What happens when your already precarious situation is upended by #Centrelinkfail?

Travel to the Jaipur Literary Festival with Emily Laidlaw where she investigates contemporary Indian literary culture. 

This is part of an email I wrote four days after the event . . .

Author Nick Earls tells us why he's gone short.

As luck would have it, the day before I was due to file this piece I ended up the emergency room with my ten-year-old daughter. She was burning up, had stomach pains. The fever clocked in at forty degrees. They took pieces of her away for testing. They stuck needles in her. I sat by her bed and we put our heads very close to the TV remote’s speaker and from time to time, people came to make sure she was okay.

As a person living with a chronic illness, the most humbling part of the experience for me is observing the amazing effect it has on other people. I am often asked, ‘Kaitlyn, what is the best thing about having a functional impairment?’ and I can say without hesitation that it is the magical way I inspire able-bodied people to divinely manifest medical knowledge.

When Turnbull became Prime Minister the Twitterverse (and traditional media) filled up with left-wingers cautioning against positivity – some argued it would have been better to have the onion-eater as leader until the next election. Bethanie Blanchard, avid #auspol watcher, turns her keen eye on Turnbull's rise and its effects on Australian politics.

If you thought Eurovision was just cheesy ballads and pyrotechnics, think again. Musicologist and Eurovision obsessive, Chris May, has analysed the rules and studied the geopolitical ramifications of 2015’s Eurovision Song Contest.

I remember this moment back in November 2013. I was living at my ex-girlfriend’s house and it was hot and I’d been at home writing all day from 9am to 6pm, not really eating or forgetting to eat, just listening to Clams Casino’s Rainforest on repeat, editing, editing, reading, writing. I’d been getting these headaches from staring at my laptop for so long but I didn’t care or I cared a lot but at that point the pain was manageable and I didn’t know but maybe knew that I was done with my book but that thought seemed terrifying because how can we ever, really, be done with anything?

The Doily and the Unsung Heroes: I was sitting at the launch of the Lip Magazine Anthology, that came out of a magazine published in Melbourne from 1976 to 1984. A feminist magazine, it was called a ‘lightning rod’ for art, theatre and journalism in the Women’s Movement.