Progressive culture since 1954
I was in no way prepared for pregnancy – had not even considered the idea that pregnancy is something to prepare for. I had not thought about what Maggie Nelson labels ‘the capaciousness of pregnancy. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before … the rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs.’ I imagined such things almost painlessly. After all, my mother had done it; my grandmothers had done it. How hard could it be?
I can’t get to sleep. Anne Carson is in my head.
The tobacco plant is fragile. To kill all the things that are trying to kill it meant a rigorous regime, keeping the plant alive at an unknown cost to human and ecosystem health.
On 14 July 2019, the trans and gender-diverse community and our allies rallied to show support for the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2019. If passed, the proposed law will allow trans and gender-diverse people born in Victoria to change their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity without first undergoing surgery to their reproductive organs.
There’s no future in nihilism, but sometimes it seems like there’s no future regardless. On this level, it can be therapeutic to wallow in it for a little while – just sometimes.
Australasia’s largest philosophy conference was wrong to give transgender discrimination a free pass last week: not even academics should have a right to discriminate.
There is a period in many little girls’ lives, around the age of ten, where they go completely wild. Not in the sense of Girls Gone Wild, which depressingly clogs up the search results, but in the most natural sense of the word – feral and free.
People adopt different styles of packing when leaving a place. There are the light-packers who just throw in a change of clothes, grab their smartphones and are good to go. These ones are eager to leave, discard accumulated memories, and make new memories in a new place.
As wild and genre-bending and hellacious as her prose is, though, Emanuel’s novel can be placed alongside things we have read: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Samuel Beckett’s body of work, and, more locally, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose. But while Cox’s debut was lauded in the Guardian and the Saturday Paper, described variously as exciting, original, and brilliant, critical responses to Emanuel seem strangely subdued.
Announcing the recipients of the 2019 Overland writing residencies, which are supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation.
A democracy in aged care would need to work through a series of layers. The society around us would have to be more fair. It would look for better ways to finance the system. But above all it would find a way to involve residents more in decisions about how the facility functions. Perhaps one day ‘homes’ will really be more like homes.
We must not fail to acknowledge how the demands of the neoliberal university fall disproportionately on disabled academics and students and how this perpetuates deep inequalities, of which ableism is just one expression.
On 21 July 2011, forty-two years and one day after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, NASA’s space shuttle program – a program that had spanned three decades – concluded with the final return trip of Atlantis from the International Space Station (ISS). It felt like the end of an era – and it was.
The Code of Conduct, the Student Discipline Rule and the investigative processes that are set in motion after a student is suspected of breaking either are familiar enemies to left-wing students at the University of Sydney.
My mother discovered me having sex with my best friend who was the same sex as me when I was seventeen. I remember how she looked at me with horror and righteousness, knowing and believing I would go to hell. She said to me in a serious tone that I should think about ending my life. Suicide was the answer for such shame.
Anyone of a leftist disposition who spends long enough on the internet will sooner or later encounter the online figure that has come to be known as logicbro. There he is (for he’s almost always a he), accusing you of being ‘factually incorrect’, urging you to ‘get your facts straight’, and asserting that you are ‘emotionally driven and therefore prone to making sloppy mistakes’.
It has been a privilege to edit a magazine that emerged from different left traditions and continues to find new ways to foster radical spaces and thought. For me, it has always been the making of the magazines that I loved (18 print editions since 2015, and countless online editions and pieces) and the ephemerality of each edition, a collaboration shaped by all the ideas and forces around it.
Dear Mr Peter,
Norman has sinned 1,830,666 times in his life so far. I notice the last three numbers too sinister.
None of us can rehearse grief. It is an intangible force that comes into focus and disables us when we are least prepared to deal with it.