Andrew McMillen
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As seen in:
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Covers:
australian culture, music, arts
National music writer at The @Australian / mcmillena@theaustralian.com.au / Author: talkingsmack.com.au / @PenmanshipAU podcast 2015-2017 penmanshippodcast.com
Articles by Andrew McMillen
What happens when AI music tools infiltrate the art of songwriting?
Listening to your favourite songs is akin to sightseeing in the places you know best. Press play on a treasured recording and you’re cruising the streets of your town accompanied by tunes that remind you of who you were, who you are, and who you yet might be. Not so long ago, the only way to hear music was to be physically near the sound of live performers.
Andrew McMillen at The Australian
Get the latest Stockhead news delivered free to your inbox For investors, getting access to the right information is critical. Stockhead’s daily newsletters make things simple: Markets coverage, company profiles and industry insights from Australia’s best business journalists – all collated and delivered straight to your inbox every day. Markets coverage, company profiles and industry insights from Australia’s best business journalists – all collated and delivered straight to your inbox every day.
The Green List: Peter Garrett on the ‘high-risk’, ‘cruel joke’ of nuclear energy
The Green List: Peter Garrett on the ‘high-risk’, ‘cruel joke’ of nuclear energy The Midnight Oil frontman, former politician and environmentalist says the idea that Australia needs a more expensive and riskier technology when it has an abundance of sun, wind and flowing water is ‘a cruel joke’. Andrew McMillen, The AUSTRALIAN, November 22, 2024.
Never Rattled, Never Frantic
Staying motivated during eight years in freelance journalism Underneath my computer monitor are three handwritten post-it notes that have been stuck in place for several years. They each contain a few words that mean a lot to me. From left to right, they read as follows: 1. Alive time or dead time? 2. Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practised every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgement, repeated every day. 3. Never rattled. Never frantic.
Internet Archive Search: penmanship
25 25 Apr 17, 2019 04/19 by Andrew McMillen eye 25
Cryptocurrency Conference Steemfest Proves Bitcoin Isn't Dead Yet
As the Bitcoin rollercoaster ride continues, we go inside a conference for another cryptocurrency called Steem. There, we meet the devotees who see this new financial system as the way of the future – and the man who will lead them there. On the stage in front of us stands a clean-shaven young man, his short brown hair slicked back at the fringe.
How I Snuck Through Wikipedia’s Notability Test | Backchannel
The English-language edition of Wikipedia is composed of 4,735,036 articles at the time I write this sentence. One of those articles is a ridiculously detailed biographical summary of my career as a journalist and author. At 1,905 words in length, excluding references, it is shorter than the entries on The Simpsons’ family dog, Santa’s Little Helper (2,908 words), spontaneous human combustion (2,347), the internet meme Rickrolling (2,307) and Barack Obama (10,302).
Welcome to MH Longform, where in-depth reporting and cutting-edge storytelling meet.
This Is How Jason Momoa Got Ripped Enough to Play Aquaman
Glad for a few hours off from shooting Aquaman, Jason Momoa is shirtless and polishing off a bowl of chicken and peanut butter. A superhero physique requires that he ration his carbs to even enjoy Guinness. But as he’s quick to tell you, being Aquaman has its perks too. The meal over, the Hawaii-born actor, 38, stands beneath a custom-built indoor rock climbing wall that plays an integral role in his workout routine.
Dispatches #168: Goblin kings, refugee dentists and maybe babies
Here To Help (1,500 words / 7 minutes) In high-achieving refugee dentist Dr Hooman Baghaie, Iran’s loss is Australia’s gain. When he was 12 years old, Dr Hooman Baghaie’s family left their comfortable, middle-class life in Iran behind. This decision by his parents was made out of love and sacrifice: as members of a religious minority, they had experienced discrimination and persecution.
Katharine Murphy (live), Oct 2017
Having spent more than two decades as a member of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, Katharine has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s sharpest political analysts. While based in Canberra, she has worked as a reporter for The Australian Financial Review, The Australian and The Age, and more recently, she has been a part of Guardian Australia‘s team since the website launched in 2013.
The Social Network Doling Out Millions in Ephemeral Money | Backchannel
Every time you log onto Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to share a photo or post an article, you give up a piece of yourself in exchange for entertainment. This is the way of the modern world: Smart companies build apps and websites that keep our eyeballs engaged, and we reward them with our data and attention, which benefit their bottom line. Andrew McMillen is a freelance writer and the author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs.
Dispatches #166: Smashed gods, stall catchers and very bad trips
Risky Business (3,400 words / 17 minutes) How a bad LSD trip taught one Sydney teenager to think twice about experimenting with drugs Tom* closes his eyes, settles back on his bed, breathes in the aromatherapy oil he's burning and listens to psychedelic trance while waiting for the onset of the trip from the LSD he's just swallowed.
Dispatches #162: Bathing newborns, walking camels and enrolling friends
My daughter has just finished school. I contest this fact most days, driving her to distraction. I keep prosecuting the point—darling, it can’t be over—because I’m almost certain that in her private life, in the life she enjoys precisely because it exists outside the orbit of my benign parental suffocation, there are practical tasks she may have neglected. I also keep prosecuting the point because there is no other avenue for me to articulate my own incredulity. I’m not sure how we got here.
Meet the Ultimate WikiGnome
On a Friday in July 2012, two employees of the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk at Wikimania, their organization’s annual conference. Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling addressed a packed room as they answered a question that has likely popped into the minds of even the most casual users of Wikipedia: who the hell edits the site, and why do they do it? Pinchuk and Walling conducted hundreds of interviews to find out.
Dispatches #161: Crowd collapses, orange-bellied parrots and baby bumps
Worlds Beyond (3,400 words / 17 minutes) Teachable moments in virtual reality The blue whale is only a metre or two away from me, and its huge right eyeball is level with mine. I have never seen the largest creature on Earth from this angle, at this depth, in these dimensions. Its body mass fills my vision, and I have to turn my head 180-degrees to take it all in.
Dispatches #160: Mortal dangers, child soldiers and sad songs
On a bedside computer screen in the cardiac catheter laboratory, an orb-shaped network of dark arteries jumps and twitches against a pale, amorphous background. My eye seizes upon a single vein and tries to follow it through the twitching object, which looks a bit like a jellyfish space monster from an early series of Doctor Who.
Penmanship podcast episode 40: Gideon Haigh, August 2017
Since he began as a cadet journalist at The Age in 1984, fresh out of high school, Gideon’s main subject areas in journalism have been in sport and business. For most of his career, Gideon has worked as a freelancer, and his writing has been published in more than one hundred newspapers and magazines around the world. As an author, he has written 32 books to date, with at least two more underway.
Dispatches #159: Personal bests, Healthy Harold and sport inventors
compelling mix of basketball and football played on trampolines – I've been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better. During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coördination—you have that down halfway through your residency.
The Heroin Heroineof Reddit
Credit: Elad Rahmin /flickr by Creative Commons 2.0 On a quiet night in late April, Brad Treseler slipped off to his bedroom at his family’s home in Cumberland, Virginia. His friends kept on chatting in the living room, but after a few minutes they began to wonder what Brad was up to. They found the 25-year-old slumped on the floor of his room, blue and unresponsive. He had overdosed on heroin and benzodiazepine. Brad’s friends cycled through the options.
Dispatches #158: Curiosity shops, outback odysseys and understanding suicide
You don’t notice how out of place 330 King Street, Melbourne, looks because it’s rendered so insignificant by its surroundings you don’t tend to notice it at all. Built in 1850, it’s the oldest residence in the CBD and has been in the same family and run as a shop since 1899. It looks like the neighbouring high-rises are trying to dislodge it and pop it off into the middle of the intersection to be crushed by the number 30 tram. But it digs in.
Penmanship podcast episode 39: Sarah Elks, July 2017
Sarah Elks is Queensland political reporter at The Australian. During her decade of writing for the national newspaper, Sarah has reported on many of the biggest news stories that have taken place in Queensland. It takes tenacity and passion to be a daily news reporter, and Sarah clearly has an abundance of both of these qualities.
The Sleeper Autistic Hero Transforming Video Games | Backchannel
For Samuel Hookham and his younger brother, Overwatch was an obsession that took root last spring. They played the fast-paced shooter video game almost every day, passing the PlayStation 4 controller back and forth across the couch in their family’s California home. Samuel was surprised to find himself selecting a female avatar. Overwatch offers two dozen characters of different genders and races, each with a richly drawn personality.
Dispatches #157: Autistic heroes, marching powder and Cuban ballet dancers
On a muggy February morning five years ago in regional NSW, nine police officers from Strike Force Willbe converged on a bushland property that had been the home of a married couple and their children for nearly 20 years. The parents, both in their 50s, were well known in their small community, for their adult daughters were gifted at sports and the husband was a respected coach and educator.
Dispatches #156: Lad banter, linguistic evidence and grandfathered dreams
Q: Why do you write? What drives you to do this? A: Writing helps me better understand the world around me. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. If I didn’t write, I’d feel dumber and less human. As a journalist, I deal exclusively with facts, and a big part of my work is asking ‘why?’ so that I can help my readers to better understand the world around them, too. Q: How did you come to writing? A: My love for reading came first, and I think that’s how it has to be.
Dispatches #155: Weeping guitars, meeting mavericks and summer queens
Jack Heath is the CEO of SANE Australia, where I am fortunate to sit as a director on their board. Jack started with a career in politics while the Labour government was in power here in Australia, and after a tragic incident where his cousin died by suicide - Jack started the Inspire foundation in 1997. Now known as Reach Out, It was the world’s first online mental health service for young people.
Dispatches #154: Video poker, lucky men and unbroken runners
You know what people think. They see jeans too short and winter coat too shiny, too grimy, and think, homeless. They watch a credit card emerge from those jeans and think, grifter. They behold a frozen grin, hear a string of strangled, tortured pauses, and think, slow. Stupid. You learned too young about cruelty and pity. You learned too young that explaining yourself didn’t help, that it made things worse. People laughed. Made remarks. Backed away. So you stopped explaining.
Dispatches #153: Thought police, hot hands and tsunami flotsam
On a gray morning this spring, Chelsea Manning climbed into the back seat of a black S.U.V. and directed her security guard to drive her to the nearest Starbucks. A storm was settling over Manhattan, and Manning was prepared for the weather, in chunky black Doc Martens with an umbrella and a form-fitting black dress. Her legs were bare, her eyes gray blue. She wore little makeup: a spot of eyeliner, a smudge of pink lip gloss.
Dispatches #152: Wheelchair hitchhiking, energy slaves and sextortion
The kids who come here have barely begun their lives and yet are often dealing with everything from dyspraxia to dyslexia, oppositional defiance disorder to separation anxiety, ADHD to ASD, trauma to poverty, domestic violence to drug and alcohol abuse, absent parents to parents in prison. The referral process takes time, but some stories immediately speak to dire circumstances. There was the little girl last year, whose hard-working single mum passed away suddenly.
Dispatches #151: Oblivion gifts, waste wars and plank experiences
Shortly before we visited Baltimore-based electronic musician Dan Deacon, he spent a day trying to source Legos. The goal, as he explains it, was to better secure his equipment together, making the peculiar gear he travels with easier for TSA to inspect. He figured that if he could quickly separate and reattach the various pieces, they would be less likely to get destroyed on the road.
Dispatches #150: Crap marketing, child psychopaths and butterfly men
When Dwayne Johnson meets you (and I can assure you, he would love to), the first thing he will do is ask you six thousand questions about yourself, and remember the answers forever.
Dispatches #149: Broadband bungles, crocodile hunts and old hearts
The Hardest Hit (2,600 words / 13 minutes) Since a tragic incident during the filming of a music video, hip-hop trio Bliss N Eso has changed its outlook on life and music On Monday, January 22, a 28-year-old man named Johann Ofner left his home on the Gold Coast to go to work in Brisbane. Muscled, tattooed and quick to laugh, Ofner was thrilled by the role he had landed as a stuntman in a music video for an upcoming single by Sydney-based hip-hop trio Bliss n Eso.
Dispatches #148: Pacific riddles, fatal distractions and flower moon killers
David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new book is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. “The more stories I reported over time, the more I just realized there are parts of the story I can’t always get to. You know, unless this is a reality show and there’s 18 cameras in every room, and people [talk] before they sleep, and maybe you have some mind-bug in their brain for their unconscious, there are just parts you’re just not gonna know.
Dispatches #147: Great pretenders, night games and worlds beyond
Worlds Beyond (3,400 words / 17 minutes) Teachable moments in virtual reality The blue whale is only a metre or two away from me, and its huge right eyeball is level with mine. I have never seen the largest creature on Earth from this angle, at this depth, in these dimensions. Its body mass fills my vision, and I have to turn my head 180-degrees to take it all in.
Dispatches #146: Electric ladies, lone buglers and chilling tick-tocks
A few years ago I sent George Saunders an email, and he replied. His response, though brief, was warm, heartfelt and, at least to my mind, invited an email back. So I sent another, and he again replied. Which, skipping a few steps, is how I find myself in a car with him, driving towards the Mississippi Delta. George is up front, fiddling with Spotify. Next to him is Lee Durkee, Mississippi novelist and friend of George’s from his student days at Syracuse.
John Clarke, 2017
John Clarke was a freelance writer, performer and author. John died suddenly on Sunday, 9 April 2017, aged 68. I had spoken to him a few days beforehand, and we had made plans to record a conversation for this podcast while I was visiting Melbourne that weekend.
Dispatches #145: Idiocracies, godwits and clown pants
Last January, after a lifetime on the East Coast, my then fiancée, Amanda, and I moved from New York to Los Angeles and promptly fell to hapless pieces. Our reasons for moving had been sound. She’d been offered a good job out here, and she was tired of winter. We were about to get married—I’d already pledged to follow her wherever she went. Plus I liked the idea of trying something new. So I followed her to Los Angeles.
Weekly email dispatches from a freelancer’s lonely desk
The email subject line in edition #139 was “Clown doctors, giant pigs and public shaming”, while #99 was titled “Gay twins, shot elephants and friendly magpies”. The intention is always to pique the reader’s interest, so that if they see Dispatches among a few dozen emails in their inbox, mine is the one they’ll want to open first, because they are curious about these three unique phrases?—?taken from the recommendations contained within?—?and want to know more.
Dispatches #144: Gastrointestinal tracts, dog men and Russian passengers
Weekly email dispatches from a freelancer’s lonely desk (1,600 words / 8 minutes) Newsletter as lifeline. The email subject line in edition #139 was “Clown doctors, giant pigs and public shaming”, while #99 was titled “Gay twins, shot elephants and friendly magpies”.
Dispatches #143: Folding stuff, outlet glaciers and virtuosos
Tony* wasn't sure what to say when the woman he'd slept with told him she was pregnant. First, he says, there was a long pause. They weren't a couple, and he didn't want to say the wrong thing. "I told her that it was her choice and if she chose to keep it, then I would be a good dad," he remembers. "I was freaking out." At the time, Tony was in his mid-20s, working as a bartender and photographer in a college town out west.
Dispatches #142: Depressed wombats, scar tissue and dead Queens
Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. No new words this week. The call bothered Malcolm Perry. “Dr. Tom Shires, STAT,” the girl’s voice said over the page in the doctor’s cafeteria at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The “STAT” meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital’s chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And Shires, Perry’s superior, was out of town for the day.
Dispatches #141: Thunderstorm asthma, container ships and pinball wizards
It was her reply that told me straight away all was not well. I'd just walked into my local cafe and she was sitting in the far corner with her backpack and plastic shopping bag taking up half the long bench. It was the only space left to park myself. "Do you mind if I sit here?" I asked. "Not if you don't mind looking at my miserable face," she said, shifting her belongings to the floor. She was young, tanned and, yes, a little woebegone. "No, you've got a lovely face," I said brightly.
Penmanship podcast episode 35: Amelia Lester, 2017
Amelia Lester is the editor of Good Weekend. For the first episode of 2017, I could think of few more qualified guests than Amelia Lester. Penmanship is all about exploring the gritty details of how to build a life around working with words, and Amelia has done just that at the very highest level of magazine publishing.
Dispatches #140: Desire lines, Caribbean raccoons and Really Big Ones
Her life’s defining moment lasted 7200 seconds and Thordis Elva tallied every one as she listened to the dull metallic thunk of the bedpost on the wall. One second. Two seconds. Three. His hipbones jabbed the inside of her thighs, sending red filaments of pain knifing through her. Angled across the bed she shared with a menagerie of stuffed toys, she kept her eyes on the alarm clock, running down the numbers until they spiralled into a glowing pattern that began to seem almost meaningful.
Dispatches #139: Clown doctors, giant pigs and public shaming
Mark Leveson is working in the small accountancy firm he runs in southeast Sydney when the NSW attorney-general calls. Leveson, a solid, barrel-chested man, answers the phone the way he always does — brightly. Gabrielle Upton is gracious and generous with her time but that does not disguise the ugliness of what she has to say, the choice she’s offering him. He feels let down. Let down because a decade after his son Matthew, 20, disappeared, no one has found his body.
Dispatches #138: Drum fills, dying wishes and near-drownings
Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits.I had a feature story published in The Weekend Australian Magazine on Saturday. Excerpt below.To read the full story, visit The Australian . Above photo credit: Justine Walpole I learned about the in-home palliative care services provided by Karuna last year, when I read Dying: A Memoir by Brisbane author Cory Taylor, then interviewed her for my podcast .
The Troll Taunter | Longreads on WordPress.com
Andrew McMillen writes on how one young Wikipedia admin fights back at trolls by raising the profile of notable women in science, one new Wikipedia page at a time.
Dispatches #137: Taunting trolls, brain injuries and astrophysicists
Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits.I had a feature story published on Backchannel this week. Excerpt below. To read the full story, visit Backchannel. Above illustration by Laurent Hrybyk. How I found this story: I interviewed Emily Temple-Wood for my last Backchannel story, Wikipedia Is Not Therapy!, which was published last August.
One Woman’s Brilliant “Fuck You” to Wikipedia Trolls
The “fuck you” project crystallized one Friday night last year. As Emily Temple-Wood video-chatted with friends, an email pinged in her inbox: “There are alternate realities where I raped you and got away with it,” it read. “In those realities it’s legal for me to rape you as long as I want and as hard as I want. I am dead serious.” The note came from someone with a history of harassing the 22-year-old medical student. This man hates women, Temple-Wood thought to herself.
One Woman’s Brilliant “Fuck You” to Wikipedia Trolls | Backchannel
The “fuck you” project crystallized one Friday night last year. As Emily Temple-Wood video-chatted with friends, an email pinged in her inbox: “There are alternate realities where I raped you and got away with it,” it read. “In those realities it’s legal for me to rape you as long as I want and as hard as I want. I am dead serious.” The note came from someone with a history of harassing the 22-year-old medical student. This man hates women, Temple-Wood thought to herself.
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