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However, “swirl” conjures images of chocolate melting into vanilla – and this is where ice cream metaphors fall horribly short. On her high-traffic dating site Beyond Black & White, Karazin (who’s happily married to a white man) makes the case for “swirling” based on statistics that are the product of systemic inequalities, such as low marriage rates between African-Americans. Swirlr, which is about as edgy as an episode of Joe Millionaire, features awkward bowling dates in which spirited women named Quintana gravitate towards brooding jocks called Rocky.

Karazin’s app might ask us to “date different” but her project still reflects a culture that uses the language of cosmopolitanism to push a version of diversity with whiteness at its heart. If the world was really post-racial, we wouldn’t celebrate interracial couples for being interracial. Love depends on feelings that occur entirely beneath the skin.

There’s a lot of presumption that goes into writing. There’s a lot of internal questioning: Am I an expert? Can I speak on this topic? What makes me valid enough to have a voice? I’ve had to work towards the idea that I couldn’t just arrive in a room and be a person with ideas; and that I needed to respond to other people’s curiosity about who I was before I could really enter a room.

– The Guardian’s recent interview with Brooklyn writer Durga Chew-Bose is crazily insightful.

Image credit: The Cobrasnake

Somewhere between the demise of American Apparel and the unmasking of Gavin McInnes, the Vice co-founder who penned an openly transphobic essay for Thought Catalog last August, an appetite for sincerity and self-improvement has seen irony lose its edge. Last year, Emily Gould, the former gossip columnist credited with inventing Internet snark published a heartfelt memoir about the trials of female friendship. And in what may be an apex of the age of earnestness, The New York Times recently introduced readers to snowga – a dubious hybrid of yoga and snowsport.

– Thrilled to report that I’ll be contributing to The Sydney Morning Herald’s Daily Life fortnightly this year. If you missed it, today’s column is about why we shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate the age of earnestness.

Image credit: Nikki Chadwick

Sitting at Universal Music’s Sydney headquarters, a concrete-and-glass space dotted with egg-shaped couches and flickering flat screens, it’s impossible not to worry that this charming earnestness is destined to become a casualty of the high corridors of hit making. But in the last 18 months, 20-year-old Georgia’s crystalline voice, which ducks and weaves between multi-instrumentalist brother Caleb’s lush synths, has already helped catapult the pair beyond their wildest dreams.

The latest issue of Renegade Collective, featuring my interview with Georgia and Caleb Nott, the brother-sister duo behind Broods – an indie act whose short but explosive trajectory includes sold-out US shows –  is out at newsagents now. Super-talented and incredibly humble. What’s not to like?

From ‘Dear Sugar’, a cult The Rumpus advice column that showcases Cheryl Strayed’s talent for turning promiscuity into poetry, to ‘Savage Love’, gay activist Dan Savage’s attempt at questioning sexual norms, to The Cut‘s ‘Ask Polly’, where Heather Havrilesky draws from her past as a beer-swilling ingrate to inspire readers to take charge of their lives, these modern-day advice columnists are an Internet-era corrective to a world where we google our heartbreaks and air career problems on Reddit – even if the decisions we face are more complex than ever.

I wrote a column about my obsession with the agony aunt revival over at Daily Life today. Also, Murakami’s new advice column is the best thing ever.

The answer has almost nothing to do with the writer’s emotional context and everything to do with the fact that quest narratives belong to a Western literary tradition in which “finding yourself” hinges on the presence of a far-flung Other, whose authenticity brings your own truth sharply into focus. The scenery might switch between Kerouac’s heady African-American jazz clubs, Gilbert’s technicolour Indian wedding and Strayed’s snow-covered High Sierras, but it’s the process that makes it easy to emulate – as O’Heir writes, “the problem with all self-help or inspirational literature is always the same: People want to take it literally, and we have a tendency to mistake the map for the journey.”

 

Are spiritual quests only for the privileged? – Daily Life 

Image credit: Rachel Kara

The last three months have flown by in a series of deadlines bookended by an incredible fortnight in Japan. Here are some things that I’ve been working on in the last little while.

• I’ve had many kinds of interview experiences but few as humbling as my chat with the artist Sydney Ball for Broadsheet. You can read the piece here – images by the lovely Rachel Kara.
• I reviewed Lena Dunham’s memoir Not that Kind of Girl for The Vine back in October.
• A roundup of five female artists I think are worth watching for Daily Life.
• I profiled Sydney artist Jelena Telecki for the latest issue of Vault magazine.
• My feature on Houzz co-founder Adi Tatarko is in this month’s Renegade Collective at newsagents around the country now.

And I imagined my own pain, my anger, magnified by fifty in the man who would send that email, the person who believes that life is a zero-sum game and girls are there to be your props, that anyone else’s artistry is a mere distraction from the Lord’s grand plan to promote your agenda. How painful that must be, how suffocating. And I decided then that I would never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won’t be threatened by the old or the new. I’ll open wide like a daisy every morning. I’ll make my work.”

– my favourite excerpt from Not That Kind of Girl, the new essay collection by Girls creator Lena Dunham. I enjoyed it immensely, despite the hype.

 

If Keef, who makes the kind of hedonistic party music that could soundtrack the apocalypse and is regularly arrested for weapons charges, represents the tension between authenticity and bankability that’s as old as hip-hop itself, then Herb, whose acclaimed recent mixtape Welcome to Fazoland ⎯ named for a dead friend ⎯ tempers bleak portraits of urban warfare with a rare technical artistry, demonstrates the form’s ability to spin hopeless circumstances into a vehicle for redemption and joy. Herb’s real-world tales of street violence give voice to metaphorical struggles too, proof that hip-hop can be a talisman for triumph over adversity, a legacy that found its apex in Biggie and Tupac.

An excerpt from my feature on Chicago’s drill music scene which was published in new biannual magazine Museum. Some of the young hip-hop artists I profiled live pretty turbulent existences so getting this story wasn’t easy – but the fact that their lives are such a testament to how hardship can galvanise ambition has made it one of the favourite stories I’ve worked on to date. Read the whole thing here or you can preorder Museum here.