Front Page
Love Letter to Glasgow
“Glaswegians have more fun at a funeral, than Edinburgh people have at a wedding”
Smugglers’ Paradise
From cocaine shipments and narco-subs to meth labs and transnational gangs, Ben Bohane reports from Vanuatu on the hard-drug trade spreading across the Pacific.
Dancing with the Stones
You Am I main man Tim Rogers on meeting Mick Jagger, mobile dentists and flamboyant trousers. Blame it on the Stones.
Breaking Waves: Homesick for Bondi
Adam Gibson reflects on memory, belonging and a suburb becoming unfamiliar even as he remains within it.
5 Stars for Dominick
A motel review, an old cat and a meeting with a beloved friend in a fading town in upstate New York.
The Cost of Entry: What it takes to belong now
They still live in the city, work in it and move through it every day. But as rent, distance, time and the cost of simply saying yes continue to rise, more people are quietly editing themselves out of urban life—not leaving the city, but taking up less and less room inside it.
Pretty Vacant A letter from New York
Are luxury stores the victims of success? Our most fashionable neighbourhoods appear like they’ve been looted: a third of the stores in the heart of the city are empty! This retail rot is a new form of urban blight.
Bilson at Table My Favourite Duck
"I often view with evil intent families of ducks walking towards the ponds in Centennial Park."
Cigarettes & Turpentine An Ode to My Artist-Mother
She smoked Marlboro Reds and drove old cars that always broke down… She wore red lipstick religiously. She was never on time to pick me up.
2018: A Space Odyssey How Sydney artists are re-entering the inner city
"Somewhere that is a place for ‘the other’, the people who fall a little bit through the net.”
Roads to Nowhere A city besieged by construction
"We've put up with it because we are building tomorrow’s Sydney. We must do our bit. That’s life in the big city. We’re not anti-development, we’re just…. exhausted."
Getting Southerly Busted At North Bondi RSL
The image of Bondi is one of glitz and glamour… But the salt-blasted reality is somewhat different; the old weathered remnants of what was known locally as Scum Valley still often win out.
Books That Change Lives, Apparently Iranian existentialists, chick lit grandmas and spitting in Morse code
How to win the Facebook competition to see who has the most exotic home library.
Nick Cave Premonitions of Love
“The impulse was to hide. But it turns out that being forced to grieve openly basically saved us.”
Bilson at Table The Death of Paul Bocuse
Once Bocuse perfected a dish it remained unchanged on his menu:“If a dish was worthy of three Michelin stars in 1963 it should be worthy of the same accolade in 1993!"
Something Better The old masters give Beck’s sound a new shine
“Great music can create some great perspective shift. Like a sudden stunning view. Or a moment out with friends when you’re all laughing. Where life opens up and everything is bigger and brighter.”