Alex Tighe
Alex Tighe is a writer and editor, and the winner of the University of Sydney’s 2018 Wentworth Medal essay prize. In 2019 he was the ABC / Kidney Health Australia’s inaugural Mark Colvin Scholar. He is the current ABR Rising Star for New South Wales.
If you’ve somehow avoided listening to podcasts, you will have missed out on the recent explosion of long-form audio storytelling – and I mean it, you’ve really missed out. The show which pioneered the form, This American Life (TAL), pulls a cool four to five million listeners each week, and you don’t get those numbers for nothing. TAL takes ordinary people, tells their stories, and then ... (read more)
‘A book about waiting’ was perhaps a hard sell for Jason Farman to make to his publisher. Waiting, so the consensus goes, sucks. It is the elephant graveyard of time, the dead zone between something and something else. Who would want to spend more time on waiting?
It helps to clarify that Delayed Response is not the type of book that presents its topic as life’s panacea (like ‘tidyin ... (read more)
You probably own a smartphone. Chances are it’s in your pocket right now, or at least within arm’s reach – don’t pick it up. Fight the habit. Besides, you’ve probably checked it in the last fifteen minutes. If you are an average user, intentionally or not, you will spend three to four hours looking at its screen today. If you did check your phone after the second sentence, then well done ... (read more)
What is tinkering? As Katherine Wilson makes clear in Tinkering: Australians reinvent DIY culture, there is an easy answer to that question – but also several complex ones.
At the physical level, tinkering is what the protagonists in Wilson’s book do: they convert cars to run on vegetable oil; they build their homes by hand and perfect quince jam. One tinkerer whom Wilson profiles made a peda ... (read more)