The problem with Biden’s soft stance on cannabis
Indiana When Joe Biden directed a review into the classification of cannabis two years ago, no one – not the…
What would Franz Kafka have thought of ‘Kafkaesque’?
Franz Kafka is one of a handful of writers whose names have become an adjective. First coined in the 1940s,…
What’s behind the boom in Japanese fiction?
‘There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine’. This is a quote from the novel Butter by…
Money in decline, society in decline
Society is declining in value because our money is declining in value. This is self-evident. And yet every time I…
NSW refuses to pardon 3,628 children for breaching pandemic orders
New South Wales police fined 3,628 children between 2020-22 for Covid-related ‘offences’. Most were from low socio-economic LGAs. Of these,…
Who will survive to lead the Tories?
In spite of his conviction for falsifying business records, Donald Trump is still expected by many to make a remarkable…
Why South Africans lost faith in the ANC
A red dawn had just broken when Stephanie Sathege joined the queue to vote at her local polling station in…
The triumph of Labour’s centrists
Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale,…
The enduring ghastliness of Sarah Ferguson
When I was a kid in the music business, I became aware of a funny phenomenon whereby visiting American bands…
Free speech will be in peril under Labour
Threats to freedom of speech in Britain today typically stem from a combination of two ways of thinking. First, the…
Bashing Brexit won’t help Macron defeat Le Pen
The Prime Minister of France has warned his people that any form of Frexit would leave them weeping into their…
Mexico’s narcos election
17 October 2019 will forever be etched in the memory of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico, as Black…
The buck stops there
Not many of us remember Fred M. Canfil, who, when visiting an Oklahoma prison in 1945, was impressed by a…
Lowering ourselves to Rising
While Victorians can’t afford their bills, they’re paying for a post-modern horror show
Turning Japanese a good sub alternative
The sorry saga goes on
Multiculturalism was always a bad idea
Not all cultures have the same values
Albo goes MIA in these darkling times
For the first time, international bodies seriously damage the West
They paved paradise and put up an empty carpark
The ‘working from home’ joke
Sunak the Foolhardy?
Britain’s election would have been different with Farage
Business/Robbery, etc
As a strategy it’s a gas
From the Pyrenees to the Sea, will Catalonia be free?
Europe and the Middle East have a long history of antisemitism
ABC gets that tingling feeling
Does Australia really need an activist public broadcaster?
An imperfectly articulated plot
It seemed, on the face of it, a bizarre idea: opera at the Margaret Court arena. And Opera Australia was…
Aussie life
As the Q&A host was telling me, the conservatives have a ‘problem with women’. Or with more election campaign zing,…
Language
Here’s one to add to your Weird Word collection: ‘empleomania’. This is a mania for holding public office. and there…
