Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
The minor fall, the major lift
ENGAGEMENT WITH THE fundamentals of music and sound deeply influence the formation of a composer's aesthetic. There is such...
What is seen and heard
‘What are these blinks of an eyelid, against whichthe only defence is an eternal an inhuman wakefulness?Might not they...
Word for word
'Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us...
We, the populists
IN OCTOBER 2010 Australia's Director of Military Prosecutions, Brigadier Lyn McDade, brought charges against three Australian soldiers, resulting from...
Selling the forests to save the trees
LONDON EXCEL, SITUATED in the now gentrified old docklands of the British capital, is a huge empty space designed...
More than human, more than nature
PERFECT SEPTEMBER DUSK. Tide low, water still. We scrunch wet sand beneath our shoes, facing the rocky cliff opposite....
The crumbling wall
I GREW UP in an era when science had an aura of certainty and solidity: it was 'the true...
Reformation and renaissance
ONE EVENING I was getting into the crowded lift at my local tube station in Central London, to go...
The rise and fall of infant reflux
Selected for The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 AT THE DAWN of the twenty-first century Queensland infants were in the...
If wishes were fishes
I LISTLESSLY TRAWLED through endless canned quote pages, searching for a line that would capture my feelings and ideas...
A new enlightenment
ANYONE WHO HAS worked in science for the past fifty years, as I have, has experienced many changes in...
Struggling in the face of complexity
THE FLOODS THAT swept through Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, causing death, injury and the destruction of homes,...
