The Kerrigans’ Coolaroo château-with its lead-poisoned soil, towering powerlines and proximity to the airport-is a shithole. But it’s their shithole. Darryl, a family-oriented towtruck driver, is endearing in the same way as Kath and Kim are: they’re...
Towards the end of Melbourne’s second lockdown, as the number of new cases continued to fall, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg joined the growing chorus of people calling for restrictions to be eased, and specifically for retail and hospitality businesses to be allowed to...
In The Craftsman, sociologist Richard Sennett offers a radical vision for living, a way of being and engaging with the world based on the values, ethos and commitments embodied in craftsmanship – an antidote, if you will, to a commercial and consumption-driven...
Marooned on a traffic island in central London, Robert Maitland, the protagonist of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island, comes to inhabit a world that he always, on some level, knew existed, but that he never really knew. He drove passed it everyday on his way from his home...
Democratic states have only ever existed as an ideal – an abstraction more malleable than is often acknowledged and a form of government utterly incompatible with capitalism. ‘We must make our choice,’ warned the American jurist Louis Brandeis, ‘[w]e may have...