The Sydney Morning Herald

Yes, I see you looking at me in the change room at the pool, your mammaries doing the cha-cha as you dry what would be your short-and-curlies if you hadn’t lasered them off. I’m so pleased you’re immune to shame while displaying your naked flesh, a relief map of the …

Book Week rolls around again, and with it comes the predictable chorus of strung-out parents who have no time to read books themselves but are tasked with “inspiring a love of literature” in their kids. How? By dressing them up as characters from children’s books. For an entire week! Why? …

Germany has some of the world’s strictest historical regulations and considers the Holocaust a singular event that is beyond comparison. Gessen’s essay wove together official and unofficial ways the Holocaust is remembered, how the boycott-Israel movement is framed as antisemitic in Germany, and how charges of antisemitism are now wielded …

Ercolano station whips by, a blur of terracotta and graffitied concrete. We are supposed to be out there negotiating a bus ticket up Vesuvius, the only active volcano on the European mainland. Napoli’s low swagger demands local knowledge, which includes its public transport system of overlapping modes and companies. It’s …

The Japanese company SoftBank is developing an “emotion-cancelling” filter called SoftVoice for call centre workers to screen out the inevitable parade of angry people who have been waiting 2½ hours to speak with a human, just to be told that, while their call is very important, they are unable to …

THE ENVIRONMENTLiving HotClive Hamilton & George WilkenfeldHardie Grant, $27.99Clive Hamilton is a peddler of unvarnished truths; politically unpopular in the moment, they are often accepted in the fullness of time. His 2018 Silent Invasion – about Chinese influence in Australian politics – was dumped at the last moment by a …

Jelena Dokic has lost 20 kilograms. And again, we’re hit with deja vu as she’s inundated with body commentary from trolls and supporters alike.For years, body trolls have dwarfed the achievements of Dokic, arguably one of the best tennis commentators we’ve seen. She has long been both vocal and powerfully …

It was once possible to walk the 1500 kilometres from Melbourne to Brisbane enclosed in native forest. Today Australian forests have been pushed to the margins, surviving as scattered islands, logged around and through. In most states this continues, enabled by expedient myths about forest’s resilience and replaceability that have …

It’s 3pm and we still haven’t booked a room for the night – meanwhile, my fiance, Mak, bops along to Take it Easy by the Eagles in the driver’s seat.

I get it – you’re a Scrabble purist horrified by Mattel’s “unforgivable” update of the game. They’ve released a “dumbed-down” version in which players work collaboratively on a series of challenges rather than compete against each other. “We want to ensure the game continues to be inclusive for all players,” …

Imagine living in a body that is, by overwhelming consensus, regarded as wrong. Imagine being told your entire life that you need to change it. Imagine trying everything humanly possible to do that, only to wind up exactly where you started, or worse off. Now, imagine there’s a drug that, …

POLITICS Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future Ian Johnson Allen Lane, $55 In 2012, I took a five-week bullet-train tour of China’s East Coast. Hoisted on pylons, I soared above the fields and villages of old China, to the surging cities of a bold new country. …

It’s crazy how quickly your child powers through noteworthy stages. In utero, they grow from a grain of rice to a grape, to a rockmelon. Then they’re born, and before you know it, they’re rolling, crawling, running, learning your real name isn’t Mum. Suddenly, they’re four years old and entering …

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no greater love than that of a romance writer for their genre, which is especially true in the case of The Other Bridget by Rachael Johns, one of Australia’s most productive novelists. In Rachael Johns’ latest romance her main character, Bridget …

“There is certainly magic in the world, but it only works when you don’t try to control it and scale it.” says Tyson Yunkaporta in Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. Tyson Yunkaporta worries that Indigenous knowledge will be appropriated and exploited. To prove this point he posits …

One of the first times endometriosis was mentioned in Australian media was in a 1949 article in the Catholic Weekly. Doctors in the piece prescribed pregnancy as a treatment for “one of the most crippling of female diseases”, which they claimed was suffered by women who didn’t have kids young …

Top HSC achievers of decades past took different paths: medicine, teaching, politics, filmmaking – and dancing in Las Vegas. They share their advice for the class of 2023.

Top HSC achievers of decades past took different paths: medicine, teaching, politics, filmmaking – and dancing in Las Vegas. They share their advice for the class of 2023, who will get their HSC results this week.

Dear Frozen, happy 10th anniversary. Disney, can we have something new now? The time has come to let it go. I know I’m treading on thin ice here, weighing in on a film for which I’m not the target audience, but let me explain. As we arrive at this anniversary, …

Newfound love for AFL and the cost of student public transport were the topics of the winning essays in the inaugural competition for young writers.

Photojournalist Barbara McGrady says she’s seen a change in attitude towards First Australians over 30 years through her camera lens.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up. Here’s what to know before you shop the sales.

The fizzy concoction Hard Solo is not the first product to be forced to change its name amid a wave of pressure.

Though it’s an increasingly controversial stance among those who subscribe to the gentle parenting movement, I make my children hug their grandparents. To some, enforcing my two young kids these kinds of rules is considered to be on par with sending them to Neverland Ranch for a sleepover. Our “child-focused” …

Gen Z is looking for more sustainable and economic ways of acquiring that special formal dress.

“At the heart of artificial intelligence is a fundamental deceit,” claims AI doyen Toby Walsh, in Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World, his fourth book on the subject. The con starts at the name. AI is not true intelligence. It does not arrive at conclusions (or outputs) through …

Due to a serious illness in a colleague’s family, I’ve become responsible for recruitment at a small company that is growing rapidly. I’m trying my best, but this is a whole new world for me, and I’m barely keeping my head above water. We are getting good responses to the …

A few months ago, I left the disability support industry that I had worked in for 14 years behind. Despite finding the work hugely rewarding, supporting a young family on the industry’s wages was becoming harder, so I made the difficult decision to leave. Among the 222 recommendations the disability …

I am all for the matriarchy. In the words of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme song: “Females are strong as hell.” When done well, a female-led TV show or film can do justice to the complexities and diversities of women’s stories. But when it comes to gender-flipped reboots, like Australia’s …

Bali has many reputations. Kuta, once the centre of the tourist universe, is in decline having never recovered its pre-COVID glory when hordes of Bintang-singleted Aussies staggered through the Hard Rock Cafe foyer loaded with pirated DVDs. In the last few years, attention has shifted west to Canggu, into influencer …