Well Readhead

I remember once going to Guantanamo Bay on assignment and reading “Lolita” on the military jet en route. 

I didn’t think anything of it until I noticed a few people giving me sideways glances. 

It made me wonder if it weren’t slightly inappropriate reading material for a public place.  Sort of like clipping your toenails at the dinner table.

Continue reading "Well readhead: the most arrogant interview ever" »

With the whole nation absorbed in post-election intrigue, I’m declaring today’s reading list a politics-free zone.  But before I do, I’d like to nominate my favourite ‘what the?’ moment from the coverage of the election campaign.

I rule out going with Mark Latham’s transformation into a ‘journalist’ because it’s far too obvious.  An in-depth analysis of the size of Julia Gillard’s earlobes is a hot contender but also too predictable, given the fun cartoonists have been having with that issue for years.

A front page profile of Rhys Muldoon certainly caught my fancy, complete with its ‘Underbelly’ style photo, implying that the ‘Playschool’ actor had some sinister inside influence in Canberra. But to my taste, nothing topped this rolled-gold quote in a revealing profile of Kevin Rudd: 

Continue reading "Well readhead: the politics-free zone" »

There’s been some buzz around a recent article in New York magazine titled: ‘All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting’. The cover of the publication shows a mother holding her baby with the cover line ‘I Love My Children.  I Hate My Life’.

The author Jennifer Senior (a mother herself) explores a wide range of research on parenting and reports that it overwhelmingly supports the view that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases, are less so.

She writes about the changing views of childhood in Western society, arguing that before urbanisation, children delivered their parents an economic advantage that’s no longer evident:
‘If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store.  But … as we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed … kids in short went from being our staffs to being our bosses.’

Continue reading "Well readhead: Everyone’s talking about parenting" »

In The Wizard of Oz, the Great and Mighty Wizard is exposed as a fraud when Dorothy and Toto discover him hiding behind a curtain frantically manipulating levers and pulleys.  That moment reminds me of making television.  What viewers see on the screen is only a fraction of what’s really happening behind the scenes.

A few times, I’ve considered using this blog as a way of being more transparent about my own TV reporting.  A recent Lateline interview with the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has given me a good place to start: the compromises involved with celebrity interviewing.

Major stars usually only grant interviews when they have something to spruik, such as a new book or project.  But often what they want to sell has little to do with what the interviewer would really like to ask about.  Both sides have to make compromises, although on air, it’s meant to look like a spontaneous conversation that’s engaging both parties.

Continue reading "Well read-head: Getting stars off message in interviews" »

In his new memoir Hitch-22, the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens writes that he now drinks ‘relatively carefully’.  By that, he means only a glass of scotch and half a bottle of wine at lunch, followed by the same at dinner and occasionally a nightcap.

Hitchens’ drinking is the stuff of legend.  In fact, according to family folklore, his first fully-formed sentence was ‘Let’s all go and have a drink at the club.’ 

A 2006 profile in The New Yorker (which among other things notes that ‘Hitchens only recently gave up smoking in the shower’) describes Hitchens as ‘drinking like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.’

Continue reading "Well Readhead: Hitchen’ my wagon to the Prat Pack" »