It’s a beautiful 25 degrees Celsius in Canberra today. The best temperature, IMO. I hope you are all warm and doing well wherever you are.
As always, if you’re enjoying Solidaritas, paid subscriptions are available for US$5/month or much much cheaper at US$40/year. Have a lovely weekend!
-Kate
Read
The myth of the ‘male bumbler’:
There's a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler's perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men — particularly powerful men — use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts. The bumbler takes one of our culture's most muscular myths — that men are clueless — and weaponizes it into an alibi.
There’s a massive kimchi problem possibly brewing in South Korea: heavy rains have destroyed cabbage crops, leading to a severe shortage.
How feminists are struggling to determine what sort of criminal responses, if any, are appropriate for domestic violence.
Singapore is aiming to plant one million trees!
Watch and listen
One of my favourite podcasts, The Cut, has returned with a new season. One of the latest episodes is called ‘Am I radical enough?’; it looks at how so many of us struggle between idealism and pragmatism.
Longform Podcast interviewed Jiayang Fan about her article, How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda.
Eat
I have been using douchi, Chinese fermented black soybeans, in a few dishes recently and am really enjoying the deep salty earthy taste.
Lotus roots! I never realised you could buy them frozen in Australia, so I’ve been eating them with all sorts of lunches recently. You can just lightly stir fry them as a side-dish; you don’t even need to defrost them beforehand.