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.
Lyrics to imaginary songs
WHEN I THINK about poetry, about my need to read it and reflect on it – and even express...
Learning to write
THAT MAGNIFICENT OLD monkey-apple tree shading the butcher's shop lodged in my mind through a strange trick of memory....
The liberating discipline
THE RICH PROCESS of life is all about the acquisition and application of knowledge. How we manage our life...
Never real and always true
IN 2003, AFTER more than a year in the grip of a major depressive episode, I consulted a doctor...
Picking winners
YESTERDAY, AT THE races, someone I was making small talk with asked if I missed journalism. Two champagnes into...
On annoying a shock jock
I USED TO have a boring job. Not a terrible job, just a boring one. Everyday, I had to...
Tribes of Berlin
THE EARLY DAYS in a new city always feel similar to snorkeling, or taking hallucinogenics, or lucid dreaming –...
Welsh rarebit
The past in maiming us, makes us. – Frank Bidart[i] ON MOST DAYS when I was very little I would...
Seeds of hope
WHEN I FIRST started going in and out of Jordan three years ago, my well-honed multicultural sensibility was shocked...
When elections need protection
THE CALL CAME at the very end of my four-hour shift on election day 2008: ‘Ma'am, I'm calling from...
Assemble at home
ONE AFTERNOON IN late July 2003 I turned up at a café in Brunswick Street Fitzroy to have coffee...
Working on big issues
FOR A COUPLE of years in the mid-1990s, I worked out of an office overlooking Times Square. Sounds of...
