Good morning!
I’ve received a couple of lovely reader emails recently - it’s wonderful to hear from you. I hope you are all doing well.
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
My long read of the week: ‘Why I’m losing hope in India’:
Yes, there’s time. If India stops turning inward and embraces an open, transparent partnership with global investors, hundreds of millions more would get a shot at prosperity. A stagnant world economy could tap a new source of future demand. The West might win a strong and reliable security partner in Asia. The ’90s optimism will renew itself. But if India remains stuck in a middle-income trap, people will soon stop asking if it could be the next China. My generation already has.
Hong Kong protest leaders Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, and Ivan Lim have been jailed. I wish them strength.
Care work is too often treated as a private matter. It is ‘unproductive’ work, carried out ‘beyond’ the market and naturalized to certain groups of people to be performed out of love, virtue or duty. It’s not the business of the economy. While care work might be treated as a ‘gift’, and can be full of joy, its capacity has limits. Those carrying it out – paid or unpaid – are too often treated as expendable.
The United Liberation Movement for West Papua has announced a provisional government in exile. This is a big move by the ULMWP.
Three quarters of Australians now back a target of net zero by 2030. The government, of course, doesn’t seem to care.
What if we called people in instead of calling them out? I’m still deciding how I feel about this approach. What do you think?
NPR’s Book Concierge has been updated for 2020. There are almost 400 books outlined here - you can select filters to help decide what to read next! Disastrous for people like me.
Watch and listen
The ABC’s The History Listen podcast just did an episode on a 1970 movement called SCOOP - South Coast Organisation Opposed to Pollution - based on the coast south of Sydney. They were fighting a proposed coal loader on top of an escarpment in the Illawarra region. It’s a great listen because none of the people involved (who won, by the way!) had been activists before, so it’s fascinating as well as being useful to hear why they did what they did, particularly the women becoming politically active for the first time.
The Cut spoke to Black health educator Erica Chidi about her journey from being a doula to establishing Loom, a sexual and reproductive health education company.
I’ve had this bloody Italian ‘English gibberish’ song stuck in my head all week, so it’s only fair that you hear it too. Apparently the singer, Adriano Celentano, wrote it because he was convinced Italians would like any song in English, even if it didn’t make sense. He was right - it went to number one in multiple European countries.
Eat
It’s warm again so I’m back to eating salads for lunch. We immediately pulled out last summer’s favourite - Hetty Mckinnon’s char-grilled broccoli with chickpeas, baby spinach, almonds, lemon, and parmesan. Great news: it’s still as delicious as ever! We often use broccolini instead.
Technically drink rather than eat, but: oat milk. I decided to stop drinking cow’s milk a couple of months ago to reduce my impact on the environment (cow’s milk is very water intensive) and switch to oat milk. I’ve tried about 10 different kinds recently - some are like awful thin porridge and some are delicious. I’m really into the Vitasoy barista oat milk. It’s excellent in tea and great in coffee - it even froths well. $4 at the supermarket.