The Sydney Morning Herald

Let me paint a scene: I’m at a music festival in a sea of bodies. The Rubens are playing, and giant screens broadcast every angst-filled expression. We’re sipping batch-made, handcrafted pale ales and watching all the beautiful people – glittered cheeks, Blundstones, Akubras, short skirts and square sunnies – looking …

When a friend told me she’d recently used ChatGPT to create a birthday message, I was both impressed and disturbed. We were entering the murky, uncharted waters of the future. Hallmark sentiments from a soulless bot? What next? Send a clone-bot of yourself to kiss Aunty Beryl and her whiskers? …

I began reading Janet Malcolm as did many a budding non-fiction writer with The Journalist and the Murderer. It was an affront to my cherished ideal that contributing to the record was inherently noble. To Malcolm, the journalist is half traitor, half parasite. They seduce their subject, leech their story …

Jelena Dokic is doing a world-class job of calling out fatphobic slurs. And what a waste of her precious time it is. Sure, we’ve come a long way in the fight for body diversity in media, but if you think we’re living in a body-positive, post-fatphobic world, I would invite …

Like many, I veer wildly between being wary of the effects of technology and elbowing people in the face outside of Apple shops on the days a new iPhone drops. I’m no troglodyte (though putting QR codes on cafe tables instead of menus is an abomination). As we work through …

I grew up in a shopping centre. Not literally, like in some Macaulay Culkin film (although that was a secretly harboured fantasy). I was born and raised 600 metres from the Northgate shops in Hornsby, one of the first modern-style shopping centres in Sydney, built in 1979. And I treasure …

My gym has a virtual running course on the screen of the treadmill. I can embrace the virtual outdoors with a fresh virtual breeze and virtual trees waving in the virtual wind. I can even connect with a virtual community and make virtual jogging friends. I stare at the screen, …

I bought a shakti mat during Black Friday sales because if you dangle the words “deep relaxation” and “stress relief” over a tired toddler-mum on the verge of Christmas, she’ll jump, like a cat to catnip. My Instagram had me all worked out, throwing ads at me daily: attractive, yogi-looking …

It’s embarrassing how excited I am about my new Dyson. It’s like the pinnacle of first-world accumulation: the fanciest vacuum on the market – a vacuum that doesn’t suck. I mean, it sucks; you know what I mean. It’s like the Tesla of the vacuum world. It even has a …

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. You have your self-appointed party planner who’s organising the work Christmas party (not Greg after last year’s “incident”). While everyone’s throwing around ideas for The Best Night Ever, you know there’s going to be someone who suggests a boozy art night. They’re …

Just over a year ago, writing for this masthead, I attempted to give voice to women’s collective rage – correction, their downright fury – directed at the Morrison government for failing to legislate all the recommendations from Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins’ Respect@Work inquiry into workplace sexual harassment. Now I’m …

Finally, unions are pushing for period leave to be enshrined in the Fair Work Act. What a dream: no more sitting at your desk, heavily medicated because your womb is doing a salsa while womenfolk secretly dish out Nurofen to each other like seventh-graders with their Ritalin. But you’re fine …

The problem with climate change is the hot air. A belief, once widespread, was that rational discussion, awareness-raising and political debate were levers that could be pulled to correct an errant course. Today, heave though we might, these levers seem only to vent steam. Here, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s …

“My girlfriends have all quit.” Angela’s voice on the phone breaks as she speaks of the toll the pandemic has taken on her and her nursing colleagues. “I’m the last one standing.” At 58, with more than 40 years’ experience as an emergency department nurse under her scrubs, she’s worked …

So, you’ve just left the Picasso exhibition in a reverie of culture-soaked wonder. Iconic masterpieces have whispered to you from the past, stories of love, revolutions, war and tragedy and find yourself in … the gift shop. Don’t just silently appreciate Picasso’s Weeping Woman, why not take her home? How …

In the introduction to his new essay collection, Provocations, Jeff Sparrow states he feels “tremendously isolated” as a socialist writer in a country as anti-intellectual as we. Like most Australian greats, Sparrow rejects the “persona of ocker larrikinism” that mainstream writers adopt to avoid accusations of elitism. He also admits …

The history of feminism is often talked about in terms of distinct “waves”. While this is, admittedly, a bit reductive, and each wave of feminism was not a monolithic movement, it’s still a useful tool to understand the movement’s history, where it came from, and how it developed.

Ever since my high school English teacher told us that Mr Darcy sinking a red billiard ball in the BBC’s 1995 series Pride and Prejudice was “blatant symbolism for sex”, I feel somewhat qualified to throw my bonnet in the ring when it comes to Austen spin-offs. The recent Netflix …

Remember the “why” game? Most children discover it during their intensive questioning phase. They ask “why is something as it is?” You answer only to be instantly asked “why?” again. That’s basically it. After a few rounds it has veered into an existential nightmare for you, while the child has …

Little known fact: women are five times as grumpy about domestic inequality now than they were before the pandemic. And after the May election, we all know grumpy women can be politically dangerous.

It’s a lot further than you think, but it has already started. The singularity is the moment AI will improve itself at a rate faster than we can. From here it will unleash incomprehensible brilliance that could devastate humankind. Or so the movies say. For the time being, we are …

While on research, I visited the Polygon, an area in remote north-eastern Kazakhstan where the USSR conducted hundreds of nuclear tests. It was late summer and the battered earth was carpeted in wildflowers. The situation in our rump-sprung four-wheel drive had become tense. Our guide, a former Soviet nuclear physicist, …

Again, I truly hate to bring the mood down at a time when we’ve finally achieved the freedom we all craved for two years. I’m a Melbourne girl, I lived through a lifetime of lockdowns and social restrictions, cancelled my honeymoon, cried with friends over their ill-fated nuptials, and prayed …

Greater Sydney’s only disease-free and growing koala population is under threat by the construction of a housing estate in its habitat without promised safeguards in place, scientists warn. Earthworks for the first of a two-stage 5000-home development between the Nepean and Georges rivers near Campbelltown, by Lendlease, began in January …

“Keeping Julian in prison will kill him eventually,” Moris, speaking at the Frontline Club, an independent journalist’s hub in west London where Assange held press conferences and hid out, tells The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. “The Australian government should be saying [to the US] ‘he’s our citizen, this …

Over the border, the war is close enough for Tim Tiraspol to hear. Every day it begins “at 5am like clockwork” with bombs and Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns. He has been working for 15 years as a tour guide in the breakaway state of Transnistria, which despite having its own currency …

In a recent article, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, claims that armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a rebuke to humanity’s greatest claim: that progress is possible. The crisis signals a return to the “jungle” where might is right, a posture thought obsolete at the end of the …

As former Australian of the Year Grace Tame and former political staffer Brittany Higgins took the stage for their much-anticipated “duet” at the National Press Club on Wednesday, I couldn’t help but recall a defining address on the same platform seven years ago.

Strength and bravery: this is what is needed to tackle the challenges in the Year of the Water Tiger, and to find the prosperity forecast in the Lunar New Year. The Year of the Water Tiger promises a welcome change from 2020 and 2021 as celebrations for Lunar New Year …

Dedicated lanes for driverless vehicles on NSW roads would enable the state to be better prepared for the introduction of fully automated cars, according to a new report which also warns the transport network is not ready to cope with the technology. The University of NSW Research Centre for Integrated …