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For most of us, learning to read is like learning to walk. The ability to glean meaning from symbols on a page is so instinctive, we forget that the first sentences we read also enabled us to write our own futures. In August, I was lucky enough to become an online ambassador for Do it in a Dress, a campaign by One Girl – an inspiring Melbourne-based organisation hell-bent on helping the 66 million girls in the world who don’t have access to this privilege. The campaign, which has already raised $120,000 – enough to send 412 girls in the Sierra Leone to school – is a call to action for anyone who’s ever wondered if they could change the way that gender inequality shapes the course of girls lives. Want to know how you can help? Visit http://www.doitinadress.com/ for more information and check out the video below.

If you happen to be in Sydney, pick up the new Broadsheet spring issue – I wrote the cover story on Kelvin Ho of Sydney design firm Akin Creative, who’s super-nice and very talented. It also features a guide I wrote on dumplings of the world, photojournalism from Andrew Quilty and an intriguing story on Surry Hills’ Hibernian House.

But you don’t have to be white to remember those weird years before you became smart and responsible and tightly edited. The pain and pleasures of taking wrong turns, being self-destructive in order to create something and doing things that aren’t you to find out who you are aren’t specific to race – they’re just a consequence of being young.

– In case you missed it, here’s an excerpt from my piece in Daily Life a couple of weeks ago on the absence of white characters in wasted youth narratives.

Are you that somebody? 

“If you’re the sort of person who fucking whines about being motivated, like some of the art students I lecture, then just fucking stop. I’m not interested in speaking to anyone who wonders how to motivate themselves. If you need to talk about how to get motivated, then go get a normal job in the normal scheme of the world and just do art as a hobby so you still love it. Stop clogging up the field for the people who need this like a drug,” says artist and journalist, Molly Crabapple in one of the excellent longform interviews over at The Great Discontent. Also worth checking out the interview with Roxane Gay, whose book of essays Bad Feminist, I devoured in two days.

When I’m reading Murakami, strange serendipitous things start happening in my life (when my boyfriend is reading him at the same time, the weirdness doubles). This Buzzfeed essay sums up his addictive brand of magic.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to stumble on Ann Friedman’s essay on Patti Smith for This Recording. For me, Smith’s Horses is the urgent, musical sum of endless Saturday nights in Melbourne with my best friends and the hazy glow of mornings after.

Miranda July’s new app Somebody turns to the power of hashtags to forge connections between strangers.

I loved Rachel Hill’s story on how millennials are embracing the #girlboss philosophy on The Daily Beast.

Last week, I saw The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum speak at the Opera House for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and she reminded me about why Sex and the City and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are two of my all-time favourite shows.

“I was a boy haunted by questions: Why do the lilies close at night? Why does my father always say, “I can dig it”? And who really killed the dinosaurs? And why is my life so unlike everything I see on TV? That feeling—the not knowing, the longing for knowing, and the eventual answer—is love and youth to me. And I have always preferred libraries to classrooms because the wide open library is the ultimate venue for this theater.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates has new writing up at The Atlantic.

I find FKA Twig’s blend of art, persona and ethereal, trip-hop laced electronica fascinating. Her music is like a modern-day tribute to the old, scratched Aaliyah CDs I used to have on repeat in my suburban bedroom in the nineties.

“The scenes of Mumbai are less interested in technicolour weddings than they are with crumbling apartments and the way it feels to stand alone in a packed commuter train. It captures the rhythms a of a single city while maintaining that finding an emotional connection when you’re surrounded by strangers is remarkable anywhere. And Ila’s decision to leave her joyless marriage is the mark of a film that doesn’t treat her as a cipher or a way to advance the plot. She might exist in a world where you wash laundry by hand and making an aromatic lunch is a form of self-expression but that doesn’t make her choices less feminist.”

Is ‘The Lunchbox’ the perfect indie love story? – my latest at Daily Life 

David Goldberg might be the husband of Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In author and one of Forbes most powerful women in business but his own trajectory – which includes leading a Silicon Valley start-up during the Napster era and heading up SurveyMonkey, an online survey site that was valued at $US1 billion – is no less fascinating. I interviewed Goldberg, who was in Sydney to launch Survey Monkey’s new Asia-Pacific office for Renegade Collective magazine, and his generous answers were baffling in light of the fact that he must have suffered some serious lack of sleep. The issue, which also includes a great feature on Misty Copeland, the first African-American female soloist for the American Ballet, is available in Australia now.

Vault issue 7 is at newsagents now featuring my profile of G-Star’s Shubhankar Ray – the kind of creative director who still carries around a notebook to document ideas and weaves influences that range from art hijacks to post-punk Manchester into his work. It was one of those long, dense interviews that are a nightmare to transcribe but can see the story just write itself – read it here. This issue also includes an essay on LA photographer Elad Lassry who makes flat, monochrome collages using materials such as old issues of Life.

Beat it, Kerouac. 

There’s been a lot of discussion about why it took so long for the cult of Terry Richardson to unravel. As always, Molly Lambert’s Grantland analysis – which also attributes American Apparel’s success to the third-wave feminist myth that women have somehow mastered the male gaze – sums it up.

Whether it’s fossicking for sea urchins or uprooting edible weeds, it’s difficult to have a conversation about food culture in Sydney without referencing the foraging trend. Gillian Osborne’s brilliant essay Stone-Age Nostalgia links the rarefied foraged creations we might find ourselves eating at Copenhagen’s Noma (if we can get a table) to a longing for the ecological past.

I’ve been really enjoying Anne Helen Peterson’s writing on Buzzfeed  lately. Jennifer Lawrence and the History of Cool Girls, which traces the evolution of the cool girl trope, is a great place to start.

What is it about getting a glimpse into people’s routines that’s so fascinating? It’s difficult to shake off the voyeuristic thrill of Waiting for Saturday and the Morning After section of Adult magazine. The latter is also home to killer first-person writing that riffs on modern-day sexuality.

Alice Gregory nails it.

Gabby Bess guest-edits Dazed and echoes a long-held belief: that a copy of On The Road is the world’s most effective douchebag radar.

Image credit: Film School Rejects

A few weeks ago I interviewed Gia Coppola ahead of the Australian release of Palo Alto, which was adapted from a short story collection by James Franco. Although the film, which follows a group of teenagers indulge in the kind of hedonism specific to adolescence (joyless party scenes, sexual encounters in lieu of love) and features a bleached-out visual language that makes you long for Californian summers you never had, it’s also a textbook example of how narratives about wasted youth owe their power to an ability to take race out of the equation. Often, we’re presented with aspirational stories about white, middle class kids giving into the excesses of being young not because ethnic kids are never wasted or lost but because people of colour are required to be productive members of society – a journey that doesn’t involve drugs, parties or booze. 

There’s a scene in Frances Ha, a 2013 film written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, where the title character runs gawkily through the streets of New York to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Frances, a 27-year old aspiring dancer who believes that her best friend Sophie is the love of her life, has just spent a night drinking whiskey with new friends at a low-key party: the kind of meandering night that makes you feel like your inner and outer worlds are completely aligned. There are many things to love about this film – including its portrayal of female friendship as both complicated and transformative and its ability to capture the weightlessness of being in your twenties – but the way it frames being led by your feelings as an achievement is my favourite thing of all.