No longer exclusively the domain of Japanese chefs with deep roots in traditional culinary practices, the new mix of casual dining and simple sweet shops reflect the ever-changing construct of Japan within the imagination of the West.

It has always been clear that there is no future in the oppressive Israeli occupation — not for Jews, Muslims, Christians, Israelis or Palestinians. It is just as obvious that antisemitism, islamophobia and anti-Arab racism cannot be defeated by a standing army.

While common-sense ideas of ‘Team Australia’ reached absurd proportions during the pandemic, the underlying logics aren’t new. They reinvigorate much older common sense discourses of settler colonial nationalism: triumph over adversity, unity in crisis, national identity forged in war time. And like most common sense ideas, they function to paper over the foundational contradictions that produce and sustain contemporary crises.

What a writing life is that, one might wonder, having to publish one’s own work by oneself, in the case of Pessoa, or consigning one’s own work to obscurity, in the case of Dickinson? But that is exactly what migration—mental, spiritual and creative—is all about.

What distinguishes a doctor from a scientist or a textbook is their figuration in culture, their supposed ability to incorporate something more artful than scientific into the treatment, and their manner at the bedside. It’s for that reason we can say that the doctor presented as ‘Dr Death’ is indeed monstrous – but monstrous in the most doctorly way. Monstrous inasmuch as what is doctor in him has grown malignant.

Crown Sydney drags the Australian ugliness out of the twentieth century and into our globalised present: a gratuitous embellishment of the harbour and city skyline, a priapic glass monument to late-capitalist excess and neoliberal myopia.

What happened at Canterbury is now happening in universities around the Anglophone world. Even if most news coverage of higher education focuses on quarrels over curricula and freedom of speech, humanities departments have in fact experienced a far deeper realignment, one that is three decades in the making.

With climate-change denial rapidly losing its social license, climate ‘doomism’ – the conviction that it’s now too late to prevent the collapse of civilisation – has become a new archnemesis of climate activism.

From Arinze Ifeakandu’s decidedly queer-centric fiction to the experimental sound of Fireboy DML’s music, young Nigerians are starting to embrace cultures that used to exist at the fringes of society. They are powered by a bohemian rush, a pressing need to skate down what Kerouac called the ‘senseless nightmare road’.

When walking, things somehow have a way of getting organised. Like Tetris. The oddly shaped blocks that are your thoughts, falling down from the sky. Fitting them into the right space, then ping, the lines form. The more lines you form, the better you feel. Ping ping ping. Soon, the blocks start to fall even faster. Ping ping ping. Lines and lines disappearing before you fully get to grasp them.

It may well be a law of nature that when you defeat the empire, you become the empire. Cobain and Nirvana had challenged corporate power from within, but the adaptability of those structures saw them drawn unwittingly into the middle of the machine. Cobain was too honest to give in, but also too exhausted to keep running ahead. The more successful Nirvana became, the less he was able to control his own message, to represent something other than the symbol he had become – the constructed symbol of a rock’n’roll star, a polite focus for suburban rebellion, even in spite of the challenging art he made.

Murray Bail’s He. seems to enclose most of a life and much of the world. The size of this small book (164 pages) is disproportionate to its affect of astonishment – at least for this fan.

The pandemic makes borders legible in new ways. For some, the death counts and interactive maps tracking the global movement of the virus recall the monitoring of sea journeys and charting of refugee movements. For others, the act of crossing borders is made visible anew, as different sorts of bodies are ensnared at airports and surveillance points. These redraw once again the permeable lines between rights and rightlessness, the privileges and limits of citizenship. Different biopolitical permutations are playing out before our eyes from moment to moment.

My vagina disappoints me, I say to myself once a month or so. One doctor looks at my vagina and says, ‘yes, well, that’s the sort of vagina you got on the public health in 1972.’

Shows like Parks and Rec and Schitt’s Creek (or Rosehaven) represent the continuation of the pastoral fantasy in the context of social and political upheaval. The pastoral endures in the English imagination, the context where Williams excavated its grip, but the category is just as applicable elsewhere in an age of environmental catastrophe, political upheaval and economic immiseration.

Luster is smart, and funny, and very sad, and extremely good in its own right. In observing the refracted desires and self-critiques that guide Edie’s romantic trajectory, we can see one example of how race, age and privilege intersect to influence what it is that we want when we have sex.