flat white

Kean channels Jimbo

The fact is that it’s not easy being green just now. Physics, engineering and economics in combination have a nasty…

15 Mar 2025

It’s time

Australia once had cheap reliable electricity, generated mainly from coal. Not now. Electricity generated from Victorian brown coal was some…

15 Mar 2025

The recession we deny

Peter Jay (1937-2024), a UK economist, broadcaster and ambassador to the US between 1977 and 1979, was ‘in the room’…

15 Mar 2025

Mandates matter

I’ve asked this question before and I’ll ask it again. Why do right-of-centre politicians want to go into politics? If…

15 Mar 2025

End the foreign aid scam

I have long favoured the complete elimination of the foreign aid industry but failed to make much headway in persuading…

15 Mar 2025

Fewer bureaucrats, more fighters

Australians are frequently reminded that we are facing ‘the most complex and challenging strategic environment since the second world war’.…

Dutton get your gun

‘Call it what it was, PM: a menacing attempt to increase anxiety in the Australian population,’ read the headline of…

15 Mar 2025

Trump may yet prove Ukraine’s peacemaker

To anyone who’s been a diplomat, the choreography of Donald Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky was bizarre.…

15 Mar 2025

This anti-Semitic bomb plot was a hoax all along

In late January, Australians were convulsed out of their summer holiday torpor by what appeared to be an elaborate anti-Semitic…

14 Mar 2025

The economy is shrinking. Rachel Reeves must act

The economy shrank by 0.1 per cent in January according to figures just published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The…

14 Mar 2025

The problem with putting US nukes in Poland

Nukes are becoming a big issue for Poland. One way or another, both the Polish president and prime minister want…

14 Mar 2025

Why couldn’t this elite school cope with my talk on anti-Semitism?

Perhaps it is a rite of passage these days for a journalist to be cancelled. But I never expected that…

14 Mar 2025

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New Zealand’s cringeworthy new tourism slogan

‘Everyone must go!’ New Zealand’s new tourism declares, but so far almost everyone seems to be cringing. The prime minister…

18 Feb 2025

The sacred sites fandango

The second-highest mountain in New Zealand has been granted ‘personhood’ by the NZ parliament because it is regarded as the…

15 Feb 2025

Operation Resolution: cleaning up after HMNZS Manawanui

HMNZS Manawanui, formally a chirpy red and yellow MV Edda Fonn, sank on October 6 much to the shock of…

16 Dec 2024

Why is this New Zealand airport clamping down on hugs?

‘Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world,’ Hugh Grant famously offered in the heartwarming opening scene of Love,…

24 Oct 2024

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Aussie life

When Kermit the Frog told us in 1971 that it’s not easy being green it was meant as a plea…

15 Mar 2025

Language

Speccie reader Joseph has written to ask: What is ‘identity politics’? First, the history. The term ‘identity politics’ is recorded…

15 Mar 2025

What does Meghan mean by ‘intentional living’?

‘What are your intentions towards my daughter?’ said my husband, screwing an imaginary monocle into his eye. We had been…

15 Mar 2025

Why would anyone drive at 30mph on a dual carriageway?

After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were…

15 Mar 2025

The adventures of the indomitable Dorothy Mills

When Dorothy Mills disappeared to Haiti to research a travel book, the British press led with the headline: EARL’S DAUGHTER…

15 Mar 2025

The vagaries of laboratory experiments

One usually likes to think that scientists know what they’re doing. Here’s something that might shake your confidence. In bio-medical…

15 Mar 2025

The unfairytale life of two European princesses

This hefty book is more about context – the turbulent years of mid-19th-century Europe – than it is about its…

15 Mar 2025

The soldier poet: Viva Byron!, by Hugh Thomson, reviewed

In 1821, while Byron and Shelley briefly shared what they high-mindedly called an ‘artist’s colony’ in Pisa, along with Mary…

15 Mar 2025

The mystery of the missing man: Green Ink, by Stephen May, reviewed

Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in…

15 Mar 2025

The comfort of curling up with a violent thriller

Tsundokists of the world, unite! You have a new champion in Lucy Mangan, whose follow up to her entrancing memoir…

15 Mar 2025

Survival of the cruellest in 16th-century Constantinople

The 16th-century Ottoman ruler Sultan Suleyman liked to impose himself on foreign monarchs from the start, always beginning official letters…

15 Mar 2025

The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke

It is one of academia’s horrible ironies that linguistics, the subject devoted to human communication, has managed to communicate nothing…

15 Mar 2025