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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech
Business

Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech by Josh Bornstein

In November 1997, Bryce Rose was travelling for work in northern New South Wales. Rose was a technical officer with Telstra, and his help was needed in the Armidale area to address a surge in reported faults. Required to spend a few nights away from home, he arranged to share a hotel room with a colleague. On the third night, the pair went for dinner and then on to a nightclub. Much alcohol was consumed, and there was an altercation between them. Around 3 am, Rose returned to the hotel room, only to find the other man waiting for him. The furniture had been rearranged to create a space in the middle of the room. ‘Well, that’s your boxing ring if that’s what you want, mate,’ Rose’s colleague told him. There was a scuffle, and Rose began bleeding. He ultimately needed twelve stitches at the local hospital. Rose appears to have been the more innocent of the parties; his colleague was later convicted over the altercation.

Interview

Calibre Essays

From the Archive

November 2012, no. 346

We All Fall Down by Peter Barry

Hugh Drysdale, thirtyish, appears to have it made. An ambitious account manager with a Sydney advertising agency, he seems poised for a dazzling career. Confident of future success, he has installed his wife and son in a palatial house by the sea – with a palatial mortgage to show for it.

From the Archive

February 2014, no. 358

Jen Webb reviews 'The Goldfinch'

Donna Tartt has produced just one novel a decade so far: The Secret History, which came out in 1992 to enormous success; The Little Friend, ten years later, which barely rippled the surface of the literary world; and now The Goldfinch, which I suspect will achieve at least the standing of her first novel. Her novels possess a signature of sorts: crisply polished prose, perfect syntax, beautifully observed places and events, tricky characters, and unresolved crimes. They also explore the difficult world of adolescence, with their principal characters either witness to, or active participants in, those crimes. To this extent they possess a family resemblance to crime fiction; but they refuse to obey its conventions. The world is not restored to order at the end of her novels; the guilty are not punished, or the innocent rewarded. Instead, events and consequences roll indifferently on, unconcerned by fairness or justice or right, leaving the narrator to stumble through an attempt to make sense of what is in fact almost entirely random.

From the Archive

June-July 2015, no. 372

Ian Gibbins reviews 'On Immunity' by Eula Biss

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of arguably the biggest single breakthrough in our knowledge of how immunity works. After years of uncertainty, it turned…