Kick back, relax and be welcomed into the pleasure dome by Griffith Review to launch our latest edition The Leisure Principle with Editor Carody Culver and self-confessed radical humanist Richard King as they talk chess, fashion, the body-mind-machine problem – and why the inability of an algorithm to enjoy a glass of wine undermines every claim for artificial intelligence made by the tech bros of Silicon Valley. 

The two will be joined in conversation by Managing Editor John Tague and short story writers and Griffith Review 81 contributors Brendan Colley and Jade Peters to riff about drumming, sport as monied global spectacle and what to do should you finally find the meaning of life… 

About The Leisure Principle:  

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes spelt out a vision of the impending utopia. Work, he said, will become a thing of the past. ‘For the first time since creation,’ he predicted, ‘man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to occupy the leisure which science…will have won for him.’   

  So where did this vision of future past go? Griffith Review 81 examines the terms and conditions of our contemporary relationship with the leisure regime, its fallouts and limitations, and how we came to cede so much simply to amuse ourselves to death.    

Richard King is an author and critic based in Fremantle. His latest book is Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (Monash University Publishing, 2023). 

Brendan Colley was born in South Africa, and now lives in Hobart. The Signal Line, his first novel, won the University of Tasmania Prize for best new unpublished literary work in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes and was published by Transit Lounge in 2022.  

Jade Peters’s fiction has appeared in The Suburban Review. She grew up on unceded Dharawal land and now lives in Naarm (Melbourne).  

Carody Culver is the editor of Griffith Review. She has written for publications including Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow and Books+Publishing. Her chapbook, The Morgue I Think the Deader It Gets, was published by Cordite in 2022, and she’s been a featured Australian poet on the Best American Poetry blog.  

 John Tague is managing editor of Griffith Review. He worked as a writer, editor and critic for twenty-five years in London, contributing to the Independent on Sunday, BBC Radio Four, The Times Literary Supplement and the NME among many others. In Australia he has worked for AAP and the ABC.