These days, evenings are heavy
with clouds that refuse to crack, to open
a window is let in the night
creatures, which flutter and tumble
into the glow of a phone

During the walk she takes with Michelle de Kretser along the Cooks River, the bit that snakes between Hurlstone Park and Tempe, Belinda Castles, the author of Walking Sydney, muses on the impact of Sydney’s geography. ‘On the footpath-climb to skirt the golf course,’ she writes, ‘the village-like nature of Sydney makes itself felt, the way suburbs are enclosed and cut off by ridges and valleys, cliffs and rivers, the tentacles of the harbour. A city’s form has an effect on thinking and ways of being.’

1.     worlds inside brown eyes
2.     a figure in a bed
3.     stars in summer
4.     women of clay

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is famous in France for his booming eloquence, his rich vocabulary, and his deep knowledge of history and politics. The firebrand orator was born in 1951 in Tangier, Morocco, to parents of Spanish and Sicilian descent, then moved to France with his mother in 1962. After a degree in philosophy and languages he was a schoolteacher before becoming a political organiser and elected politician, notably from inner-city Marseille.

A wise scholar once advised me against using absolutes in historical writing. The first reason is functional. When you resort to words such as ‘everyone’, ‘everything’, and ‘nobody’, you invite trouble; most of the time you can find an exception. The second reason is more important. The use of such words can betray an approach that packages the messy past too neatly, where there is little room for nuance and even less for uncertainty. Confidence doesn’t necessarily produce the best results.

Ellen van Neerven is a writer and editor of Mununjali and Dutch heritage. Their books include Heat and Light (2014), Comfort Food (2016), Throat (2020), and Personal Score (2023). Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award, and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize. Ellen’s second book, Comfort Food, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize and highly commended in the 2016 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. They live and write on unceded Yagera and Turrbal dhagun.

Living alongside the world’s only native black swans, Australians should be more alive to the provisional nature of truth than most. For thousands of years of European history, the ‘fact’ that ‘all swans are white’ was backed up with an overwhelming data set that only the delusional – or a philosopher – would debate. But as Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out, the difficulty with inductive reasoning is that it can seem incontrovertible all the way up until it is not. But if the truth is always shifting, where do we find solid ground when our lives depend on it? And to what absolutes and experts can we refer in an era of wilful misinformation, institutional mistrust, and anti-expert populism?

The death of the white male novelist, lately the subject of a fistful of literary think-pieces, has been greatly exaggerated. Yet it is a truth widely acknowledged that such authors now lack much of the cultural cachet that they once brazenly wielded. The challenge for these writers has been to transmute themselves into narrative subjects more palatable to the sensibilities of a shifting readership. Some continue to doggedly write self-adjacent fictions; others have willed a kind of metamorphosis, their subjectivities transposed or otherwise suppressed. Then there are those that try to do both. In the case of Rhett Davis’s Arborescence, this results in a novel with a striking elevator pitch: it is about people turning into trees.

Some literary biographies are best known for their gestation – or malgestation. Some authors, we might go further, should have a big sign around their neck – noli me tangere. Muriel Spark is one of them. Her voluminous archive, lovingly tended all her life, is full of booby traps. Twice she went into battle with biographers: first Derek Stanford, a former lover; then Martin Stannard, whose biography of Evelyn Waugh she had admired. 

Apple is one of the world’s largest companies. Its market value reached $3 trillion in January 2022, having grown by more than $700 million per day since August 2011 when Tim Cook took over as Chief Executive Officer after an ailing Steve Jobs resigned. Apple began with Jobs and Steve Wozniak ‘tinkering in a garage’. Iconic products followed including the Mac, the iMac, the iPod, the iPad and, most successful of all, the iPhone. An early slogan aimed to align Apple with ‘the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.’ For a company experiencing huge growth, that image was often at odds with the day-to-day commercial reality.