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.
Aleksandrinke
SHE IS WRITTEN deep in Slovenian folklore, stuttering into existence in ballads, songs, myths, legends. A woman repeated, kept...
Revisiting the Dark Man
ONE RECENT SATURDAY morning, I once again drove my children to the street in Brisbane’s west where I grew...
On the record
A YEAR AGO, feeling hopeless about my work as a freelance writer, I began to look for other ways to...
The how matters
This story contains descriptions of violence. ON SATURDAY 15 March 2014, my stepmother Genee was shot twice in her bed...
The trauma of discipline
THE TILES IN the kitchen were white, with a grey diamond pattern. The grout was a light greying brown –...
Narcissus triumphant
I LIKE TO look in mirrors, a predilection I suspect I share with many others – all of us too...
Lessons from the Valley
THERE’S SOMETHING ENDURINGLY disconcerting about flying into Silicon Valley from Australia, where you arrive before you leave. If Silicon...
Computer says no
WHEN PREPARING THE publicity plan for Made by Humans (MUP, 2018), my book about data, artificial intelligence and ethics,...
To the moon
I’D LIKE TO believe that I wasn’t jumping on the bandwagon. But don’t we all tell ourselves little white...
Don’t do it yourself
IT’S FUNNY TO think that a broken gearbox could lead to a physics student folding T-shirts in my lounge...
When big tech met books
THE FIRST TIME I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2008, I had an appointment with Google. Its...
The suburbs, the ’60s
IT’S 1961, AND the kids of the baby boom are rapidly outgrowing old nests. On the eastern edge of...
