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 pain of disrespect
ON MARCH 31 this year, a cultural performance was organised to raise funds for the tsunami victims in Sumatra....
Habits of inclusion
AUSTRALIA'S UNLIKELIEST TELEVISION presenter, Peter Cundall, recently conducted viewers of the ABC TV's Gardening Australia on a tour of his garden...
A brief reflection on the Cooktown orchid
This essay inspired us to use the Cooktown orchid in the logo of the Griffith Review Emerging Writers' Prize....
Listening not talking
GOVERNMENTS OFTEN CONSULT. They set up inquiries about new laws and policies on everything from taxation to climate change...
Just another suicide?
EACH DAY SOME day two and a half million commuters pass through the turnstiles at Tokyo's Ikebukuro metro station....
A tipping point for impact investing
THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL crisis or GFC, as it is affectionately referred to in discussions taking place in the boardrooms...
Getting over globalisation
THE IDEA OF globalisation never enjoyed popular support in developed nations and for that reason it will probably become...
After the afterword
THIS IS AN ending to my latest novel, The Book of Rapture, that was eventually abandoned – creating a very different...
On the strangeness of fiction
FELLINI'S COMMENT THAT ‘everything and nothing in my work is autobiographical' is a neat way of describing the mysterious...
On the same page, right?
Yes, Dear Reader, we're messing with your minds. When Paul Kelly sings, ‘Gather round people, I'll tell you a story,' he may as well be singing, ‘Gather round people, I'll rewire your cortex.' But as well as messing with your minds, we're messing with your – and our – societies.
Learning to write
A FEW MONTHS ago an article by the distinguished American author and academic Louis Menand appeared in the New Yorker, asking whether...
Writing from the past
I SPEND A lot of time in graveyards these days. On mornings when it's too blustery to walk my...
