February 2009

'The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty' by Peter Singer

By Chris Middendorp

Peter Singer is a public intellectual par excellence; he takes complex philosophical notions and relates them directly to the general reader without a hint of loftiness or superiority. The Life You Can Save is classic Singer: a straightforward but perspicacious exploration of one of the great ethical questions of our age. Do ordinary people in the West have the power to end world poverty and

'Outliers: The Story of Success' by Malcolm Gladwell

By Zora Simic

Perhaps by virtue of his own accomplishments, Malcolm Gladwell - author of bestsellers The Tipping Point and Blink, writer for the New Yorker, and well-paid speaker and guru - has a vested interest in the topic of success. Yet, in publicity for his latest book, Gladwell has resisted calling himself an outlier, formally defined as "something that is situated away from or classed differently fr

Numismatics

By Clive James

Statesman

By John Bryson

Mike Parr’s Cartesian Corpse

Mind / Body

By Daniel Thomas

To know or not to know anything in advance about an artist's work? That is the question for art curators. They hope the artworks they launch into the public domain are charged with aesthetic force and will put non-specialist minds to work unaided. It's a win w

Antony and the Johnsons’ The Crying Light

Nature Boy

By Robert Forster

Four years ago, while on a promotional tour for the last Go-Betweens record, I came across Antony and the Johnsons' second album. I was in Amsterdam and had asked our local record-company rep how our album was being received, to be told, in typically abrupt Du

Laurent Cantet’s 'The Class'

Life Inside

By Luke Davies

In the staff room at the beginning of a school year, François (François Bégaudeau), a French teacher at a Parisian middle school, chats with the new history teacher, who is outlining with matter-of-fact certainty his term plan for Year 9. The teacher's ideas seem gra

Sonya Hartnett’s 'Butterfly'

Unhappy Families

By Craig Sherborne

If we didn't have childhoods we'd be much better people. We'd start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn't have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hyp

Eddie Perfect’s 'Shane Warne: The Musical'

The Comeback Kid

By Gideon Haigh

Consider these three vignettes from the storied life of Shane Warne, involving something that happened, then something that didn't, then something that is. On 10 June 2000, London's Daily Mirror publishes front-page allegations that Warne harassed a nurse, whom he met

Boxing for Palm Island

By Chloe Hooper

Ten years ago, Ray Dennis found himself out of work. Each day he made more home-brew and started killing himself drinking it. Then he remembered the talent of the young men he'd trained from Palm Island, the Aboriginal ex-mission community north of Townsville.

An Australian Fiasco

Gone with the Wind

By Peter Conrad

By now all those questions have had the same dismal answer. The few grudgingly favourable reviews Australia received chose to be amused by its giddy, garbled, retrograde kitsch - the lurid sunsets and silhouetted roos that pander to fantasies about an exotic c

Looking Sheepish

By Alice Pung

"Sheep's placenta for the face is all the rage among Chinese women," my father said. All his mainland-Chinese friends told him that this was the perfect gift for me to give when I went to Beijing: lanolin oil containing adventurous admixtures of animal innards. So Dad s

Representing

By Jo Lennan

Justice Michael Kirby was jet-lagged. He was just off the red-eye after a trip overseas for UNAIDS work and speaking engagements, and small mountains of correspondence waited on a side table. Paper covered his desk and rose in piles from the floor around it."Come around here," he said."I won't tread on the paper," I replied."Oh, you can tread on it. Now, wha

Open Market

By Cate Kennedy

Once Kevin Rudd's $10.4-billion bonus found its way into Australians' bank accounts, malls and mega-marts across the land were reportedly swamped with eager spenders in the days leading up to Christmas. Sure, we grasped the implications of the global economic crisis, but we were also prepared to demonstrate our consumer confidence in the way we like best: buying stuff.On the day itself, most of us

Backyard Blitz

By John van Tiggelen

When Tony Gibbins comes knocking, you know you've messed up. Gibbins is the Unsightly Properties Officer with the Loddon Shire Council. It says so on his name badge. Most shires prefer a prettier job title, such as Beautification Officer or Environmental Healt

Public Goods & Pipe Organs

Comment

By John Hirst

If a town hall has an organ should it also have an official town-hall organist? I thought I took a wide interest in public affairs but until I met Professor Ian Harper, who was in charge of refurbishing the organ in the Melbourne Town Hall, I had never turned

Helena Rubinstein & the Merino

By Shane Maloney

More than a century after the event, it remains unclear exactly why Chaja Rubinstein, 23, fled her native Poland and took lodgings with her uncle Louis Silberfeld, a shopkeeper in the hamlet of Coleraine, in the west of Victoria. Some say it was to escape an unwelcome s

The Global Financial Crisis

By Kevin Rudd

There is a sense that we are now living through just such a time: barely a decade into the new millennium, barely 20 years since the end of the Cold War and barely 30 years since the triumph of neo-liberalism - that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time.The agent for this change is what we now call the