Series: Griffith Review

'A faker,' said Orson Welles, 'makes fools of the experts. So, who's the expert? Who's the faker?' Griffith Review 79 lifts the curtain on fakes, frauds and forgeries. Treading the tightrope between art and lies, it explores the appeal of stories, objects, bodies or experiences that offer the false promise of authenticity. How do we discern what's real and what's...

Whether it's man's best friend or the king of the jungle, animals occupy a central place in our social, emotional, and cultural lives. We're happy as clams or pigs in mud; we hold our horses or take a lion's share of what we want; we avoid the elephant in the room or try not to open a can of worms....

The attachments we form shape our experience of the world and our understanding of who we are. Hell is other people, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, his point being less about misanthropy and more about how entwined our self-perception is with the ways in which others perceive us. And alongside our personal relationships – from filial to friendship, from collegiate to romantic...

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes spelt out a vision of the impending utopia. Work, he said, will become a thing of the past. 'For the first time since creation,' he predicted, 'man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to occupy the leisure which science...will have won for him.' So where did this vision of future...

The past, famously, is a foreign country—but in the twenty-first century, it's one in which we increasingly seek solace. No matter the relentless pace of technological innovation and the digitisation of everything from money to media, our appetites for retro design and aesthetics, for cultural products that reimagine technicolour-dream versions of decades gone by, or for fantasies of a past...

The capacity to tell stories—along with language and the ability to create art—is seen as both intrinsic and unique to the human species. Over thousands of years, we've forged narratives of our origins, our journeys, and our dreams as a means of accounting for who we are and to define our place in the world. In the twenty-first century, as...

Like the answer to a riddle, status is all around us, but it can't always be seen or heard. The silent switchboard behind our professional and personal interactions, status dictates our place on the guest list, in the room, at the table; through its connections to class, race and gender, it affords some of us power and wealth and others...

To take a leap of faith is to bet your belief on an unknown future. But belief is central to the human experience; whether it's religious, political, societal, philosophical or spiritual, the act of believing can be a lodestar, a comfort, a ritual, a guiding principle, a reason for living. We place our faith in everything from gods and mortals...

No matter how much or how little you care about what you wear, your sartorial choices are inextricably stitched into your social, cultural and personal identities. Clothing not only dictates how we define ourselves and relate to others throughout history, it's also been a mode of expression, resistance, revolution and disruption.Put on your Sunday best for Griffith Review 90: Best...

There's no escaping the onslaught of content these days. But it seems increasingly tricky to determine what's good and what's not as we stream, tap and swipe our way through our endless entertainment feeds. How can we tell our own taste? Have we reached the end of culture? What place does criticism occupy in this ever-shifting landscape? From page to...

Money talks but it doesn't always speak the truth. It's also far more than a medium of exchange and a store of value: money is a status symbol, a friendship destroyer, an opportunity creator, a psychological blocker, an obsession, a dream, a curse, an albatross and an elephant in the room. And if money makes the world go round, it's...

Food is more than a matter of taste. From the comfort of the kitchen to the theatre of the restaurant, the glamour of the TV studio to the gloss of the cookbook page, the ways we frame and consume stories about food shape our cultural histories as much as our personal identities. Griffith Review 78 serves up a smorgasbord of...

There's no place like home, although home isn't always a place. It could be a feeling, an instinct, a language, a person, a memory; it could be where we long to return or can't wait to escape. But for all its symbolic resonance, home also has myriad material consequences: from the picket fence to the political arena, it raises questions...

What can we learn about learning? Australians have one of the highest levels of educational attainment in the world, but not every Australian has access to a world-class education. What represents a 'good' education in a country with an increasingly segmented school system and a tertiary sector that faces profound uncertainties, both financial and existential? Griffith Review 75: Learning Curves...

Loss, wrote Marcus Aurelius, 'is nothing else but change'. We lose face, lose time, lose heart, lose touch, lose ground, lose our keys (often); we can lose the things that hold us back or weigh us down, just as we can lose the people and places we love most. Loss, whether it offers us pain or reward, is fundamental to...