Can You Write a Novel as a Group?
The stories of three fiction-writing collectives, on three different continents.
Elon Musk and the Failure of Our Imagination in Space
Musk and his fellow-“astropreneurs” have tapped into our idealism about space travel. But to what end?
The Mapping of Massacres
In Australia, historians and artists have turned to cartography to record the widespread killing of Indigenous people.
Dr. Space Junk Unearths the Cultural Landscape of the Cosmos
Alice Gorman is a pioneer in the emerging field of space archeology.
What Old Age Is Really Like
Old age is perplexing to imagine in part because the definition of it is notoriously unstable.
Can Reading Make You Happier?
Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence.
The Year That Marriage Equality Finally Came to Australia
When Sydney celebrates the new year, a rainbow-colored waterfall of fireworks will cascade from the Harbour Bridge, marking overdue change.
Read more of Ceridwen's newyorker.com articles
Mining the Moon
Few of us remember to be grateful to the Moon. We are lucky to have it, though we still don’t know exactly how it was formed. Our planet could just as easily have ended up moonless, like our neighbours Venus and Mercury, or we could have been burdened like Mars with its small moons, Phobos and Deimos, their names meaning fear and dread.
Can David Sinclair cure old age?
Since my recent visit to the Harvard Medical School laboratory run by Australian geneticist David Sinclair, I’ve been struggling with a shamefully greedy impulse. How can I get my hands on the wonder molecules that Sinclair is trialling to amazing effect in mice, not only slowing down their ageing but reversing it?
The alluring world of Liane Moriarty
You know you've read a great book when it changes how you move through the world. That's how I felt after reading Big Little Lies, Australian author Liane Moriarty's sixth and best-known novel. Moriarty's creative genius in this book, as in all her work, is to scrutinise a group of ordinary people forced to co-exist in an emotionally and morally charged situation.
The eureka factory
If you haven’t already heard, the solar cell efficiency race is on, and once you’ve dusted off your periodic table, it’s a race as scintillating as any big-ticket derby. The...
Art for the nose
The scents of the seven deadly sins, in miniature sampling vials of varying shades of amber and green, are arranged on my work desk. In preparation for interviewing Jonathon...
Schoolyard crush
Steph Croft never set out to become a whistleblower. But in 2012 the financial analyst and mother of two teenagers began to realize something was going horribly wrong with schools...
The pencil and the damage done
“I was ruthless,” Karl Ove Knausgaard, the now infamous Norwegian author of the volumes of autobiographical fiction, My Struggle, said at last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival...
Read more of Ceridwen's The Monthly articles
Moondust Could Cloud Our Lunar Ambitions
It's superfine. It's sharp. It sticks to everything. Before we return to the moon, we'll have to conquer one of the weirdest substances in the solar system....
The Great Koala Rescue Operation
I arrived on Kangaroo Island bracing myself for the sight of acres of blackened trees and white ash, but I had not expected the parasitic bright green vines wrapped around almost every charred trunk, glowing phosphorescent in the sunlight....