Is the election really already over?
With 15 days still to go there is an odd sense that campaign 2016 has already moved into the past tense.
Having a baby and having a medical career
Every hospital has a “residents’ room”. A place only the junior doctors can enter, where posture and politeness are discarded, naps are stolen, bosses are demolished, hook-ups are arranged and black humour reigns. It’s like a pub without alcohol.
An ideology of savagery
Two years ago, the armies of the group that would soon call itself the Islamic State, a group that already controlled large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, entered Mosul, the second city of Iraq.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until 10 July 2016
The ancient past has rarely seemed so present. With just 135 ancient objects from museums in China’s western Shaanxi Province, and one piece of advanced contemporary technology from Sydney, Tang: Treasures from the Silk Road capital summons up another world.
The coral bleaching signals a defining environmental shift
Many of today’s marine scientists blame Jacques Cousteau, who surfaced in their lounge rooms during their formative years, for luring them into the water. Others were hooked by the psychedelic barrage of coral gardens and sea creatures in National Geographic.
A lab-grown diamond is forever “There is an unusual number of shoppers huddling near a particular window one spring morning. Several women who are looking to buy earrings are astonished to see a strange sign that reads, ‘Lab-Grown Diamonds!’ ‘Why would anyone buy such a thing?’ Sharon, a mother of four, asks....
Hundreds arrested in Venezuela after latest unrest over food “Venezuelan security forces have arrested at least 400 people after the latest bout of looting and food riots in the crisis-hit OPEC member country, local officials said on Wednesday. Another death was also reported in the state of Merida from unrest...
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Australia’s changing place in Britain’s EU deliberations
This month, the British people will finally cast their vote in the long-anticipated “Brexit” referendum, to decide whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union. Prime Minister David Cameron’s audacious gamble to appease a fractious Conservative Party in the lead-up to last year’s UK general election has brought the nation to the brink of a historic decision.
Are we treating the symptoms of our problems rather than the causes?
“I think I’m stuck,” Louis* said when I asked why he had come to see me. “I finished my commerce degree last year and I started in a job, which I thought was going to be fine. And it is … but I’ve started feeling really anxious again, like when I was a teenager.”
I glanced down...
Artist Jan Senbergs prepares for his NGV retrospective
Jan Senbergs sits surrounded by the ephemera of his life’s work: folders of correspondence, press clippings, catalogues and plastic sleeves of 35mm slides that document his five-decade career as a painter.
What eels do when we're not watching
There is a small crowd of people by the ponds in Sydney’s Centennial Parklands, tossing bread to the clamouring waterbirds, when the dark form appears. It glides upwards with a lazy, powerful motion to swallow one of the crumbs before disappearing back into the murk.
When human nature and the law intersect
At a Saturday farmers’ market, two little girls in floral sundresses gaze up at a tall, red-lipped, ponytailed busker with a guitar. Among the stalls, crowds and opportunistic seagulls, Georgie Stone is performing hits by artists such as Taylor Swift, as well as songs she’s penned herself.
Australia’s car industry has met policy failure head-on
In 2000, as the Olympic torch wound its way around Australia en route to Sydney, the car leading the relay was an Australian-made, electric–petrol hybrid, the ECOmmodore. But during the decade that followed, Holden decided there was no future in Australian-made electric cars.
Managing child sex offenders in the community
On a Saturday morning, I wake in the dark and drive seven hours to a support session for “fellas”. “We don’t use the P-word,” the organiser had explained over the phone when I’d asked how many paedophiles were coming.
The dominance of baby boomers is becoming total
Mike Baird, the premier of New South Wales, can’t have been prepared for this. Two months ago he was probably the most popular politician in Australia, presenting a wet Liberal surfer persona that gelled with the state’s better nature. There were travel concessions for asylum...
New
Before I went to Hiroshima I did not know the word hypocentre. It didn’t exist for me until I found it on a wall in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, past the diorama of children with charred skin flaps hanging from their outstretched arms. But there, hanging a precise distance above the clean model of a cityscape, was a polished plastic red ball: the hypocentre of the nuclear fireball of August 1945.
Anohni’s presentation of her recent album, Hopelessness – it’s not quite correct to describe it as a concert – began in her absence.
The gang at News Corp couldn’t believe their luck.
When the hapless Duncan Storrar rose to ask why rich people were to receive tax cuts while the poor, like himself, did not, the man ticked all the boxes.
The Kiwi charm of Taika Waititi’s ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’
In Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (in national release) we open on a majestic aerial view of dense New Zealand forest. It could be the beginning of some ominously dark Norwegian crime thriller – or Top of the Lake. But Waititi is a director of sunnier disposition, and he is not about to stray for long from the comic warmth that drives his films.
Helen Garner’s work collected in ‘Everywhere I Look’
In one of the shorter pieces in her new nonfiction collection, Everywhere I Look (Text Publishing; $29.99), Helen Garner celebrates the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould: “JS Bach is God, as far as I’m concerned, and the pianist Glenn Gould was one of his major p
Doing the right thing in Jay Roach’s ‘Trumbo’ and László Nemes’ ‘Son of Saul’
The television series Breaking Bad is held in high regard for many reasons. Over five seasons spread across six years, it attained the quality of a Greek tragedy. The writing sparkled. The cinematography dazzled (literally – it was shot in sun-baked Albuquerque, New Mexico)....
An interview with Jonathan Franzen
There’s something a little old-fashioned about Jonathan Franzen. I don’t mean old-fashioned in the bird-watching, fist-shaking at the internet and wearing thick black-rimmed writerly glasses way. I mean old-fashioned in the “novelist on the cover of TIME magazine” way. The sense...
Rihanna’s ‘ANTI’ and Future’s ‘EVOL’
The Barbadian pop singer Rihanna and the Canadian rapper Drake have recorded three duets together.