The yellow bus to nowhere
The middle Melbourne rail loop – Cheltenham to Box Hill for starters – will go on through the west and…
Is flag football the future of the game?
“Where does it stop?” Andy Reid was griping about the NFL’s new kickoff rule. This year, for the first time,…
Cyclones, dunnies, and a belated confession
As far north Queensland mops up after the flooding and mayhem largely resulting from unpreparedness in the wake of Cyclone…
Albanese all at sea over Houthi rebels
What has long been regarded as a nuisance in the Red Sea escalated in recent days to a serious economic…
New York is a people pleaser’s hell
Oh, New York, New York. So nice they named it twice. It never sleeps. It’s New York or nowhere, they…
Why BDSM is innately conservative
My friend Evie complains that I never want to go out and have fun anymore. “You’ve become a boring old…
Remembering John Gardner
“Art begins in a wound, an imperfection,” said the late novelist John Gardner, one of the last American writers to…
A history of intellect
It has it been widely noted that, as Western culture generally has grown steadily more materialistic in its values and…
Visiting Glashütte, the small town in East Germany that has mastered time
The view from my top floor room at the Steigenberger Hotel de Saxe looked out at the great dome of…
The wellness retreat reborn
Rebecca Illing’s résumé doesn’t read like your typical hotelier’s: circus school graduate, free diver, marine conservation advocate and certified death…
Why the law on assisted dying must change
Esther Rantzen’s decision to join the campaign to legalise assisted dying, in the light of uncertainty about her cancer prognosis,…
A craft beer revolution in Grand Cru Country
If the dozens of cartoonish stereotypes that flood my mind when I think of France — grand Bordeaux estates, snails…
Cooking for busy people
Scrambled eggs. Beans on toast. Canned soup. But Caro Chambers, recipe developer, Substack author and mom of three little boys,…
The perils of Harvard and Claudine Gay
History sometimes rhymes. You can’t expect things to work out the same way every time. But sometimes events are so nearly…
Are Red Sea ship attacks the start of a crisis for the global economy?
Covid provided a revelation of the vulnerabilities of the global supply chain, but now war in Yemen has provided another.…
From West to East: shifting global power via Net Zero
The 28th annual scourging of fossil fuel users, the Conference of Parties (COP28), has been and gone. Like the previous…
A true Vienna experience includes the Sacher cake
What Victoria is to a jam sponge, so is Sacher to chocolate cake. It’s a man, a hotel and a…
Bowling Alone reads like a nostalgic look at the good ol’ days
In the Phetasy.com book club, we recently read the famous social science tome, Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. In it he…
Does falling inflation show that interest rates are too high?
Well that was a surprise. At just 3.9 per cent, down from 4.7 per cent, the latest inflation figure published…
The lawfare against Donald Trump is increasingly farcical
Does kicking a popular candidate off the electoral ballot protect democracy? Or is that in fact deeply anti-democratic? These are…
Is the cost of living crisis over?
This morning’s inflation figures are good news. The fall in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) to 3.9 per cent, from…
Macron has been humiliated by Marine Le Pen
Marine Le Pen celebrated what she called ‘an ideological victory’ on Tuesday evening after Emmanuel Macron’s government finally had its…
Godzilla Minus One: an absolute riot!
In 1954, Ishirō Honda released Gojira. The movie centres on Godzilla, a gigantic reptile that is brought to life after being…
A year of failure for Albanese and Labor
During the election campaign of 2022, one got the impression that Labor Opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese, didn’t take winning the…
The politics of envy
One of the defining moments of the 2004 federal election was Mark Latham’s hit list of wealthy non-government schools and…
