First published in Daily Life, August 2015 If you grew up binge-reading magazines, there’s a high chance that you can spot the phases of romantic attraction with a detective precision but be clueless when it comes to identifying friendship soulmates. You know, the people who are destined to down too many espresso martinis with you on your […]
First published in Daily Life, August 2015 Three decades before we learned how to adjust our arms in front of a smartphone screen and commit our most winsome angles to Instagram, Cindy Sherman turned the selfie into high art. One late seventies summer, the American photographer started taking the Untitled Film Stills, a series of grainy black-and-white […]
First published in Daily Life, June 2015 Back in 1913, C.A Jeffries and John Barr, two writers from The Bulletin, made a small but critical contribution to the diversity debate that has us scratching our heads more than a hundred years on. The pair wrote Australia Calls, a silent film directed by Raymond Longford, which cast members […]
Winehouse, who grew up memorising the music of jazz greats like Tony Bennett and Sarah Vaughn, might possess a voice that sounds like velvet cigarette smoke – but to undermine her artistry, we made self-destructiveness her myth. She might have dabbled in crack cocaine, but she became a tragic heroine because she dared to contain […]
Turn-of-the-century heroics might be hopelessly outdated but the ghosts of Jeffries and Barr are still looming large. In the last two years, the fact Chinese investors have overtaken the US as the biggest buyers of Australian property has sparked headlines that could wake the ghost of Edward Said, the thinker whose 1978 book Orientalism first suggested the […]
First published in Daily Life, April 2015 The greatest myth about progress that it’s measured rather than felt. There’s a reason we feel joy at the prospect of using dark-skinned emoji in a text message, or a like a weight is lifted when Olivia Pope’s affair with president Fitzgerald Grant onScandal raises questions because Fitzgerald is married […]
First published in Daily Life, January 2014 We’ve all been faced with the kind of question that’s designed not to find out what we really want but to tell us what we already know. For Mindy Kaling, the writer, creator and star of The Mindy Project, a sweet if occasionally patchy sitcom based on her alter-ego […]
“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 […]
