Abdul Abdullah wins 2025 Archibald Prize Packing Room Prize with Jason Phu portrait

2 May 2025

Melbourne and Bangkok, Thailand, based Australian artist Abdul Abdullah was named winner of the 2025 Archibald Prize Packing Room Prize yesterday, for his portrait — titled No mountain high enough — of Jason Phu.

The announcement of the Packing Room Prize is a bit like the beginning of Archibald Prize season, the annual arts award for Australian portraiture, and runs through to the closing of the Archibald exhibition, being Sunday 17 August this year.

Entry is open to any Australian artist, who’s painting was produced in the twelve months prior to the closing date for entries. The work should feature a “distinguished” Australian subject, usually in the arts, sciences, or politics, who, further, sat for the artist, face to face, while the work was produced.

Nearly two-thousand-four-hundred works were submitted this year, for the Archibald, together with the also annual Wynne (landscape painting), and Sulman (painting, genre, or mural painting) Prizes, the second highest of entries in the history of the prizes.

It can only be imagined how busy the loading dock at the Art Gallery of NSW must have been during the entry stage. The winners of all three awards will be announced next week, on Friday 9 May 2025.

The best books of the twenty-first century, so far, according to Kirkus Reviews

2 May 2025

Kirkus Reviews, an American literary publication, founded by teacher and editor Virginia Kirkus in 1933, has published a list of the best books — so far — of the twenty-first century.

It alarms me, as somewhat of a book reader, that I have not read even one of the fiction titles they list. I have seen a few of the film adaptations of some books though.

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books, literature, novels

More Australian publishing plagiarism allegations, this time in cook books

2 May 2025

Australian cook Nagi Maehashi, founder of popular food blog RecipeTin Eats, and publisher of two cook books (her first title was riotously successful), has accused Brisbane based baker Brooke Bellamy, of copying at least two of her recipes.

In addition, Maehashi also claims Bellamy copied “word for word”, a Portuguese tart recipe, published by late Australian chef Bill Granger, in his 2006 cook book, Every Day.

I’m not sure you can copy a recipe for something like Portuguese tarts, but allegedly re-printing one verbatim might be another story:

It has historically been difficult to prove recipe plagiarism, especially when recipes such as baklava, caramel slice and Portuguese custard tarts are not original ideas but versions of traditional recipes that have been tweaked and replicated thousands of times.

Bellamy has denied the plagiarism allegations, saying all recipes in her book, Bake with Brooki, were her own original work.

The Emperor of Gladness, a new novel by Ocean Vuong

30 April 2025

The Vietnamese American writer’s second novel will be published next month:

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. Six years seems like a bit of time between drinks, but Vuong also published a book of poetry, Time Is a Mother, in 2022.

Mark Zuckerberg says social media is no longer social media

30 April 2025

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of AI-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible.

In other words, social media is no longer social. The Facebook co-founder, and CEO, states what many of us have known for at least a decade. Zuckerberg’s comment was made a few weeks ago, during anti-trust proceedings led by the United States Federal Trade Commission, against Meta.

This is For Everyone, a memoir by Tim Berners-Lee

29 April 2025

This is For Everyone, being published this September, is the memoir of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The title, I think, belongs on the TBR list of anyone with any interest in the web.

The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee famously shared his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything, transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream and connect.

Not only did the British computer scientist bring us the web, he also created HTML, URLs, and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), all of which makes it possible to see this very web page.

Starbucks turns its fortunes around in Australia

29 April 2025

American coffee chain, Starbucks, is enjoying a surge in popularity in some parts of Australia.

Starbucks, put simply, had to stop chasing the mainstream market — metropolitan city coffee purveyors who savoured the neighbourhood cafe experience.

This is a far cry from their Australian nadir in 2008. To continue the good run though, they’ll need to retain the cafe-style business model, where customers can sit down and socialise. This rather than converting shops into glorified fast food collection points, apparently the norm in North America.

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AI-host presents Australian radio show undetected for six months

28 April 2025

CADA, a Sydney based radio station, was, without a word said, using an AI-generated DJ to host one of their shows, for possibly as long as six months. The ruse came to light after Australian writer Stephanie Coombes, acting on a tip off, was unable to track down any bios, press releases, or social media presences for Thy, the twenty-something presenter of the four-hour, weekday show.

Australian Radio Network (ARN), who owns CADA, later said in a statement to Mediaweek, that Thy was part of a “trial” of AI audio tools. Thy’s voice, according to the statement, was based on that of a woman working in the ARN office.

There’s a few things at play here. One is the broadcaster’s failure to disclose their presenter was AI-generated. Another is the time it took to pick this up. I don’t listen to CADA, and never heard Thy’s show, but the AI avatar must have been convincing in the extreme, if others listeners didn’t think anything was amiss, even after six months.

There’s also the point that this is the direction broadcast media might be moving in, that is, away from people as presenters, to AI-created entities. In addition, the suggestion has been made that other broadcasters might already be using AI hosts for shows, that have not, so far, come to light.

One well known AI-radio presenter however is Debbie Disrupt, a newsreader on Melbourne based radio station, Disrupt Radio. In this instance though the station made it clear from the onset that Debbie was not a real person. That particular stance seemed to move in Disrupt’s favour.

If there is life on K2-18b the K2-18 red dwarf star will kill it off

25 April 2025

News that traces of chemicals possibly indicating the presence of life on a planet, known as K2-18b, some one-hundred-and-twenty-four light years from Earth, resulted in a flurry of headlines the other week. Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet. Scientists claim they’ve discovered most promising ‘hints’ of potential for life on distant planet. And: Scientists Find Promising Indication of Extraterrestrial Life — 124 Light-Years Away.

Sure, it’s exciting. This is news many of us have been waiting for. Even if it’s not quite the definitive announcement we would have preferred. The problem though is the media outlets writing about the discovery of chemical “fingerprints” in the atmosphere of K2-18b, have not looked at the whole story. In fact, it seems they’ve only looked at the first few words. After all, why allow the full facts of the matter to get in the way of a click-bait worthy headline? The biggest — literally — part of the story is K2-18, the star the would-be life-hosting planet K2-18b is orbiting.

I’ve written about this before, but let’s revisit the subject, since it’s topical.

K2-18 is a red dwarf star. Red dwarfs — as the name suggests — are small. Some might only be a little bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Red dwarfs are dimmer and cooler compared to a star like the Sun. They however have long lifespans, typically measured in trillions of years, rather than billions, as is the case for many other stars in the universe. At first glance, red dwarfs seem like ideal stars to host planets that might give rise to life. Their longevity gives lifeforms an eon to take hold and develop. But red dwarfs are not really life-friendly stars.

One problem lies in their size. Being so small, the habitable, or Goldilocks zone, the area of their solar system best suited for the fostering of life, that is neither too hot, nor too cool, is quite close to the star. Any planets in the habitable zone will be tidally locked. This means one side of the planet permanently faces the star, while the other is perpetually shrouded in darkness. In other words, the star facing side of a planet will be incredibly warm, while the dark side will be quite cold. Neither extreme may be particularly conducive to life, especially complex lifeforms.

But that’s not the worst of it. Red dwarfs also emit powerful flares that can render nearby planets lifeless. Some of these outbursts can be even more intense than those generated by the Sun. While one study of these flares found they might emanate from the polar regions of red dwarfs, rather than their equators, being the plane planets usually orbit a star along, the odds remain stacked against life here. None of this information is new, but has just about been completely overlooked in the recent news stories, about the possibility of life on K2-18b.

Here may be an unfortunate instance of a star that brings life into being, only to take it away later.

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Your time machine breaks down at the worst times in history

24 April 2025

Despite what you might think, the worst possible time for your time machine to breakdown is not 2025. Instead, in this Kurzgesagt imagining, you are variously trapped in three periods of time, some several million years after three separate mass extinction events.

The time machine taking you to the early Triassic Period (two-hundred-and fifty million years ago), the late Carboniferous Period (three-hundred-and_twenty million years ago), and finally, the early Devonian Period (four-hundred million years ago) is not so much broken down, as it acting with a mind of its own. Why else hone in on some of the worst times in the far distant past to visit?

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animation, education, history, science

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