The latest slice of self-help from the Freakonomics pair is cut to a more economical 700 words After writing Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we started to hear from readers with all sorts of questions, the most frequent of which was, "How do you guys get away with it?" The simple answer is that we don't know. And when we say we don't know, we don't mean we don't know. We mean we know...
Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says the 2008 bank bailout worked well. Sen. Elizabeth Warren says it taught bankers to be reckless because the risks are on taxpayers. Vote for who is right....
A fascinating history of lawn tennis reconnects the sport with its subversive past, while a valuable 'inside story' of the modern game sheds light on the career of Andy Murray David Foster Wallace once wrote, in an essay on Roger Federer , that "For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's." He was seeking to explain why, in men's sports, "no...
At Sydney writers' festival, the author of Barracuda and The Slap discussed writing sex scenes, his Greek immigrant family, and what it takes to be a good man On Saturday morning, Christos Tsiolkas was interviewed in bravura style by David Marr about his books, particularly the latest, Barracuda . Describing him as a "giant" and noting how quickly the talk had sold out, Marr said: "I...
Myth and grit are powerfully entwined in the novelist's work, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin prize for The Swan Book after winning the award in 2007 Alexis Wright's work has been richly rewarded for its literary panache. It was recently announced that The Swan Book had made the Miles Franklin literary award shortlist , while Wright's 2007 novel Carpentaria won not only the Miles Franklin, but...
Are personal trainers now the masters of our bodies? How are women's physiques fictionalised? Sydney writers' festival tackles the corporeal Bodies: we all have them, but how do we engage with them - with our own, with other people's, when writing fictional characters? These are the questions the panel Writing Bodies attempts to answer, looking at Lucy the personal-fitness trainer in Irvine Welsh's...
The winner of the women's prize for fiction told Sydney writers' festival about how the trauma of being adopted has influenced her darkly satirical novels There is a well known definition of plot, Susan Wyndham says at one point during the AM Homes event at Sydney Writers Festival, Things get worse. And you do that well. Wyndham had just outlined the violence and murkiness in Homess dark satires of...
Funny, insightful and occasionally shocking, a Sydney writers' festival panel of three writers discussed multiculturalism, race and feeling alien from their parents "Isn't Jewish culture more about guilt than shame?" asks Amy Tan . "Shame is much more public." Tan, Benjamin Law , Gary Shteyngart and facilitator Annette Shun Wah are discussing what it means to grow up in a western...
The violence, wonder and ghosts of moorland are savoured in this highly engaging account of walks on English moors As a boy in Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire, William Atkins took possession of what he thought of as a miniature moor close to his home, spending all his dusks there, and many of his before-school dawns. It was the subject of the GCSE geography inquiry that he wrote at 14, the aim of which...
Joseph O'Connor's fictional account of a rock band is strongest on the years of struggle before fame The rock'n'roll novel is not a genre garlanded in glory. One problem is that even the most lurid fantasies about pop fame wilt against the on-road excesses revealed by a memoir such as Mötley Crüe's The Dirt or Nick Tosches's sulphurous Jerry Lee Lewis biography, Hellfire . Pop fiction will...
This portrait of the great female agents in the field, and the women who followed them into the Foreign Office, often feels like an upper-class hoot Catherine Ashton was appointed foreign policy chief of the European Union in 2009, a prime diplomatic post. Initially, it was brickbats all the way: she was too low key, too out of her depth. Until, that is, 2013, when she helped to broker a groundbreaking...
Geoff Dyer observes the privations and discipline of US warship life with a sharp eye Geoff Dyer's voyage on the vast aircraft carrier named after the 41st president of the United States is not only a memorable exercise in incongruity self-conscious Englishman cabined, cribbed and confined at the sharp-end of American military efficiency but also a well-directed opening salvo in a new publishing venture....
This is an age of man-chasing, full-blooded heroines in the same vein as Lena Dunham's Girls Bad Girls are the new It Girls in the world of books. As if to confirm the cultural shift that has seen us wave goodbye to man-chasing heroines like Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones to embrace more complex, true-to-life creatures such as the characters in Lena Dunham's Girls , a batch of novels out this...
Two decades after Girl, Interrupted , Susanna Kaysen is back with Cambridge , an unflinching, elegiac, quasi-autobiographical novel that takes us back to her childhood in the 1950s....
The Untold is a fictionalized account of Jessie Hickman's life, a real-life outlaw on the run in the Australian outback. NPR's Scott Simon speaks with Courtney Collins about her debut novel....
X-Men: Days Of Future Past is a time-travel movie, but not only because of its plot. It's also an experiment in how to continue a franchise without the potential complications of starting over....
A panel discussion curated by the Griffith Review chewed over some familiar questions at Sydney writers' festival "When I look at my own middle son, Lochie, who is 19 now, skateboarding," says Scott Rankin, creative director of Big Hart , "I know that elite artisanship is in good hands. His dexterity and command over every form of his young male body and testosterone is so refined and...
Former home secretary Alan Johnson is that rare thing: a genuinely popular Westminster figure. This week he won two major awards for his first memoir, and there's more to come The dominant sound on the tape of my interview with Alan Johnson is his laugh. This loud rattle has always been part of his personality, encouraging the popular view that he is a rare human among the aliens on Planet Westminster...
As the Chelsea Flower Show draws to a close, John Dugdale harvests literary gardens from William Shakespeare to Philippa Gregory Ovid, The Art of Love (c 2AD) Ovid's gardens influenced Shakespeare and Spenser, but probably not his porn passage in which a glade becomes a metaphor for the female body ("mid soft green turf there springs a sacred fount") and the symbolism of a male hunter entering...
The funny, insightful story of two boys who end up on a road trip using a 'borrowed' car, told through the eyes of a 14-year-old I was eating breakfast in a hotel, reading a book, when the German illustrator Axel Scheffler (of Gruffalo fame) sat down opposite me. "Do you know about Herrndorf?" he asked. I shook my head. "He got cancer," he said. "Wrote a blog about it....