Bluesky gets sketchy, I go offline, come back and there’s a Massive Attack x Tom Waits collab doing the rounds. Actual omg

I had to lose a description of someone as a ’gun runner’, as in, very fast. There was a query whether the person in question was smuggling weapons 😜

‘We support entrepreneurial scholars and practitioners’ - what a ride (and how tf to read this parable of contemporary literature?)

Circle of Wonders by Kathryn Heyman review – solace and healing in an acid-etched portrait of a dysfunctional family Heyman’s story about women struggling to put aside their hurts and do right by one another is all about rage, vulnerability, forgiveness and a bit of woo-woo

New from me on Guardian Australia: a review of Kathryn Heyman’s Circle of Wonders, a novel notable for its sharp attention to the humanity of its vulnerable central characters www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews ‘The Ruin of Magic: Longing and belonging in strange times’ by Kate Holden Kate Holden made a striking début with her 2005 memoir of addiction and sex work. In My Skin was both a critical and commercial success; in it, readers encountered a frank, opulent stylist possessed of a remarkably compassionate point of view. In My Skin pre-empted the boom in life writing by women that has been a fixture of Australian literature this century. If the tropes of recovery lit are more familiar now than they were in 2005, the brisk confidence of Holden’s voice and the curiosity of her gaze remain impressive. Holden refined and hybridised her approach in her next book, The Romantic (2010), a memoir that incorporated travel writing and literary criticism. These early works won Holden a devoted readership and she continued to publish new material as a columnist and cultural journalist over the next decade.

I wrote for ABR about, The Ruin of Magic, a new essay collection by Kate Holden. I’ve long admired Holden’s work but this collection, which deals with pressing questions of home, belonging, migration and exile, struck me as seriously undercooked.
www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/c...

Disappointing, tho not surprising, that policy development on copyright has been cordoned off from cultural policy

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent review – an exhilarating, dazzling reckoning with grief The author confronts the trauma of losing her parents as a teenager in a succession of fragments – almost all of which contain the word ‘fourteen’

This is a fine @catrionamp.bsky.social review of @erinvincent.bsky.social 's outstanding book.
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

Thanks Michael!

Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent review – an exhilarating, dazzling reckoning with grief The author confronts the trauma of losing her parents as a teenager in a succession of fragments – almost all of which contain the word ‘fourteen’

I wrote about Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent for GuarDian Australia, a very accomplished, very affecting work. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

South Dakota's "Meth. We're on it" campaign

I'll always remember Kristi Noem for the "Meth. We're on it." campaign.

Catriona Menzies Pike on what the Los Angeles Review of Books mess says about the landscape for literary journals, and the big test ahead for the new Meanjin. On point as always

Thanks for sharing Jane!

I’m still writing my newsletter Infra Dig, which covers digital literary culture and related themes. The latest deals mainly with editorial independence - at Meanjin and LARB.

infra-dig.ghost.io/returning-ho...

It’s very frustrating and I think you’re correct that it will make critical writing even less visible…

Albanese says Australia supports US action against Iran and stands with the Iranian people’s ‘struggle against oppression’ Department of foreign affairs warns travellers of risk of reprisal attacks, further escalation and flight cancellations in Middle East

Yep, Albo all in www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Carney is rightly getting hosed for this softly-softly response - but you know what, I think Albanese, desperate to make it look like Australia’s most important defence partnership hasn’t been sidelined, is going to be much more effusive. (Happy to be wrong!)

The Millenial King and his wife, the Gracious Commoner

Bracing myself for months of soft-focus features on royals and their noble royal feelings about all of this

💯

Point taken - but there are plenty of functional democracies that do not have a hereditary head of state. The question is hardly, do you want to be like the US or the UK? That said, I cannot conceive of a sane conversation about constitutional reform in AU public right now.

The British monarchy is an institution that is rotten to the core, and yet we must endure the most sentimental drivel about our beloved royals - even from the so-called republicans. Get rid of them all, I say.

I’m sure every editor in the country is scrambling for comment pieces on the Andrew debacle right now and that’s all we’ll read for days. But in the absence of any credible progressive movement for constitutional change, what chance is there that this will galvanise republican sentiment?

If only it were possible to wrest the microphone on Australian republicanism from the easy does it yacht club crowd at the ARM. The ARM promise that nothing would change in an Australian republic is yet another example of small target politics making itself irrelevant.

wtf

Lots of culture in that sentence! Thank you for sharing.

I’ve been out of action for a few weeks and not able to read much. My main response to the AWW debacle, now that I’m catching up properly, is, is this shit for real? I wrote a newsletter about risk, cancel culture and concussion. infra-dig.ghost.io/hard-surfaces/

Reader, I wept.

María Corina Machado says she presented Trump with her Nobel peace prize medal The Venezuelan opposition leader did not confirm whether the US president accepted the award

Knut Hamsun gave his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels in 1943, if anyone is looking for a precedent.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Sounds like TD is out too. Surprised me, but happy to be wrong.

Everything is tainted, I agree, and it’s incumbent on those of us who aren’t getting kicked off panels for gutter racist reasons to show solidarity with those who are.