Jon Ronson’s Them was published just months before the world changed on September 11 2001. Its portrait of conspiracy theorists and extremists was eerily prescient.
Articles on Cultural touchstones
Displaying 1 - 20 of 38 articles
A GP reflects on the lessons of Eric Schlosser’s ‘muckraking’ classic. A necessary health check on the world we’ve built, it urges us all to take back our agency.
Barbara Ehrenreich was inspired to write her classic expose of low-wage life in America by punitive 1990s welfare laws. Today, its message is as urgent as ever.
In his recent speech at Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney drew on Havel’s book challenging compliance in an age of untruthfulness. What does it say?
Infinite Jest is a kind of geological cross-section of a writer and a literary culture at a moment of major upheaval.
Diagnostic and symptomatic, accusatory and culpable, communal and personal, The Hollow Men is a poem about that which ails society at large.
It’s not often that a screen adaptation manages to outdo a book – but in the case of Bunny Munro, the transformation is nothing short of merciful.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is neither a history of economics, nor a religious history. It borrows from both, but is stranger than either.
If you grew up in Australia in the past 50 years, there is a good chance it was an advertising executive who taught you the facts of life.
Max Porter’s stories of people on the margins are told in fragments, flickering images, surprising swirls of language and wit.
In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro summons our liberal sentiments only to turn them against us.
Roland Barthes’ notion that the author is dead has been incredibly influential, though it was not as original or revolutionary as it seemed.
Writing before the advent of the smartphone, a French philosopher foresaw a world where computers would shape our behaviour, controlling much of our lives.
A 2015 book by a psychologist who works with adult children of emotionally immature parents has taken off on social media, ‘validating’ its readers. But is it any good?
Fletcher Knebel’s novel has much to say about the fragility of our democratic institutions and the dangers of unchecked authority.
One of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century, Discipline and Punish is unsettlingly prescient in our age of digital surveillance.
Now we know how power dynamics complicate consent is it time to revisit The Kiss?
Mike Davis traces natural disaster and climate change in Los Angeles over centuries, painting a vivid picture of a city on the perpetual brink of catastrophe.
The life and death of acclaimed writer Yukio Mishima is a cautionary reminder of the complex, sometimes dangerous relationship between creativity and fanaticism.
Francoise Sagan was just 18 when she published Bonjour Tristesse, her scandalous existentialist novel about a girl who feels too much. Now, it’s been adapted for film for a second time.
Top contributors
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Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne
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Lecturer, Media Law and Ethics, Adelaide University
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Associate Teaching Fellow, Sociology, Deakin University
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Professor, School of Psychology, Adelaide University
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Senior Lecturer, Literary Studies and Creative Writing, Monash University
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Associate Professor in Creative Writing, Griffith University
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Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Deakin University
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Justice and Society, UniSA, Adelaide University
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Casual Academic, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney
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Associate Professor, Department of English, Creative Writing and Film, Adelaide University
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Jury Professor of English and Language and Literature, Adelaide University
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Associate Dean and Associate Professor in Social Sciences, University of Canberra
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Senior Research Fellow, Division of Health Research and Social Work, Lancaster University; La Trobe University
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Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Wollongong