The Minefield

In our previous explorations of famous “last words” — performances or compositions delivered with a certain end in view, with a sense of either culmination or parting, or with an eye to the future and hence to what one...

Evidence has been mounting for more than a decade that social media tears away at the fabric of democratic life by eroding the conditions of deliberation, shared understanding and mutual trust; that it is the conduit of...

It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an interpersonal bond — and use them to...

It is suitably ironic that one of the most poignant, and pertinent, moments in Homer’s The Odyssey was airbrushed out of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. The first time we meet Odysseus, the endlessly...

It is hard to imagine a series of events more tragic, more unseemly, more emblematic of the performativity and polarisation that dominate our time, than the premature rise, sudden fall and untimely death of Jason Arday...

At a time of profound polarisation, when the fracturing of media ecosystems has been so complete that any agreement on threats to our common life seems impossible, an issue has emerged capable of bringing voters of...

The widespread availability of GLP-1 based drugs has been lauded as a “revolution in weight loss” and as inaugurating the “end of obesity”. As we’ve discussed previously , health benefits aside, there are concerns that...

Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are invariably motivated by a...

According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last fifteen years. Whether it...

Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports broadcasts, but the language...

It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a midwestern girl...

Essential to the profitability and widespread adoption of modern technologies is the need to conceal their costs — the human labour, the unjust or exploitative working conditions, the environmental degradation and drain...

In 1967, after reaching the heights of social and political influence in 1963, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and having been instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the...

If One Nation leader Pauline Hanson managed to reignite a public debate with her assertion that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural” during her address last week to the National Press Club...

It’s common these days to refer to “the return of nationalism”. But that assumes that nationalism receded for a time, like the tide, and here the world is, now, getting its pants legs wet. Such an assumption...