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‘Breaking Bad’
Breaking Bad | Bryan Cranston | HBO | November 2012 | Television | Walter White | Television | Arts & Letters
The Monthly
It is well known that mail is sent by the bucketload to the fictional town of Weatherfield, England, addressed to characters from the long-running television soap Coronation Street as if they were real people. It is difficult to comprehend such stupidity. Until you become addicted to Breaking Bad,...
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Aboriginal People | Alice Springs | Life writing | October 2012 | Tracks | Vox | The Monthly Essays
The Monthly
The past caves away and dissolves behind us, leaving a few clues with which we try to reconstruct it. Hopeless task. History lives in the present. It is over 30 years since I walked across half of Australia with my dear camels and dog. If I concentrate, I can retrieve flashes of a particular place...
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Tim Birkhead’s 'Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird'
Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird | May 2012 | Tim Birkhead | Arts & Letters
The Monthly
Had nature not evolved birds, would we dream of flight? Would we be sufficiently inspired by the dragonfly, the butterfly, the bee? No other class of animal has engendered a passion strong enough to require a category neologism – no fishwatchers, insectwatchers or mammalwatchers. So why birds? They...
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A Dining Experience at Hobart’s Garagistes
October 2011 | The Nation Reviewed
The Monthly
Garagistes wine bar is indeed housed in a garage. And the people who work there are techies of a sort – gastronomic alchemists. I had my doubts initially. A restaurant that uses ‘foraged’ food might value tricksiness over taste. It might be an upmarket version of those grim places that offer...
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'In Treatment: Season Three'
Drugs | New York Review of Books | July 2011 | Arts & Letters
The Monthly
If, like Frederick Crews of the ‘Freud wars’, you think Freud was a crank, and his legacy a “spurious, ineffective pseudoscience”; or if, like Nabokov, you “detest” Freud (“I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his...
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Robyn Davidson on Health Retreats
Health | Health Retreat | India | Painting | World War II | Yoga | May 2011 | Travel Special
The Monthly
Sometimes fortune gifts you things you did not know you needed. Tyringham Clinic was one of those. Out in the luminous green, motorway-laced flatlands behind Milton Keynes, England, it was a Palladian pile that had known better times. At the front was a gravel drive circling a fountain that no...
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The Destruction of Burrup Rock Art
Aboriginal People | Amazon | Architecture | Art | Carbon emissions | China | Conservation | Government | Greenhouse gas emissions | Mining boom | Peak oil | Saudi Arabia | Scholars | Sexuality | The Monthly Essays | February 2011
The Monthly
We all know what justifications, arguments and perspectives are likely to be heard from the competing interests (competing visions of value). But what, ultimately, is being argued for? And is there ground for fair negotiation or is negotiation really just defeat in sheep’s clothing?An exemplary...
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Antony Gormley’s 'Firmament IV'
SOCIETY | India | Kitsch | Neuroscience | Psychology | Sculpture | Art | June 2010
The Monthly
Like all stereotypes, “stupid as a painter” – intended to cover visual artists of every persuasion – reveals itself as a truth via its exceptions. Antony Gormley is one of those exceptions. He spoke about his work recently, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with rare and affecting eloquence,...
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Trekking in the Simpson
Aboriginal People | Alice Springs | Climate Change | Drought | Genetics | The Monthly Essays | November 2008
The Monthly
For Indigenous people, who knew it as well as their own bodies (in a sense, their country was both body and mind), it was a large garden that sustained them for thousands of generations. Withholding sometimes, when the dry went on longer than usual, but generally so bountiful that they could gather...
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SOCIETY | Alice Springs | India | The Nation Reviewed | August 2008
The Monthly
"‘So what of this notion of exile?'‘No,' he says, ‘exile is too pretty a word. Can you reframe that?'‘Homelessness?'‘No, that's wrong - because I have a home.'‘Metaphorically speaking, I meant.'‘No. It's very simple. It's not exile; it's more to do with not being absolutely connected to where I am...
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In the Age of Noise
SOCIETY | Borders | Censorship | Mobile Phones | Tibet | Utes | The Monthly Essays | June 2008
The Monthly
Opinions are antagonistic to wisdom, even when they're right, which they seldom are. People cling to their opinions until history proves those opinions catastrophically wrong, but isn't it amusing that even when their opinions have been proved wrong, time and time and time again, they still believe...
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SOCIETY | India | The Nation Reviewed | May 2008
The Monthly
One of the great things about getting older is that all the anxieties you once had about death and decline (and some of us have had them daily since we first grasped the fact of mortality) are anxieties no longer. You are liberated from them because they have become real. Friends fall off perches...
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How Do Creatures Think?
SOCIETY | Biology | Ethics | Evolution | Jazz | World War II | The Monthly Essays | December 2007 - January 2008
The Monthly
As I do. And have always done.I have studied them in the wild, worked with them, shared my homes with them. Though ‘pets' seems too diminished a term to give to those aliens who have, throughout my life, kept me company, amused me, amazed me. Dogs, cats, parrots, ravens ... they have reconnected me...
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Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ & Bill McKibben’s ‘Deep Economy’
Books | Climate Change | Consumerism | Ecology | Ethics | Food Production | Global Warming | Literature | Modernity | Nuclear | Political Parties | Travel | November 2007
The Monthly
It would be interesting to know how many trees and how much oil (petrol for the delivery of, aviation fuel for the author promotion of, ink for the printing of, machines for shredding the remainders of), have gone into the plethora of books bringing us the bad eco-news in the decades since Silent...
