Podcast
The Minefield
Episodes — page 3
- "There's a horse loose in a hospital": Is John Mulaney a comedic genius?
Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of "art" — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting…
- The importance of letting someone 'save face'
When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price in order for the untrammeled supremacy of the ego to persist. But by permitting someone t…
- How do recommendation algorithms affect our sense of taste?
There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences; why they favour one genre of music or one style of writing over another. And in our world of endless digital…
- AI and the cost to human life — with Karen Hao
AI is sometimes portrayed in utopian terms as the essential technological innovation. At other times, it's described as representing an existential threat to human life, a technolo…
What can we learn about politics from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘Good and Bad Government’?It is one of the casualties of democratic politics that citizens rarely remain indifferent about the governments they elect. By investing politicians with their hopes or fears, the…
The ethics of life-writing: Memoirs may be popular, but can they be truthful?In the world of book sales, what “romantasy” is to fiction, autobiography/memoir is to non-fiction. There is an undeniable appetite for the purportedly true stories of famous or ot…
What will we lose if translation becomes wholly automated?It feels like, for so much of this year, in one form or another, we’ve been trying to count the costs that technological innovations are exacting on our humanity — how AI, in parti…
‘Adult time for violent crime’? What commitments should guide society’s response to youth crime?Earlier this month, in response to a disturbing rise in youth crime in Melbourne, Victoria’s Labor government adopted a key policy that the LNP took to last year’s Queensland state…
Will weight loss drugs entrench cultural expectations about body size?Ever since 2023, a class of GPL-1 based drugs — which for two decades were used to treat type 2 diabetes — have been heralded as a “revolution in weight loss” and signalling the “e…
Is the experience of beauty slipping away in an age of frictionlessness, speed and AI slop?The availability of increasingly powerful generative AI tools has radically altered the creative process. Anything that we can imagine can be turned into an image, a video, a text,…
Protests are a democratic right that can go wrong — how much should they be restricted?For the last two years, there has been a steady drumbeat of protests — sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly — in the centre of major Australian cities involving hundreds, thousands,…
When democracy abandons decency — with George PackerFor the second time this year, millions of people have taken to the streets of cities and towns across the United States in response to the authoritarian tendencies and tactics of…
Learning to inhabit silence — with Stan GrantThere is no doubt that silence can be a form of cowardice: a refusal to speak up or speak out on behalf of others, an unwillingness to join our voices with theirs lest we be made t…
What role should emotion play in the fraught politics of immigration?The politics of immigration has returned in recent months — and returned with a depth of feeling that suggests it never truly went away. It’s always there, lingering just beneath t…
The ‘fascism’ paradox — with Jason StanleyIn a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and political phenomena to which the label “Fascist” was being applied — to the point that he bel…
Mailbag — we answer your questionsThis week is the first ever “Minefield Mailbag”, where Waleed and Scott try to respond to what’s been on our listeners’ minds. The questions they take on cover such diverse topics…
Why Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a test for democracy — and of our decencyIt would be hard to overstate the significance of Charlie Kirk within the conservative movement and in the Trump administration. By some reckoning, his influence and social media p…
Bonus episode: Jane Austen’s enduring charmIn August, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh from The Bookshelf on Radio National, teamed up with the indomitable Sophie Gee — Professor of English at Princeton University, Vice-Chan…
What are we doing when we let someone ‘save face’?Whether it is in geopolitics or in social and personal relationships, the overweening desire to “save face” can have manifestly unjust and outright damaging consequences. Those who…
The threat that AI poses to human life — with Karen HaoThere is something undeniably disorienting about the way AI features in public and political discussions. On some days, it is portrayed in utopian, almost messianic terms — as the…
