Being the most famous (see also: sexiest) astrophysicist in the world, Neil deGrasse Tyson often gets sidetracked into conversations about things that aren’t particularly astrophysical.
A prominent face in science news cycles, he’s become the poor guy on the receiving end of a lot of inane and irrelevant conversation — like the time he tore apart what we thought was the bulletproof science behind Gravity, the fact that he’s now more commonly known as a “Pluto-hater” than scientist...
Read MoreWith characteristic naivety, Ansari’s character delves into the previously overlooked lives of his immigrant parents, his friends’ grandparents, his female friends and other Indian actors. As a result, each episode feels like a short film that tries to answer the question, “What’s up with that?” And, by removing himself from Master Of None’s spotlight, Ansari proves he’s a comedy writer to contend with the best of them.
Read MoreWe’re all familiar with the riotous, irreverent and often disturbing antics of the Cartoon Network’s weird cousin, Adult Swim. It’s the station responsible for the likes of The Venture Bros., Harvey Birdman, Children’s Hospital, Robot Chicken and those terrifying infomercials — you know, immature, dark and bizarre; those kinds of shows.
But one of those shows, while it is all of those things, layers on a moral and structural complexity you only really see on the prestige cable networks, while using itself as a platform for discussion about the place science has in contemporary society.
Read MoreDespite the excessive red tape shutting us out of the system, there has been a slow drip-feed of stories emerging from inside Australia’s offshore refugee processing centres. Squalid living conditions, restricted movement, claims of inadequate medical facilities, mistreatment of gay asylum seekers and the constant fear of violence is an everyday reality for the men, women and children housed there. The stories that have emerged so far have consistently made international headlines, drawing damning statements from both The United Nations as well as American NGO Human Rights Watch.
Read MoreBefore getting stuck into the finale of Go Back To Where You Came From’s third season, we all have to make a concession: this is reality television. Everything is bitchy exchanges, super dramatic musical cues, and emotions. So many emotions. It even encourages you to have fun in trying to figure out if Kim is simply ignorant or completely sociopathic.
Read MoreAt 9am on April 1, 2015, the reddit community was presented with a diabolically simple and mysterious social experiment: The Button. An enigmatic post from the reddit admins, the experiment was simply a button attached to a 60-second countdown timer. Once a reddit user presses the button, the timer resets. Each user only gets one press, and new redditors are barred from engaging in the experiment.
Its purpose remains a mystery, a dynamic that seems designed exclusively to thrust members into an existential dilemma. Do you wait to push the button, give yourself the chance to keep the timer alive when it most needs it?
Read MoreThe last thing you’d expect the new comedy series from Tina Fey to be is incisive, but that’s just what Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt seems to be. While 30 Rock tackled its fair share of contemporary issues, it did so somewhat half-heartedly. Head writer Liz Lemon’s journey through prejudice in the world of show business came with a sugar coated gleam, a discussion capped by the impermanence of the sitcom plot and a savvy smirk from Alec Baldwin. To its credit, that unwillingness to get bogged down in discussion at the cost of a gag is what made the show such an endearingly simple pleasure.
Read MoreI’m willing to bet you haven’t thought about submarines since the last time The Hunt For Red October was on TV, but their necessity in modern defence is a big concern for our government, and big business for industry in South Australia. Just how big is a little staggering.
Read MoreThe Bureau of Meteorology recently named 2014 as Australia’s third-hottest year since records began in 1910. Maximum temperatures were 1.16 degrees higher than average and it’s no anomaly either. As a nation we’ve racked up seven of our ten warmest years on record since 2002.
Read MoreOf the hundreds of thousands of horror movies out there, which do you line up this Halloween? Well, the sign of a truly great horror movie tends to be a powerful, inalterable image. You could go for Linda Blair’s scarred, vomity and putrefied face from The Exorcist, Norman Bates’ cross-dressing silhouette in Psycho or Danny’s first encounter with the creepy British twins in The Shining, all of them markers we’ve used to define the genre. Yet, while these images may have scarred our brains (and childhoods) forever, we seem to overlook the sound design built around them. These images alone are nothing without the atmosphere of claustrophobic diegetic sound and a moody score.
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