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Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.
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This week on The ABR Podcast, Marilyn Lake reviews The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. The Art of Power, explains Lake, tells how Pelosi, ‘a mother of five and a housewife from California’, became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Marilyn Lake is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Listen to Marilyn Lake’s ‘Where is Nancy?’ Paradoxes in the pursuit of freedom’, published in the November issue of ABR.
Few phrases captured the atmosphere of lethargy and disorientation in which many of us lived under lockdown as ‘brain fog’. The term has come to denote a whole range of symptoms – from fatigue and forgetfulness to anxiety and an inability to focus – that serve as an historical marker for our Covid moment. Yet, as literary scholar Thomas H. Ford observes, the malaise is far from unique to the twenty-first century. In this episode of The ABR Podcast, listen to Ford as he traces the history of cognitive fuzziness, revealing the persistent concerns about mental overwork of which ‘brain fog’ is only the latest diagnosis.
... (read more)The Australian summer was once again a story of Covid. Just as things were slowly reaching a state of ‘Covid-normal’, Omicron came along to present us with new, decidedly unwelcome, challenges. Despite Omicron, our summer did not pass by without one of its most defining features: sport. Many events went ahead as planned, not least the Australian Open tennis tournament.
... (read more)It was, inevitably, in a Zoom meeting that I first noticed the phrase. A colleague, excusing some minor oversight, explained it away with the words: ‘Sorry, Covid brain fog.’ Although I hadn’t consciously registered the expression before, I knew exactly what she meant.
... (read more)