Friday essay
Australian authorities sent artists to the WW1 battlefields to interpret and commemorate war. But unlike similar schemes in Britain and Canada, ours neglected the war experience at home and the perspective of women artists.
Music
The PM's Spotify playlists are significant as they offer insight into what he sees as valuable in popular culture. They also remind us how women are excluded from the music canon.
Tourism
A new Netflix series focusing on tourism to sites of historic disasters or atrocities delivers no more than a contemporary version of a freak show.
Close Up
When it was released in 1999, The Matrix introduced a new type of image: bullet-time. Bruce Isaacs explains why it has become one of the most influential special effects in the history of cinema.
Research
Did the minister or any of his staff read our application or any of the other ten he chose to reject?
Friday essay
As we enter the age of the Anthropocene, there is a growing recognition of different kinds of 'un-real' storytelling.
Anthropology
All monsters make their mark on the communities they haunt. Some are cheeky and mischievous, some are mysterious, others are downright evil.
OzAsia Festival
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s fusion of the choreographic universe of contemporary dance with the kung fu techniques of the famed Shaolin monks is both masterful and unexpected
Halloween
The earliest surviving example of man-to-wolf transformation is found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, from around 2,100 BC. But the werewolf as we now know it first appeared in ancient Greece and Rome.
Fiction
A Mr Darcy Halloween costume anyone? How the brooding hero of Pride and Prejudice has been reinvented as a vampire.
ARC grants
Projects submitted to the Australian Research Council are vetted heavily by panels of experts. Minister Birmingham's decision undermines this process.
Halloween
There are various techniques that can soften the fear factor of a scary film: from talking about it to providing facts that contextualise the plotline.
Essay
Leonard Cohen's final (posthumous) book was released in Australia this week. Another new book sheds light on Cohen's life on Hydra in the 1960s and the relationships he forged with Antipodeans seeking liberation there.
History
Indian migration to North America and the United Kingdom has been studied extensively, but less is known about Australian and New Zealand, the southern-most outposts of the Indian diaspora.
TV
The new Sabrina joins a host of other witches in pop culture, a witch revival that reflects more radical feminist politics.
Exploration
Sidney Jeffryes achieved a world first by establishing wireless contact between Antarctica and Australia. But his mental illness meant he gradually vanished from history - until now.
Books
Non-Indigenous writers, if they wish to engage ethically with Indigenous culture, must learn to respect it as a form of property grounded in kinship and country.
Friday essay
A growing number of parents are making money out of their children by turning them into social media celebrities. But the chimera of corporate branding is no antidote for lives lived in precarious times.
Sexuality
A snapshot of what Australians are viewing around the country.
Music
“They have been crucifying Othello into an opera,” Lord Byron later wrote after watching Rossini's opera. But the performance does much to highlight the play's racial politics.
