Alan Vaarwerk, Editor
I’m really enjoying the new Vox Media podcast Nice Try!, which explores the different kinds of utopias people have tried and failed to create throughout history, from Jamestown in the colonial US to Chandigarh in India and beyond. I loved host Avery Trufelman’s 99% Invisible miniseries ‘Articles of Interest’, which looked at the history and ethics of the clothes we wear, and Nice Try! has a similar feel – not simply telling the interesting stories of honourable failures, but facing head-on the more complex issues of colonialism and systemic inequality that often lurk below the surface.
I’m also reading Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (Hachette Australia), a collection of short fiction dealing with themes of racism, consumerism, masculinity and the Black experience in America. I saw Adjei-Brenyah speak when he was in the country back in May, and bought the book on the spot. The tightly-written stories sit in the Venn diagram of realism, satire and speculative fiction – equal parts tenderness and anger, shot through with a streak of absurdist gallows humour. The book’s opening story, ‘The Finkelstein 5’, is a devastating masterpiece of contemporary satire.
By far the wildest thing by far I’ve read this month is Allison P. Davis’ article at The Cut exploring the rise and fall of Babe.Net, the deliberately brash women’s website that broke the Aziz Ansari story – Davis’ article begins as a kind of cringey insider look at a new media upstart, but devolves into a nightmare of lax HR policies and work-life boundary crossing.
Finally, my current music obsession is The National’s new album I Am Easy To Find – Matt Berninger’s baritone combined with an assortment of female vocalists and the band’s signature driving percussion ticks all my boxes. The songs themselves are more delicate and experimental than some of the band’s previous work so I took a little while to warm up to it, but now it’s lodged firmly in my brain.
