Apologies to journalists, but some of us are just clueless
Imprisoned Saudi writer Raif bin Muhammad Badawi was on my mind this week, as he often is when questions of free speech…
The Great Barrier Reef extortion racket
The Australian Institute of Marine Science has just revealed that Great Barrier Reef coral coverage has recovered to be as good as,…
Is the Kids Helpline helpful – or just a sign of our malaise?
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Curtin…
Bezos’s bell-end: a postscript
When he was back on the ground after his – ahem – epic space flight of all of ten minutes, Amazon founder Jeff…
Covidanity: Australia’s new state religion
A key to understanding our current predicament is the extent to which Covid has come to resemble a religion. Covidanity,…
It's not woke versus woke if lesbians want to exclude the transgendered
The street I grew up on was the border of a public housing estate. On my side of the street…
The Oldest Culture: Engineering
The fourth in a series of articles examining Dark Emu-style claims. These days we hear a lot about what a…
We have no choice? Really, Mr Premier?
The Premier of Victoria said a few interesting things when he plunged the state into its fifth lockdown. He was…
We conspiracists, we happy few
What makes America America? An answer available to most of us is our shared dedication to the principles of liberty…
The rise of the noble liar
For four years the mainstream media kept a tally of every lie President Trump ever told. Fact-checkers like the Washington…
The monsters we become
Nietzsche would have been great at Twitter. He excelled at epigrams, which are to philosophy as the fortune-cookie motto is…
No vax, no vote? Macron's vaccine passport plan sparks fury
Will it be necessary to produce a passe sanitaire (vaccination passport) to be allowed to vote in France? With 221…
New Zealanders are revolting against Ardern
Thousands of tractors this recent week lined the streets of towns and cities throughout the country. In ‘The Howl of…
New Zealand's transgender debate is turning nasty
New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote in parliamentary elections. But now,…
Will fairy dust power New Zealand?
Wishful thinking, allied to government incompetence and the ambition of our Prime Minister, is lining up trouble ahead. In one…
Kiwi Life
One of my goals over the coming months is to watch an entire rugby game for the first time in…
New Zealanders are revolting against Ardern
Thousands of tractors this recent week lined the streets of towns and cities throughout the country. In ‘The Howl of…
Flirting with the Marxists
I would vote for any party that promised either to privatise the ABC or to make it a subscription service,…
Business/Robbery, etc.
It’s a legal double-whammy, especially for the resources sector. ‘Perceived bias’ in the Australian judiciary on the one hand and,…
The moral scolds are now in charge
I am in charge of streaming in our household. Someone has to be. Let face it, there is a dizzying…
The Big Lie vs Stop the Steal
The soporific vision of genial old Joe, eating ice cream and mumbling through an autocued speech, belies what’s actually happening…
Ivermectin. It’s as Aussie as Vegemite
As more than five million Sydneysiders woke up to their fourth week under house arrest, they were greeted with the…
Why does the Pope dislike conservatives?
To pray for someone’s death is morally wrong, yet it will be difficult for many Roman Catholics to resist the…
Constitutional outrage
The Wuhan virus could never be sufficient reason to justify the evasion of much of the separation of powers and…
The Greeks
What a time of captivity, what a time of plague. The Disney musical Frozen, long delayed by the mammoth Melbourne…
Martin Clunes
Just as the lockdown imprisons the people of Sydney those in Canberra have had the chance to see that exhilaration…
Opera Australia’s production of Otello
Lockdown must be making me irritable; an article during the week really got me going. It concerns two forthcoming productions…
Ethos
A Sydney lockdown on the heels of Melbourne: what price entertainment? It seemed natural as ever to have recourse to…
The least familiar stretches of Nile prove the most interesting
It’s one of the most tantalising travel images in the world — a felucca floating along the Nile at sunset,…
Terence’s stamp: The Art of Living, by Stephen Bayley, reviewed
Rumours reach me that the libel report for Stephen Bayley’s forthcoming biography of Terence Conran was longer than the book…
Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?
On Easter Monday 2018, Donald and Melania Trump stood on the balcony of the White House next to a giant…
As circus gets serious, is all the fun of the fair lost?
What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to…
Even psychiatrists don’t know how the drugs they prescribe work
What is it like to go mad? Not so much developing depression or having a panic attack — which is…
The great awakening: Henry Shukman becomes a child of the universe
For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger…
The man who made Manhattan: The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee, reviewed
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…
The young bride’s tale: China Room, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed
Sunjeev Sahota’s novels present an unvarnished image of British Asian lives. Ours Are the Streets chronicles a suicide bomber’s radicalisation,…
