Big tech, big target, good politics
Here’s to the risk takers
In the 1870s and 80s, the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge was one of the engineering landmarks of the day.…
Vaccine mandates are as queer as a clockwork orange
What if I told you there was a way to end crime forever? That there was the possibility to eliminate…
Big tech, big target, good politics
Scott Morrison is going troll hunting. Well, there’s more in his announcement of new laws targeting social media and the…
How we hope to hold people responsible for the hotel quarantine disaster: people, not just bureaucracies
In late September this year efforts bore fruit to require WorkSafe Victoria to prosecute government agencies and individuals over the…
Dan and Albo’s barbie: hard to swallow
While thousands of Victorians were marching on Parliament to protest Daniel Andrews’ pandemic legislation, the man himself was staging the…
The curious case of Joe Gersh and his defence of Ita Buttrose
The repeated efforts of ABC Director Joe Gersh to defend his Chairperson, Ita Buttrose, are as laughable as they are…
Religious discrimination legislation? What next? 'No jabber (in tongues), no job'?
People are right to be concerned that happy-clapper, sky fairy worshipping freaks will use the government’s proposed Religious Discrimination Bill…
The Dan Andrews protests v polls conundrum
Ever since the Newspoll results on Saturday, I’ve been wracking (and wrecking) my brain trying to find a logical answer…
The forever ‘war on Christmas’
It seems to get earlier each year, doesn’t it? It’s not yet even December, and the Mail on Sunday has…
Wokeness claims a museum
When will our intellectual life return to normal, where facts come together into conclusions? Today, in service to ideologies like…
Is Boris right to fear the Omicron variant?
Boris Johnson announced a new raft of coronavirus measures on Saturday, after two cases of the Omicron variant were detected…
Why are editors sharing a platform with Miqdaad Versi?
Next week, the Centre for Media Monitoring publishes its report on ‘British Media Coverage of Muslims and Islam 2018-2020’. Its…
Kiwi Life
A government in jackboots A recent headline echoes the current mood of this now fed-up country, with Sir Russell Coutts,…
He Puapua?
Now why on earth why would the New Zealand government, dominated by the far-left Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, produce a…
Kiwi notes
Our tired democracy teeters When is enough? When Aucklanders recently heard the seemingly interminable lockdown which the Prime Minister Jacinda…
Kiwi Life
Lorde vs Lana People who live in glass houses really shouldn’t get changed with the lights on. Doubly so, one…
Testing Perrottet
A brave cohort of minor-party politicians and would-be politicians have dared to oppose the Covid cult and the imposition of…
Feel-gooders take a knee, do-gooders take action
On 26 October, Cricket South Africa (CSA) directed all its players to take the knee at the T20 World Cup…
American criminal justice and the media
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I am the most pro-American law professor outside the US. I…
Dan slams the door shut on freedom’s narrow corridor
One of the upsides of being locked down in Danistan was the opportunity to read lots of books while contributing…
Business/Robbery, etc.
It was India, our new Comprehensive Strategic Partner, whose last-minute intervention in Glasgow blocked the US/UK/Europe-led attempt to set Australia’s…
Covid roulette
Australians are used to their country being confused with Austria because they share a common syllable. Unfortunately, this week, the…
Global freezing?
As delegates from the climate conference in Glasgow streamed home in mid-November, with the official start of the Australian summer…
Global warming’s great leap backwards
Speaking in Milan in the lead up to the Glasgow Cop 26 global warming summit, professional truant, Greta Thunberg, lamented…
As You Like It
As You Like It is middle Shakespeare, probably lateish 1590s. It’s not one of the earlier happy comedies like the…
Don’t forget the motor city
Detroit is the only American city where I always felt uneasy. Even the cops look at you as if you…
Sean Connery
Anyone who cares about the theatre should rush to see Kendall Feaver’s Wherever She Wanders which Griffin Theatre Company is…
Bert Newton
And so the world finally bestirs itself in the direction of going out because it’s now allowable. A young millennial…
Unexplained connection
Why would an Australian lawyer and historian write a book explaining how the English and American Revolutions produced the American…
Why has medicine been so slow to improve over the centuries?
Medicine was founded by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. Doctors continued to study the Hippocratic texts into the 19th…
Lockdown creations: the best of the year’s cookery books reviewed
‘I may, one day, stop making notes and writing down recipes,’ Nigel Slater says in A Cook’s Book (Fourth Estate,…
Anthony Holden is nostalgic for journalism’s good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
The life of René Magritte was even more surprising than his art
We live at a time in which we could (until recently) travel without difficulty and take for granted access to…
A feast for geeks: The Making of Incarnation, by Tom McCarthy, reviewed
Since the publication of his debut, Remainder, Tom McCarthy has established himself as the Christopher Nolan of literary fiction: his…
A macabre meditation on psoriasis
Obsessed with purity and pain, the boundaries of blame and innocence, Skin is a fascinating meditation on psoriasis, the long-lasting…
The unfamiliar Orwell: the writer as passionate gardener
This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian…