Festivals are a vibrant part of Australian culture but, as arts funding dries up, festival organisers will have to get creative if they want to survive. The recurring, physical event isn’t enough.
Politicians who cling to the past can view the scientist’s addiction to evidence as highly subversive.
Francisco Osorio
At events such as the Melbourne Writers Festival, it’s hard to avoid noticing that science, and scientists, are receiving special billing. The reading list of this Nobel Laureate is instructive.
According to Masha Gessen, Vladimir Putin only thinks six weeks ahead.
Judith Armstrong spoke with Gessen when she was in Melbourne as a guest of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last week. You can listen to the extended interview here. In her biography of Vladimir Putin…
A dead coral reef in the Caribbean. Coral reefs are extremely vulnerable to climate change and ocean acidification.
superqq/Flickr
Scientists are coming to the conclusion that we are on the brink of a mass extinction — the sixth known in the history of the Earth, and the latest since an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs 65 million…
‘I wouldn’t call it a miracle, I’d call it an accident’ – Gessen on Putin’s formative experience with the KGB.
Christchurch City Libraries
Russian-American writer and LGBT activist, Masha Gessen has covered every major development in Russian politics and culture of the past two decades. She is the author of Words Will Break Cement: The Passion…
‘Shoehorning your imagination into the condition of another human being is the A game in songwriting.’
Mark Seymour, AAP/ MG Promotions
At the Melbourne Writers’ Festival this week, a panel of poets, writers and performers will read and reflect on the poetry of the first world war. Among them is Mark Seymour, the former frontman of Hunters…
Ruth Reichl, the former restaurant critic of The New York Times and author of best-selling gourmet memoirs Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples, is known for describing, in vivid detail, how food…
Andrew Lock personifies the meaning of ‘grit’.
Melbourne Writers' Festival
Andrew Lock is the most accomplished high-altitude mountaineer in Australian history. He is the only Australian, the first person in the Commonwealth, and just the 18th man in the world to climb all 14…
American comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black.
Foxtel
Over the past decade we have witnessed the rise and rise of long form television – from The Sopranos to The Wire, Game of Thrones to Orange Is the New Black – and no one has been watching this transformation…
Chris Hadfield spent nearly five months on the International Space Station.
NASA
Colonel Chris Hadfield is one of the most famous astronauts on Earth. Through the creative use of social media, he’s made space exciting and accessible to new generations of enthusiasts, most notably through…