Topic: Culture
210 Autumn 2013: Features
Total surveillance, the hackerati and the future of activism
Guy Rundle
In the foyer of the Congress Center Hamburg, free bottles of Club-Mate, the high-caffeine herbal cola favoured by hackers, were being distributed from bikes, the riders threading their way between table upon table of black-clad guys and gals hunched over laptops: tacktacktacktack, furious fingers on shallow keyboards against a constant chatter of techno music.
Read 'Chaos and convergence'
210 Autumn 2013: Features
Australia's hidden defect
Dean Biron
Released in 1998, Rowan Woods’ The Boys (featuring David Wenham and Toni Collette) is one of the most important films ever made in Australia. An intense and claustrophobic study of working-class suburbia in inexorable limbo, The Boys depicts three brothers, one menacingly dominant, the others wretchedly submissive, spiralling toward the commission of a horrific crime that is only ever alluded to in the narrative.
Read 'The aesthetics of conservatism'
210 Autumn 2013: Poetry Prize
Judge’s report
Peter Minter
Throughout the summer, while reading for the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, and as a terrific heatwave bled fire and brimstone across the land, the sentence ‘Sometimes it’s just about an honest, well-crafted poem’ leapt over and over through my thoughts like a cool dolphin springing from waves in an apparition of a distant inland sea.
Read 'The 2012 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets'
210 Autumn 2013: Features
Germany and Palestine
Kate Davison
On the Left there exists a different kind of German exceptionalism, if you like, in which the notion of Sonderweg (literally, ‘special path’ – the idea that a unique historical trajectory meant that Nazi Germany was a sure thing, a pre-determined fate) is repackaged to enable special German interpretations of all sorts, like that Germany is the absolute worst out of all the nations on earth, or that anti-Semitism has really always been an especially German beast.
Read 'My German question'
210 Autumn 2013: Features
Reconciling queer identities with Islam
Alyena Mohummadally
If you google ‘queer Muslims’ you get over three million hits; ‘gay Muslims’, 121 million. Not all the resulting pages are positive or supportive, but many focus on attempts to reconcile same-sex attraction and Islam or on exposing the dangerous, sometimes deadly, struggle faced by many queer Muslims. Though it’s nascent, there is – in certain areas at least – a movement challenging the notion that homosexuality and Islam are incompatible.
Read '‘I thought I was the only one!’'
