What Doctor Norman Swan is Watching Right Now
The physician-turnedbroadcaster on the ABC became a household name in 2020 and has now written a guide to the most frequently asked wellness questions, So You Think You Know What’s Good for You. Here’s what doctor Norman Swan is tuning into...
Right now I’m listening to…
You Must Remember This, an amusing podcast on the history of Hollywood in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s through to more recent times. I’m a bit obsessed with Hollywood and the entertainment industry; it provides great escapism. An episode I found particularly interesting described the first weight-loss surgery in Hollywood. Molly O’Day was an actress aged 18 who was told to lose weight. It was 1929 so liposuction back then meant cutting her open to remove fat so that she could go straight back to acting. Of course, she never really recovered.
I’m reading…
A long-lost novel by German writer Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz called The Passenger. The author was a young man who escaped from the Holocaust then came to Australia on the HMT Dunera, a rather infamous ship that brought young Jewish male refugees, among others, to Australia. They suffered unbelievable deprivation onboard from the crew. Boschwitz, however, decided to go back to Britain and his boat was torpedoed in 1942 and he died. The Passenger is a novel that he wrote in 1938. It’s a story of what happened after Kristallnacht [the “Night of Broken Glass”, when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were ransacked by anti-Semitic rioters on 9 and 10 November, 1938] in Germany. It’s an incredible novel and very real about what it was like to try and escape Nazi forces when it was too late.
The app I use the most…
I’m on Twitter but I don’t like it, though it’s a very efficient way of getting expert sources of information on a broad scale. I don’t read any tweets I’m mentioned in. I find Instagram a softer, more amusing medium – and a lot friendlier, too.
I’m streaming…
Catastrophe – I’ve just gotten into it and it’s hilarious. I’m just a sucker for comedy, like everybody else. I enjoy the offbeat writing, which is really comic realism: making the everyday – like marriage with kids – extraordinary.
The last production I went to…
I saw Stop Girl at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, which was part memoir about [ABC journalist] Sally Sara’s life as a foreign correspondent and coming home to Australia after reporting from places like Iraq, Afghanistan and West Africa. I was really impressed by it.
