Unrelated to the soon to be judged bad sex in fiction awards (litworld’s finest annual moment outside the Man Booker) is the looming release of the movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. What a harrowing, yet unstoppable book that was. Grimly unrelieved. I can’t decide yet whether to take my mind’s eye view on [...]

Does Rupert Murdoch get the internet thing? Some thoughts from Roy Greenslade. Has Rupert Murdoch lost his magic touch? As absurd as it may to suggest that one of the world’s most successful media moguls may be in any kind of danger I argue in my London Evening Standard column today that his News Corporation [...]

The other day I wondered this about the Krauss/Plant version of Through The Morning Through The Night: I have a thing about this song, and the distinctive country minor-lilt of the harmonies. That interval, that particular pairing of vocal parts, IS country music. How does something like that evolve? Is is just based on a [...]

We were all going to post our favorite Python sketches this afternoon and combine them into something quite jolly. Then we forgot.

… but quite possibly one of the funniest things ever:

On the train for the first time in ages. Don’t know why, perhaps fearing some sort of Magda Szabanski open door effect on Bridge Road this morning. Or not. Shuffle threw up Neil Young’s very lovely Red Sun. This song always puts me in a place. Do you think I could find a video on [...]

And while I think of it, this is not a dust storm, THIS is a dust storm: Just saying.

This ad has been running hard in Melbourne print media since the footy at the weekend: It says something about the sort of person Melbourne University is hoping to attract to its business school … a school that apparently sees a football allegiance (the guy in the ad has decided, oh smart fellow, to wear [...]

The Pew Research Centre has been evaluating public attitudes to press accuracy since 1985. Pubic perceptions of press accuracy are now at a 20-year low. You may be able to believe what you read, but most Americans don’t Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that [...]

I admit here to a small amount of confusion. Does the new Fairfax opinion aggregator The National Times wish the identity of its star national affairs columnist, The Goanna, to be a secret, an open secret or Tony Wright? All possibilities appear to be in play. The National Times home page just offers The (unadorned) [...]