Healthy reef defies dubious science
Healthy reef defies dubious science
‘Peer-reviewed’ is not interchangeable with ‘established fact’ or ‘beyond question’. It used to be an acknowledgement that others in the…
Pandemic 'science' in sports is a bit wonky
Cricket is played by a small number of people spread out in a vast paddock. This, however, did not stop…
Healthy Great Barrier Reef, healthy environmental scandal
The release of the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s Annual Summary Report on Coral Reef Condition for 2021/22 has exposed a major…
Infectious disease dominates our roost
Infectious disease has been a deep-seated and inescapable feature of Australian life since the early days of settlement. Over the…
Free Speech vs. Drag Queens
After almost three years and substantial legal fees, my fight for free speech goes to court. It’s also your fight…
What would the Voice say?
The Gruen Transfer, the ABC’s comedy show about advertising, has a segment in which host Wil Anderson asks, ‘What would Putin/Palmer/Trump do?’…
Lidia Thorpe for President?!
When we consider which eminent citizen amongst us we might place our trust in if Australia were ever to become…
Nuclear: the age of immortal energy
‘Carbon dioxide poses a dilemma for the radical environmentalists. Since nuclear reactors emit almost no carbon dioxide, how can one…
Slavoj Zizek: the philosopher who annoys all the right people
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason…
Truss turns on the media
To Darlington, for another of the endless Tory leadership hustings. Last night’s clash covered much of the same old ground…
China's Taiwan tantrum is already backfiring
Chinese social media is full of anger and frustration – because the military didn’t shoot down Nancy Pelosi’s plane. As…
Could Russia stoke conflict between Serbia and Kosovo?
The prime minister of Kosovo has been talking about a possible war in the country, with Russia as the instigator. In…
Government is not the divine source of ‘truth’
‘Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth,’ declared New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, in a…
No more mask mandates, please
New Zealand epidemiologist Michael Baker has just called for the government to reintroduce widespread mask mandates as Covid cases rise in an…
Adding race to politics is not a good idea
It seems it is not only Indigenous Australians, but also some resident Kiwis, that may be given an extra voice…
Can you feel the empathy?
This week the newly minted Teal Member for Kooyong Monique Ryan gushed on social media about meeting New Zealand Prime…
Climate tropes
Last week, I wrote about the importance of language as a means of influencing people’s thinking and, indeed, decision-making. When…
Pandora’s submarines
The Turnbull government’s decision to buy a fleet of diesel submarines from France instead of Japan was unsettling. Conversely, France’s…
Defending Taiwan
The observation deck of the world’s second tallest building, Taipei 101, offers uninterrupted views of Taiwan’s capital city. Built in…
Rise of the race shifters
One of the striking findings of Australia’s 2021 census, is the growth in the indigenous population. In the five years…
Gender behind bars
As a psychiatrist who visits jails, I’m concerned about biological men being placed in women-only facilities. We’ve been through heated…
Love Labor’s Voice
When a country’s social policymaking is determined through the courts, the common picture often sold to the public is that…
Business/Robbery, etc.
We’ll all be rooned…It’s not just Hanrahan in Catholic priest Patrick Hartigan’s iconic century-old poetry collection Around the Boree Log…
Undoing Australia
Back in 2017, the University of Sydney launched a campaign to ‘unlearn’ education. In 2022, the University of Melbourne upped…
Primeval Voice
So, Archie Roach is dead at 66. It’s hard to read of the artistic triumphs and the personal catastrophes without…
Neighbours no more
It’s cheering to hear such good reports of the performance of Mahler’s second symphony by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under…
Call of the wild
It’s fascinating to hear that Warwick Thornton––who took the world by storm some years ago with that knockout indigenous film…
Genesis of a Dreamcoat
Just the other day came the announcement that a new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was to…
What exactly do we mean by the mind?
Given the ingenuity of machine-makers, said Descartes in the 17th century, machines might well be constructed that exactly resemble humans.…
The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes
Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…
A post-racial world: The Last White Man, by Mohsin Hamid, reviewed
Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…
Has Cuba’s revolution finally fizzled out?
In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…
Close to extinction: Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman, reviewed
Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…
Russian escapism: Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
A gay journey of self-discovery
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…