





Every weekday, we’ll post fresh, exciting content from here and around the web – articles, snippets, videos, links, quotes and whatever else we find. Visit every day.
By Michael Green
One of the world’s fastest-growing social movements is calling for citizens and institutions to sell out of fossil fuels – but it’s not just a matter of morality. Hard-headed analysts say there’s a growing risk of a collapse in the value of fossil fuel investments. Taken… read more
By Jon Tjhia
Musician, radio producer and sometime critic Jon Tjhia examined the current state of music criticism – drawing on his own experience and interviews with industry insiders – for The Lifted Brow’s music issue.
In this excerpt, he talks to musicians and critics about what it’s… read more
For bookish women of a certain age, nothing evokes childhood so sharply as the name Judy Blume. Iconic books like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, Deenie, Blubber and Superfudge are still in print – and being discovered by new generations of readers – today.
And this month, the first f… read more
Michelle Grattan is one of Australia’s most respected and awarded political journalists. She has been a member of the Canberra parliamentary press gallery for more than 40 years, during which time she has covered all the most significant stories in Australian politics.
As a former editor… read more
The DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – is recognised today as the bible of psychiatry. A comprehensive list of all the mental illnesses that officially exist and their symptoms, this book is extraordinarily powerful: the words within its pages have… read more
By Angela Meyer
The morning after the Stella Prize was awarded, writer and reviewer Angela Meyer blogged about her own feelings of writerly inadequacy and being at events where fellow writers wear their ‘envy on their sleeves’.
We asked her to explore the nervy underbelly of the writing… read more
The US National Security Agency has gained direct access to the servers of nine prominent internet companies, ‘enabling the spy agency to track e-mails, photographs, and video, among other forms of digital communciation’. The program is … read more
By Hugh de Kretser
Whether it’s our treatment of asylum seekers or the current debate around free speech, we seem to be confused -about the notion of free rights for all. Australians care about human rights, but we’re also dangerously complacent about the lack of protections that exist &ndash… read more
Jane Rawson has been a travel editor and writer, mostly for Lonely Planet. These days she lives in Melbourne’s west and edits the environment and energy section of The Conversation. Her first novel, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists was published this month by Transit Lounge… read more
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has found a new sponsor – it no longer needs the Prince-like moniker of ‘the prize formerly known as the Orange’. After more than 20 sponsors competed to take up the mantle, the board chose Baileys, who signed up for an initial three years.
By Mel Campbell
Mel Campbell reflects on makeover culture and the unrealistic expectations that come with it – that a sophisticated new look will deliver a new self (and life) to match. But even when it works, who does the social power of beauty serve? And why should the approval of… read more
Our picks from the internet this week.
There’s been a huge buzz this week about the much-anticipated launch of Guardian Australia, which finally happened on Monday. Original Australian content includes David Marr’s first piece as staff writer, reporting on George… read more
Pepi Ronalds is a freelance writer based in Melbourne – and a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Outback Magazine, Killings, Open Manifesto and A List Apart. She blogs at The Future of Long Form.
We spoke to Pepi about juggling writing with a job that… read more
By Michael Green
Michael Green shares why he loves re-reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s in Carlton, every autumn … and why it surprises him every time. Quoting Norman Mailer, he says it is ‘so extraordinary a work that it incites not writerly envy but pride’.

‘I am always drawn back to places … read more
By Paul Mitchell
It’s been the year of women on the Australian literary award scene – not only was the first Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing awarded, but the Miles Franklin shortlist was, for the first time in its history, all women. (It has been all-men four times.)
By Jo Case
Articles and commentaries on Asperger’s Syndrome are rife with references to the ‘condition’, ‘sufferers’ and ‘disability’. But many people who live with an Asperger’s diagnosis – for… read more
Micro-fiction writer Lydia Davis won the 2013 International Man Booker Prize yesterday. Celebrated in her native US, though less well known elsewhere, she has published several collections of (very) short stories, most of the stories no more than three pages long – and some of them as… read more
Sam Twyford-Moore is the director of the Emerging Writers' Festival, which kicks off tonight with the announcement of the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He’s also a writer and an editor, who has been published in Meanjin, the Australianread more
By Lucy De Kretser
The Wheeler Centre’s Lucy De Kretser was recently a participant in the inaugural First Nations Australian Writers Workshop in Queensland. She reports back on her highlights, from writers as diverse as Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Anita Heiss and Sam Wagan Watson.
On May 9… read more
Chicago designer Jenny Volvoski has set herself a fascinating new project – she designs her own covers for the books she reads.
They’re documented on her blog, From Cover to Cover.
‘I think a lot about book cover design while I am reading, and thought it would be a nice exercise to… read more
We share some amazing (and innovative) eco-friendly buildings from around the world – from the world’s first vertical forest in Italy to a stunning mountain hut that generates 90% of its own power in the Swiss Alps.
The world’s first vertical forest is being erected i… read more
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