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1 month ago | 
themonthly.com.au | Margaret Simons |Jackson Ryan |Ceridwen Spark |David Marr
Current Issue Newsletters Podcasts Login Subscribe Essays The Nation Reviewed Vox Arts and Letters Noted Life sentences Essays The Nation Reviewed Vox Arts and Letters Noted Cartoon Essays Federal politics End matter The demise of the China Matters think tank raises questions about how governments deal with voices they don’t want to hear Science and technology The Sun also revises A scandal in Australia’s space science community suggests the need for increased rigour in reviewing possible...
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Aug 31, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Ceridwen Spark |Stan Grant |James Bradley |Katherine Wilson
How the disk-flicking Canadian board game crokinole is bringing a diverse inner-Melbourne community together On first meeting Des, I learnt that his “proper name” was Derek. Laughing, he said he’s been told “it’s a name you can trust”. But as I soon discovered, the trustworthy Derek has an alter ego. To members of the Footscray Flickers Crokinole Club, he’s Dunkin’ Des.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Toni Jordan |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Ceridwen Spark
April 2024 Life Sentences The author pays tribute to those who have committed ‘unhistoric acts’ that have made good in her world The bearded man in chinos on his way to an appointment who pulled up on his bicycle when I tripped and smashed my face on the corner of the bluestone gutter in Wellington Street, who called the ambulance and waited with me until it came and then pedalled away, never to be seen again; the neighbours who dropped over spaghetti bolognaise, with parmesan, grated, in a...
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Tara Kenny |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Ceridwen Spark
Netflix’s adaptation of Liu Cixin’s hard sci-fi novel, from the creators of ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘True Blood’, is sentimentalised but easily digestible In a postscript to the 2014 English translation of his novel The Three-Body Problem, the Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin waxes lyrical about his love of science:I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Michael Williams |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Ceridwen Spark
From the title itself, there’s a bait-and-switch going on in Jonathan Lethem’s latest book, or at the very least a gentle confounding of expectations. Brooklyn. Crime. Novel. Three well-known elements, you’d think.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Kate Jinx |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Ceridwen Spark
Alice Rohrwacher’s tale of love and graverobbery is transcendent, while Wim Wenders delivers a steady, meditative film from the Tokyo streets Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher’s latest feature is pure melancholic magic. Premiering in competition at Cannes last year, La Chimera is that rare jewel of a film where watching it once is enough but repeat viewings are ever more rewarding; I’ve seen it three times across as many festivals, with each experience offering something new.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Michael Nolan |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Ceridwen Spark
Forty-four years on, the German experimentalists continue to forge an unconventional path, delivering a double album of works improvised on tour Kraftwerk were still cruising the autobahn with polite smiles on their faces when Einstürzende Neubauten began smashing away at the motorway foundations below them, crawling inside a Berlin bridge pillar to bang on its steel walls with bricks.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Peter Craven |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Ceridwen Spark
The decision to posthumously publish the Colombian master’s final novel, written while suffering dementia, is vindicated by its qualities How strange it is that we’re once again talking about the work of Gabriel García Márquez, and that we’re doing so on the basis of a new work, Until August, written at the height of his dementia, and that it should turn out to be diamond bright.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Jock Serong |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Ceridwen Spark
How menswear retailer Fletcher Jones built a factory, a community and an idea of the future in Warrnambool, Victoria For anyone living in Melbourne in the mid 1990s, the name Fletcher Jones meant only one thing: slacks. Daggy slacks, dad slacks, slacks invested with a certain Benson & Hedges virility that called to mind a David Parkin three-quarter-time bake, paired with a madly bulging temporal vein that, in turn, evoked Clint Eastwood.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Ceridwen Spark |Sean Kelly |Russell Marks |Jock Serong
Samoa’s formidable prime minister Fiamē Naomi Mata‘afa, a traditional leader exercising modern power In March 2023, I found myself in Samoa, seated at an outdoor table surrounded by matais (high chiefs) and being fanned by a local teenager. There was an enormous meal in front of me and I had just swum in the Pacific Ocean, on the south side of Upolu, the island on which Apia, the capital of Samoa, is located.
