Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Joel Deane

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy by Jonathan Taplin

by •
Online Exclusives
Joel Deane reviews 'Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy' by Jonathan Taplin

Good books are like recurrent dreams: haunting the reader’s waking hours by sitting, tantalisingly, on the edge of conscious thought. Take, for example ...

... (read more)

Comfort Food by Ellen van Neerven

by •
December 2016, no. 387
Nathanael Pree reviews 'Comfort Food' by Ellen van Neerven, 'Year of the Wasp' by Joel Deane, and 'Invisible Mending' by Mike Ladd

Ellen van Neerven, Joel Deane, and Mike Ladd present poems about journeys, recovery, and healing, from comfort food to the experience of a stroke, within overlapping landscapes as palimpsests for their respective pathways.

Reciprocity through feeding runs through Ellen van Neerven’s first collection (Comfort Food, University of Queensland Press, $ ...

Comfort Zone by Lindsay Tanner

by •
June–July 2016, no. 382
Joel Deane reviews 'Comfort Zone' by Lindsay Tanner

I interviewed Lindsay Tanner once, back in 2012. Tanner was sixteen months retired from political life, and I had come seeking insight into the workings of the Victorian ...

... (read more)

Machine Rules: A Political Primer by Stephen Loosley

by •
March 2016, no. 379
Joel Deane reviews 'Machine Rules' by Stephen Loosley

Mark Latham – former columnist for the Australian Financial Review, former 'special correspondent' for Sixty Minutes, former federal leader of the Australian Labor Party – wasn't the only politician to keep a diary. Writing in The Latham Diaries (2005) – a book most politicians and apparatchiks approach via the index – Latham revea ...

Poem of the Week - Joel Deane reads 'Following the many elbows of the Yarra'

by •
Poem of the Week

Our first 'Poem of the Week' for 2016 is 'Following the many elbows of the Yarra' by Joel Deane. ABR's Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton, introduces Joel who then discusses and reads his poem.

... (read more)

Letters to the Editor - December 2015

by •
December 2015, no. 377

'BATSHIT BORING BOOKS'

Tim Colebatch's review of my book Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power (November 2015) quotes a comment I made to

Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power by Joel Deane

by •
November 2015, no. 376
Tim Colebatch reviews 'Catch and Kill' by Joel Deane

Since 1980, Victoria has become a natural Labor state. It has seen twenty-three federal and state elections in that time, and Labor has won seventeen of them. The Coalition has won just three state elections in thirty-five years, and a majority of Victoria's seats at just three of the last thirteen federal elections.

It is a stunning reversal of roles. For i ...

Becoming Steve Jobs: How a reckless upstart became a visionary leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

by •
June-July 2015, no. 372
Joel Deane reviews 'Becoming Steve Jobs' by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

I was working as a technology journalist in San Francisco when Steve Jobs made his messianic return to Apple. It was September 1997, the height of the dotcom boom. In the city, the old industrial tracts between Market Street and China Basin were being transformed by start-ups. People were living on free pizza and hoping to strike it rich with stock options in an ini ...

Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford

by •
April 2015, no. 370
Joel Deane reviews 'Let Me Be Frank With You' by Richard Ford

‘My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter.’ With those opening words in The Sportswriter (1986), Richard Ford introduced one of American literature’s more unlikely protagonists. In his fictional début, Bascombe is a former short story writer-turned-journalist, aged in his thirties, navigating suburban life in Haddam, New Jersey, after the death o ...

Gravity by Mary Delahunty & Rudd, Gillard and Beyond by Troy Bramston

by •
September 2014, no. 364
Joel Deane reviews 'Gravity: Inside the PM’s office during her last year and final days' by Mary Delahunty and 'Rudd, Gillard and Beyond' by Troy Bramston

Gough Whitlam may not have been one of the Australian Labor Party’s greatest prime ministers, but, since his defenestration by Governor-General John Kerr in 1975, he has been embraced as one of the ALP’s great martyrs. Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam Government galvanised the Labor movement. To Labor eyes, Kerr was Pontius Pilate and Whitlam the slain Messiah. New followers – many of them, like Whitlam, university-educated progressives – joined the ALP. New ideas were aired through policy think-tanks such as the Labor Resource Centre, headed by Jenny Macklin, a future federal deputy leader. Out of that angst and rage, a new ALP was forged. Labor was no longer a troglodyte party ruled by factional warlords and sectarian hatreds. It was a modern progressive movement hell-bent on winning and wielding power. After all, as Whitlam famously said to an ALP State Conference in Melbourne in 1967, ‘Only the impotent are pure.’

... (read more)
Page 2 of 4