Fed up with hipsters fawning over New York, I decided to take my own bite out of the Big Apple… right here in Melbourne. This feature appeared in jmag issue 37, March 2010.

I donned my cranky pants to write this op-ed about the gooey sentimentality of whimsical culture. It appeared in The Age on Monday, 20 April, 2009.

In 2010, pop music is a spectacle of artifice – see Autotune and Lady Gaga – but in 2003 it yearned for authenticity. This feature on the ‘Britney backlash’ appeared in News Limited’s Sunday Magazine on 25 May, 2003.

This essay won the special prize for written communication by a scholar aged under 30 in the 2003 Co-Op Bookshop Dialogica Awards.

After reading about the emergence of “cashed-up bogans”, I got annoyed and wrote this opinion piece, which appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on 8 June, 2006. In it I draw on the main argument of my MA thesis: that ‘bogan’ is a figure of national identity rather than class.

In 2004, hip-hop production duo the Neptunes ruled the pop charts, and this feature explores their history and their signature sound. It appeared in The Age on Saturday, 15 May, 2004.

It’s possibly Melbourne’s best-named charcoal chicken shop, and I reviewed it for ThreeThousand on 16 October, 2008. When I went back, my review was taped to the bain-marie.

This review of Annalee Newitz’s book Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters In American Pop Culture appeared in issue 124 of the academic journal Media International Australia in August 2007.

This playful mini-essay sizes up hip-hop culture, comparing rappers who call themselves ‘Big’ to those who are ‘Lil’. It appeared in issue seven of Is Not Magazine, “Bigger Is/Not Better”, in March 2007.

‘Street style’ has become one of the most popular fashion blogging subgenres. For this feature I interviewed two ’street’ photographers. It originally appeared in The Sunday Age’s ‘M’ magazine on Sunday 11 January, 2010.