Before I got married, I had a sprouting frustration with weddings and all the demands around them. Like the first weed poking out of a flowerbed. Although so grateful and honoured to be a part of every celebration I had been to, an internal screech sounded in my ears with every hen’s invite quoting me a minimum of $250 and requiring a complete disco-cowgirl outfit to attend. So when it came to my turn… I proudly deemed myself an “anti-bride”. Looking back on it, I felt very s

Make no mistake. The Convenient Wife is much more sinister than the Trad Wife. In your late twenties to early thirties, you will encounter a very specific species of married woman. She might be your best friend from high school, your neighbour, your coworker or your sister. She has a high-paying job and a fancy title, a $79-a-week reformer Pilates membership and a husband everyone describes as “a great guy”. She pays half the mortgage on their house in Toorak. She has her own

In my eyes, ADÈLA has made a great debut pop album, so why is everyone so torn up about it? Icon Academy has done irreparable damage. First, they created KATSEYE. Second, they absolutely shattered the hopes and dreams of dozens of girls. One of those girls was ADÈLA. Thanks to whatever is left of the good in the world and a little word we call “karma”, ADÈLA has now made an excellent comeback in the form of her debut album, PRIMA. On this record, the Slovakian-born singer sho

I grew up in a world that was, in almost every visible way, run by men. But inside the home, it was always the women who ran everything. They decided where everyone would sit at the dinner table, what we would eat that night, what the children would wear and what was appropriate for everyone else to wear, too. My grandmother was a very modern, cool and dominant woman. She was the kind of woman whose word was law. Once she made a decision, nobody really questioned it. She had

From flapper dresses to GLP-1s, fashion’s idea of liberation has always come with a preferred body. The newest trend on the runway isn’t a shape, a colour or even a fabric. It’s a drug. One in eight American adults say they are currently taking a GLP-1 medication such as Ozempic, a class of drugs that has become almost inseparable from conversations about weight loss and the return of extreme thinness. And according to The New York Times, their influence is beginning to reach

Five-year-old me was up to something when she watched Peter Pan (2003) for the first time and thought moving to London was the key to eternal happiness. Twelve-year-old me had such a huge crush on One Direction that she wrote collaborative fanfiction with her friends about them moving to London and having the members fall head over heels for them. Eighteen-year-old me packed up her clothes in a 23kg bag, said goodbye to everything and everyone she knew, and hopped on a plane

There's a format going round at the moment where people list five things they think are worth your money. A good coat. A gym membership. An expensive hand soap, because the skin on your hands ages faster than the rest of you. Millions of these now, all delivered with the same steady confidence, and the premise underneath every one of them is that the correct purchase can be identified, named and handed to a stranger. It's a generous format, and that's exactly what makes it wo

Watching Tony made me think about Anthony Bourdain, and the uncomfortable truth that someone can be deeply loved, wildly successful, constantly smiling, and still be fighting something nobody around them can see. I have been thinking about Anthony Bourdain since I watched Tony, and frankly, I didn't expect a film about a 19-year-old chef I knew almost nothing about to move me this much.

I’m not sure how anyone manages anymore without completely shutting down, and I think that’s what a lot of people end up doing, because it’s all too much. I feel like a crazy person even writing this all out because it’s so scatterbrained, but that’s exactly what keeping up with the news feels like. Nowadays, it is so hard to find good and enlightening conversation. Instead, we’re stuck doomscrolling through the suffering of people overseas; the political turmoil that surroun

Saint-Exupéry wrote about adults isolated on tiny planets, obsessed with power, admiration, possessions and numbers. Eighty years later, we built an entire society around them. Written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943. In the middle of war. By a man who was a pilot and a resistance fighter. A man who would disappear during a reconnaissance flight just one year later. Now why does this tiny book, written for children, echo so deeply in our adult lives? I only discovered The

Between body shame, fashion and silence, we'll still punish those for trying to fit in. It's funny, really. Perfect bodies are THAT thing nobody can actually define. We keep redefining what they should look like every few years. Call it progress, call it evolution, call it whatever makes you feel better about the absurdity. But fundamentally, nothing changes. The loop keeps spinning

The internet taught everyone how to look effortlessly cool. In doing so, it may have destroyed the very thing we were trying to imitate. I recently came across a viral video discussing how Hailey Bieber’s stylist approaches something as seemingly insignificant as her coffee-run outfits. There was something almost fascinating about hearing the strategy behind a look designed to appear as though very little strategy had gone into it. The oversized jacket, the tiny sunglasses, t

It started with a text In my late twenties, I had the pleasure of experiencing something I’d never had access to during a breakup before: artificial intelligence. I’m not entirely sure when I started using it for relationship advice. At first, it felt quite awkward. There is something bleak about opening a chatbot and typing out the intimate details of your romantic life to a machine.

Sure, people 20 or so years ago probably loved the idea of having robots do all the gruelling and annoying tasks capitalism demands of us so that real people could relax and enjoy themselves. But when one thinks for a second about the labour- and land-exploitative culture we live in, and the corrupt politicians and elites who are seen reaping the benefits of ordinary human struggles, one can’t be too surprised that AI manifested in this intense and sinister manner.

I can tell when someone is about to stop liking me. It isn't intuition. It's pattern recognition. A smile that arrives half a second too late. Someone typing "haha" instead of "hahaha," which marks, I've decided, the difference between being amused and being polite. A voice that flattens by some fraction when it says my name, as if my name had begun to cost something to say. I know the shape of my own expiration date in someone else's attention