A tear slowly creeps down your cheek. You’re not allowed to blink, otherwise you will have to start the series of questions again. The questions are repetitive, but quickly become merciless. You’re supposed to answer them without fear or hesitation. The man seated at the other … Read more »
Lining up at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in March last year, I found myself standing behind Australian political scientist, intellectual and longtime AIDS activist Dennis Altman. I’d met Dennis earlier that summer at some events marking the fortieth anniversary of Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, his iconic … Read more »
In our increasingly confusing modern world – a place of blurring borders and shifting identities, where our desire to be permanently connected threatens to alienate us from ourselves and each other – the tradition of the city novel feels more salient than ever. As populations grow and … Read more »
The American author Rick Moody once referred to his friend and colleague Dave Eggers as ‘the Bono of literature’. Something of a backhanded compliment, Moody’s comment was an attempt to celebrate Eggers’s energetic involvement in projects designed to practically improve the state of the world. Bono, the … Read more »
After reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, I became intrigued with the ‘Fertile Crescent’ region in what used to be called Mesopotamia (now Iraq). As a global nerve centre of agriculture, science and written technology – as well as the scene of the Tower of Babel, … Read more »
