In Sapiens , his history of human development, Yuval Noah Harari argued that the transition from mobile hunter-gatherers to settlers may have had a severely negative impact on human happiness. Although agriculture allowed humans a relatively consistent supply of food, the burdens of farming also…

This a story of two stories. The first is about Bianca. Bianca is homeless. She is nineteen, has three children with a man who is now in jail, and she is pregnant with her fourth. The second story is about Kurt, or Dave, or Zack – their stories are different, but only superficially so. Kurt wants…

Werner Herzog For reasons that escape me, I simply could not make myself go back and read the journals I kept during the filming of Fitzcarraldo . Then, twenty-four years later, my resistance suddenly crumbled, though I had trouble deciphering my own handwriting, which I had miniaturized at the time…

There are better-known songs about Brisbane and Queensland, for sure. For one, the Go-Betweens’ Cattle and Cane – written by Grant McLennan about growing up in northern Queensland, travelling home to his parents’ farm on a train “through fields of cattle, through fields of cane”. The Saints’ (I’m)…

On love, liberty, and the pursuit of silence. “Good music can act as a guide to good living,” John Cage (1912-1992) once said. But what, exactly, is good music, or good living, or, for that matter, goodness itself? (public library) is a remarkable new intellectual, creative, and spiritual biography…

"Nothing ever happens to novelists. Except - this. They are born. They get sick, they get well, they hang around the inkwell. They leave home, with their stuff in a hired van.  They learn to drive, unlike poets (poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive.  Never trust a poet at the wheel.…

Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means “love” in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she…

Features In 1982 Japan called it a day and Duran Duran became certified superstars but also that year something altered indelibly about what it meant to be a "fashionable" band. Maddy Sparham looks at what was gained and what was lost Add your comment » Listen to our special Spotify list to…

News INTERVIEW: OMD Wyndham Wallace , February 5th, 2013 06:43 As a second teaser video is made available, Wyndham Wallace speaks to Andy McCluskey about Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s forthcoming album, English Electric, due for release in April Add your comment » Having already announced…

Stay limber, get a thesaurus, and eight further morsels of writerly wisdom In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian asked some of today’s most celebrated authors to each produce a list of personal…

Share Print Prose from Poetry Magazine Glittering fragments in Cummings, Crane, Betjamin, and Seidel. Product Placement in Modern Poetry Early in the twentieth century, E.E. Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be. Along with his love lyrics that…

Elmo Keep Elmo Keep on what it’s like to really lose it. When I try to explain to people what happened to me last summer when I went insane, I have what is the fairly common experience of anyone who’s been through a traumatic event: it feels as though I wasn’t the person it happened to. It happened…

Add your comment » Emerging at the dawn of the 1990s, when everyone else was starting to find inspiration in their record collections, Saint Etienne seemed like a very sane escape. While the louder groups banged on about Can, Big Star, Skip Spence or the MC5, Pete Wiggs, Sarah Cracknell and Bob…

A Quietus Interview Pavel Godfrey talks to Nick Talbot about serial killing, Englishness and the Milgram Experiments in this fascinating interview Add your comment » Nick Talbot, the Bristol-based songwriter behind Gravenhurst, has quietly crafted some of the best records of the last decade. With…

Anniversary Julian Marszalek talks to Mick Harvey about Australian post punk's high watermark statement Add your comment » Nick Cave - a tall, wiry, spike-haired figure who has been prowling the stage with all the agitation of a condemned man about to make his final walk to the hangman’s noose – has…

The city looms large in the fiction of author William Gibson. In the September issue of Scientific American, Gibson’s essay, “Life in the Meta-City,” details how cities increase “the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts” and how they serve as “vast, multilayered engines…

Although watching TV shows from the 1970s suggests otherwise, the era wasn’t completely devoid of all things resembling modern communication systems. Sure, the 50 Kbps modems that the ARPANET ran on were the size of refrigerators, and the widely used Bell 103 modems only transferred 300 bits per…

My recent vacation included a few perfect lessons in disaster recovery. Fortunately the disasters were handled by total pros that managed them perfectly. It all started when we were already packed and driving – my travel agent called me to tell me someone mixed up the dates and shifted them by two…

Author: Simon Sellars All photography by Simon Sellars. 37° 40′ 60S, 144° 56′ 60E Originally published in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks , Katrina Stoll & Scott Lloyd (eds), Berlin: Jovis, 2010. In the built environment , the ‘edgelands’ describes the interfacial…

A must-read - Will Self launches a blistering attack on Lindsay/Kasarda's "Aerotropolis": http://tinyurl.com/6zo9269

Bill Callahan reviewed: "Apocalypse is a mystery that will continue to haunt you through moments yet to come." http://bit.ly/kljTh7

Anniversary Jim Keoghan explains why the C86 cassette compilation has a far more important legacy in independent music than just giving rise to jangly indie-pop Add your comment » As soon as a jingly-jangly indie band appears today, the C86 tag isn't far behind. And yet, this wasn't always the case.…

For ethnologists, linguistic diversity is a cultural resource to be nurtured and preserved, much like biodiversity. All human languages are valuable; the more the better. That attitude of detached reverence is harder to sustain when it comes to computer languages, which are products of design or…

The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends

A young photographer’s belongings are abandoned on a Hollywood street, leaving our writer to piece together the fragments of his life.

Raging Bull began as Robert De Niro’s obsession, but the only man he believed could film it, Martin Scorsese, wasn’t interested—until the director’s near-fatal collapse gave him a visceral connection with the story of troubled boxing champion Jake La Motta. Three decades on, the author tells how one…

Anybody can become a consultant. But not everybody does it well. Here’s what you need to know to thrive.

At the laundromat, irregular things happen. People square off over washers — mine; no, mine. They sit on the counters where you were planning to fold T-shirts. Women conveniently forget a negligee in a dryer so you’ll find it and marry them. Street people try to sell utterly unnecessary things.…

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

We’re all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we’d rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we’re friends with everyone now. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? (Thanks, eush!)

On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program. By January 18 of the next year, the computer was up and running and…