This past spring, a trilogy of kinky romance novels penned by EL James developed into a cultural phenomenon. The Fifty Shades of Grey series first became popular as ebooks that could be quickly downloaded and read on Kindles and similar devices without arousing social embarrassment. When they finally came out in print, they sold over ten million copies in just six weeks. A Hollywood movie is already in the works.

I have the name and the face. And if it’s enough to make a stranger shout ni hao at me from across the street, then maybe it should be enough for me too. Sometimes I like a good comeback, something like ‘A-ya, dui bu qi, wo de zhong wen bu shi tai hao, xiang ni zen me cong ming de ren da gai ye hui shuo yin wen ba?’, which means ‘Oh dear, my Chinese isn’t too good, but a genius like you probably also speaks English, right?’

It’s 2025. After a decade of litigation, controversy and arrests on both sides of the Atlantic, the non-Murdoch equity holders have taken control of the News Corporation business. They have ended the Murdoch family’s gerrymander of stockholder voting rights and moved quickly to strip the newspapers from an otherwise profitable media conglomerate.

Jennifer Lee (Overland 207) writes, ‘I expect many readers disagree with what I say about weight and fat, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong’. The implication is that she’s right, and that disagreement speaks in the voice of the oppressor. It is one of many reasons why I find Lee’s article – and identity politics more generally – to be a narrow and unhelpful frame for discussion.

Rupert Murdoch thrust his way into the newspaper industry in 1960 when he bought Sydney afternoon tabloid the Daily Mirror from John Fairfax & Sons. The conservative publishing aristocracy sold the Mirror (and Truth) to the 29-year-old ‘boy publisher’ for the bargain basement price of £600 000, with another £1.6 million to be paid over six years.

Five years later people no longer stop me in the street and ask: ‘What happened? Did the Taliban kidnap you? Why are you still alive?’ During two strange and chaotic days in June 2004, I was on the front page of Melbourne’s Age, and the second news item on Channel Nine, sandwiched between the war […]

By now, it is the stuff of legend: Muhammad Bouazizi, fed up with police harassment and poverty, douses himself in kerosene and sets himself alight in front of the local municipality. And so it began, more than one year ago in the ruin of a Tunisian backwater called Sidi Bouzid.

Obama has little incentive to follow Roosevelt’s example, in light of the major differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession. The working class no longer has the leverage it had in the 1930s when the US was still heavily invested in manufacturing.

Overland in conversation with industry insiders Jo Case, John Weldon and Malcolm Neil.

In March last year, only days after NATO’s military intervention in Libya, the French ‘New Philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy held a reception for Libyan insurgents at the Hôtel Rafael in Paris. Among the guests was Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who played a major role in popularising the so-called ‘right to intervene’ on humanitarian grounds.

Without doubt, the porn question has, since the 1970s, been the most controversial and divisive issue in the women’s movement.

Earth Overshoot Day marks the point when human activities use more resources than nature is capable of regenerating each year, an imbalance well established by the end of last century, creating a gap that has increased most years since. If we use models devised by the UK’s New Economics Foundation (NEF) and the Global Footprint Network, Earth Overshoot Day in 2011 fell on 27 September.

In 1987, when KW Jeter penned a simple letter describing his books to Locus magazine, his words were prophetic: ‘Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective … Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like “steampunks,” perhaps’.

If I listed all the insults, I’d fill a page. I note them here to show that fat prejudice is rife in Australia. Sometimes it is women who look over their glasses and direct their eyes up and down my body in shops where they don’t stock anything over size fourteen.

What they are waiting for is el tren, the now infamous freight service that takes them to Ixtepec, Oaxaca, and on into the cartel-controlled state of Veracruz. There, many are beaten, sexually assaulted, robbed, extorted, kidnapped or killed – and there are few, if any, lucky ones.

Once upon a time, Victorian England had a reputation as such an arctic tundra of sexual frigidity that people believed the ridiculous claim that piano legs had to be covered with drapery to preserve decency; or that the typical mother’s nuptial advice was ‘Just lie back, dear, and think of Britain’.