tremblay: A Head Full of Ghosts.Stephen King: Duma Key.Stephen & Owen King: Sleeping Beauties.
And Tanwi Nandini Islam's Bright Lines about a Bangladeshi family living in Brooklyn in 2003, a portrait of characters struggling to figure out who they are. And Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, whose shape-shifting main character Paul (who thinks Orlando comes closest, but he himself never had the luxury of quiet servants) navigates what it means to be able to inhibit a body that can present as male or female.
This year, I also applied for citizenship in the country that I have been living in for the past five years. It is difficult to explain the complex thoughts and feeling that I have about exchanging a citizenship in a country that I have always struggled with for one of a country whose history of colonization and violence is unresolved in a different manner. The way I have decided to do it is to try and find an intellectual connection, an understanding of the debates and approaches to Australia - and I have been reading the diverse writings in Meanjin and The Lifted Brow to get started on something that will take a lifetime.
Also, The Habitat podcast.
Meanjin: The Trouble With Journalism, December 2019
The Atlantic: How Labour Lost the Culture War, December 13, 2019
The New Yorker: How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real, December 16, 2019
The Washington Post: At War with the Truth, December 9, 2019
Foreign Affairs: The New China Scare, December 6, 2019
Autostraddle: Toward an Applicable Theory of Just Not, December 3, 2019
Eater: What Does 'Authenticity' in Food Mean in 2019?, December 3, 2019
Film Comment: Present Tense: Kristen Stewart, December 5, 2019
The New York Review of Books: Lessons in Survival, November 21, 2019
Vice: The Creator of the Shitty Media Men List Isn't Done, November 19, 2019
Vulture: Watchmen Recap: … and Justice for All, November 24, 2019
Longreads: Every One of Us is Other: Looking Back on Representation in "Heavenly Creatuers" 25 Years Later, November 15, 2019
Wired: The Race to Bring Meat Alternatives to Scale, November 8, 2019Popula: Fuck “civility”, November 1, 2019
Bookforum: Cutting Up, October 2019
Slate: “Hot Topic”: The Complete Annotated Lyrics, October 31, 2019
NPR: Trump Impeachment Inquiry: A Guide To Key People, Facts And Documents, October 28, 2019
Bright Wall/Dark Room: Sparking Joy. Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019), October 28, 2019
Texas Monthly: When ‘Angels in America’ Came to East Texas, October 13, 2019The New York Review of Books: The Culmination of Republican Decay, October 10, 2019Bright Wall/Dark Room: Hang On Girl, October 9, 2019Insider: The story of Jamal Khashoggi's murder and how the world looked the other way, October 2, 2019
The Cut: The Toll of Me Too Assessing the costs for those who came forward, September 30, 2019The New York Times: How a Shadow Foreign Policy in Ukraine Prompted an Impeachment Inquiry, September 29, 2019Longreads: Regarding the Interpretation of Others, September 19, 2019Meanjin: Unearthed. The Last Days of the Anthropocene, September 17, 2019The New Republic: The Remaking of Susan Sontag, September 12, 2019Quartz: The Zimbabwean writer who was Robert Mugabe’s nemesis, September 7, 2019The New Republic: The Danger of a Domestic Terrorism Law, August 16, 2019LARB: Sally Rooney: The Dark Side, August 15, 2019
The New York Times Magazine: The 1619 Project, August 14, 2019Dazed: Two conversations with Sleater-Kinney: first as a trio, then as a duo, August 13, 2019Quartz: Hong Kong’s police are rolling out harsh new tactics against protestors, August 12, 2019New York Times Magazine: The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison, August 8, 2015Slate: Toni Morrison Reshaped the Landscape of Literature, August 6, 2019Slate: Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us, August 4, 2019The Paris Review: Not Gonna Get Us, July 29, 2019The New York Times: What Is the Chinese Military Doing in Hong Kong?, July 25, 2019Rolling Stone: Kamala Harris’ Moment, July 23, 2019The New York Magazine: I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked, July 17, 2019The New Yorker: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Trump's Crisis at the Border, July 10, 2019LitHub: In Patriarchy No One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing Machine, July 10, 2019The New York Review of Books: Reckless in Riyadh, June 2019ICWA: Austria’s far right faces life after scandal, June 21, 2019The New Yorker: The Unimaginable Reality of American concentration camps, June 21, 2019The New Yorker: Inside a Texas building where the government is holding migrant children, June 21, 2019Newsweek: 8-year old migrants being forced to care for toddlers in detention camps, June 21, 2019New York Magazine Intelligencer: E. Jean Carroll: “Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman.”, 21 June 2019Buzzfeed: Going Overboard, June 18, 2019Longreads: The 19th Century Lesbian Made for 21st Century Consumption, July 6, 2019n+1: Game of Groans, June 4, 2019The Atlantic: Nothing Prepares You for Visiting Omaha Beach, June 2, 2019Vulture: The Decadent, Visceral Pleasures of Killing Eve, May 29, 2019Vulture: What We Left Behind Boldly Argues for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Place in the Black TV Canon, May 17, 2019Bandcamp: The Power of Community: Team Dresch Return, May 16, 2019Bright Wall/Dark Room: It’s a Secret. Christine, May 15, 2019
KCRW Lost Notes Podcast: To Chan Marshall: A Letter to Cat Power, May 2, 2019GRANTA: Where Is Kigali?, May 2, 2019TASTE: When the Next Big Thing in Food Isn’t Actually Next, April 29, 2019Buzzfeed: “Fixer Upper” Is Over, But Waco’s Transformation Is Just Beginning, April 20, 2019
Lawfare: Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary, April 19, 2019Quartz: Astronomers have finally captured an image of a black hole, April 11, 2019NY Times: A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy, April 6, 2019The Intelligencer: What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of?, April 1, 2019Patricia Lockwood: You kick Miette, March 20, 2019The New Statesman: How Australia incubated far-right terror, March 20, 2019
Pacific Standard: Indigenous Knowledge Has Been Warning Us About Climate Change for Centuries, March 4, 2019The New Yorker: The New Yorker: An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew, February 20, 2019The New York Review of Books: Undefeated, ISIS Is Back in Iraq, February 13, 2019Undark: Psychologists Seek a Broader, Healthier Definition of ‘Masculinity’, February 13, 2019The New York Review of Books: Syria’s Torture Photos: Witness to Atrocity, February 9, 2019The New York Review of Books: America’s Original Identity Politics, February 7, 2019Longreads: The Lost Boys of #MeToo, February 1, 2019The New York Review of Books: Climate Signs, February 1, 2019Popula: Grocery-store nationalism, January 30, 2019Autostraddle: How My Cat’s Anxiety Helped Me Be Gentler With Myself About My Own, January 28, 2019Bright Wall/Dark Room: Disobedience as a Path to God, January 28, 2019BuzzFeed: Does LGBT Media Have A Future?, January 25, 2019The Atlantic: ‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You’, January 18, 2019Los Angeles Review of Books: Feasting on Precarity, January 14, 2019The Paris Review: On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted, January 7, 2019Buzzfeed News: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, January 5, 2019