Do you ever just take up exercise because you’re bored? Will training for a marathon and joining a gym cure my depression and give me a reason to live? Pain is just weakness leaving your body. Sorry that was a bit bleak wasn’t it. Gemini full moon baby. Running on a muddy track along the town belt I see a ponga tree slipping off the banks. I almost stand on a baby Tui. Honestly can nature get the hell out of my way I’m trying to cure my depression.

Somehow over the last decade, food has become supreme arbiter – moving around the cultural landscape and absorbing our biggest fears and desires, before transforming everything into a café-ready salve. What’s strange about food culture’s claim to authenticity is not so much the baroque propositions – slow food, local food, homemade food – only that the stuff we eat has taken on such a potent, transformative quality in the first place.

In September, the Labor Party officially decided to cave in on the Trans Pacific Partnership deal, leading to the deal passing in the Senate. Since then, there’s barely been so much as a muffled scream about it in the mainstream media. But this is an agreement designed to completely reshape and redesign global trade. Will the TPP bring any benefit to Australia’s trade relations? The short answer is: absolutely not.

Unlike Melbourne’s nineteenth-century stonemasons, the economic squeeze many feel today is not from overwork but its opposite: underemployment. As costs of living soar and wage growth remains dismally flat, a growing number of people struggle to find enough work to provide a dignified, comfortable existence for themselves or their families. Part-timers want full-time work. Why can’t they get it?

In contrast to other core concepts of emancipation such as freedom or equality, solidarity is quite difficult to grasp. This is because it is even more clearly a relationship, a doing, one difficult to fix down by an external standard. Solidarity happens between us. This is exactly what makes it so attractive: it creates connections.

Like most aspects of modern life, sport hasn’t escaped capitalism. Rather, it’s persistently and comprehensively shaped by economic considerations: how much advertising revenue can be generated, how many shirts will be bought if a club signs player X, how many people can be legally admitted into a stadium on matchday. The recent experience of English football club, Arsenal, exemplifies this well.

There’s an emphasis on self-empowerment within contemporary feminism which I think is hugely important. But I also think that the idea of self-empowerment can become tangled up in capitalism’s consumer culture, and social media-driven narcissism, in ways that can warp it into an aggressive individualism. The kind of thinking I’m referring to privileges the ‘right’ to do whatever one wants to do for themselves over anything resembling genuine and thoughtful care for other people.

After its absence in 2016, the biennial Melbourne Art Fair (M.A.F.) returned this year, spread across two venues in the Southbank Arts Precinct: Riding Hall, the newly refurbished stables at VCA, and Vault Hall, a bloody great tent erected on the ACCA Forecourt. M.A.F. saw forty galleries display works by the brightest and best in their respective stables, demonstrating the strength of the current Australian contemporary art scene to those who filed through.

Citizens of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries are not satisfied with the progress that has been made since 1989. Many feel that they have traded in the grey faceless bureaucratic oppression of the Communist Party for a new capitalist class who are offensively showy: every four-carat diamond and London flat pilfered through privatisation has become a personal insult to an unemployed Donbass miner or pension-dependent babushka in Yekaterinburg.

Described as an ‘immersive, intimate exploration of Islam, skateboarding and sexual politics’, the film follows the ‘surprising’ phenomenon of Muslim women skateboarders. Its aim: to tackle the stereotype of ‘passive, subservient Muslim women’.

Antidepressants work. For me, they have helped lift me out of a deep slump, but had I been prescribed them alone, I would not have sought – with the help of a fantastic psychologist – a deeper understanding of myself; one that acknowledged that my depression was partly existential anguish at the direction my life had taken. An unpromising job market had made me desperate for work, which compounded my own personal anxieties about pleasing people, making it harder to leave a job I hated.

Is Sydney the worst city to live in Australia? This is the question set on fire in a recent op-ed published on the ABC – ‘The truth about living in Sydney: Everyone has an escape plan’ – where writer Andrew Street has tapped into the fertile soil of parochial mudslinging, population debate and our economic stagnation by declaring that he is seeking to escape the beautiful but torturous harbour city of Sydney.

Who, I wonder, will play Elon Musk in the inevitable biopic? Were such a film made tomorrow, it would be easy to imagine John Barrowman in the lead role. Beyond the obvious physical similarities – square-jawed and Hollywood B-list handsome – both are around fifty, and exude that slight exoticness that comes from having attained US citizenship after being born elsewhere (Musk in Pretoria, Barrowman in Glasgow).

Violence permeates the live music scene right down to the punter level. It’s a bare-bones fact. And as more and more bands come to recognise the critical mass of sexual violence in the ‘scene’, it’s time for a brief re-evaluation of what it means to have a ‘scene’: what the scene is, and the role of violence within it.

Since the advent of the Polaroid camera in the 1960s, people have been taking and sharing explicit images of themselves. The availability of digital cameras two decades later sparked a proliferation of amateur, gonzo and ‘realcore’ genres of pornography where individuals created unedited, low-fi films documenting ‘real’ desires and featuring ‘ordinary’ bodies. With the explosion of queer and feminist pornographies in the 2000s and a cultural investment in authenticity and ethical production, DIY porn acquired significance as a politicised intervention into mainstream netporn.

Two weeks ago, social media lit up in a fever dream of outrage. This time, because a corporation hijacked the imagery and aesthetics of resistance movements as part of a daft strategy to sell soft drink to millennials. Most disturbingly, Pepsi’s ad appropriated the imagery of the Black Lives Matter movement, ultimately trivialising police brutality. However I suspect that there’s another hidden, murkier reason that this ad got the left into such a tizzy: because it draws attention to our own always-already co-opted, neutered gestures of resistance.