The Minefield

In December 1974, “The Godfather, Part II” premiered in New York City. Following the unlikely success and unexpected acclaim that his 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling no…

Since the start of November, the Australian government has made two significant announcements aimed at preventing the harms that social media platforms are causing to the mental he…

Most of us are aware that the emergence of social media platforms and their omnipresence in our lives have fractured public discourse and undermined the conditions of democratic de…

“Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” Such is the assessment of Peter Wehner — a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, and an…

One of the defining features of the last century is the fact that “evil” has become more vivid to our imaginations and common in our language than “good”. Stan Grant joins Waleed A…

There is something undeniably satisfying about revenge. When we feel we have been aggrieved, harmed or humiliated, it is natural to want payback. In ancient Greece, to inflict such…

Just weeks before a US presidential election, a combination of political mendacity, the perverse incentives offered by social media platforms, and opportunism on the part of conten…

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the outcome of the Brexit referendum, “populism” became the catch-all diagnosis for everything the ails democratic politics. But its…

The policy of negative gearing — which gives the owners of investment properties an unlimited ability to deduct losses from their overall taxable income — has come to symbolise the…

The war poetry of Wilfred Owen refuses the comfort of hollow consolation in response to the mass loss of life — it also urges the sacrifice of the kind of bellicose pride that sees…

With the US presidential election on the horizon, to say nothing of a number of Australian elections, our airwaves, news sites and social media feeds are filled with political rhet…

Given the dependence of many Australian universities on international student fees, a significant drop in enrolments with no corresponding increase in government funding will likel…

One of Australia’s greatest strengths has been the remarkable diversity of its multicultural society. But is this also a potential source of weakness? In this live recording at the…

Even for a nation obsessed with the concept of “freedom” — or perhaps it would be better to say, concepts, not all of them easily reconciled, some of them utterly incommensurable —…

In democracies with a history of racial injustice, are “colourblindness” and recognition of a “common humanity” — which were at the heart of the moral philosophy of Martin Luther K…

When the first episode of Seinfeld went to air in 1989, it faced stiff competition from a packed field of American sitcoms. By its finale in 1998, the “show about nothing” had rede…

Humour can often be a response to the sense of being ill-at-home in society — perhaps even ill-at-home in the world. But whether it takes the form of fatalism or self-deprecation,…

In one form or another, comedy often proceeds from a certain exaggeration of life — exaggerated bodily movements, or facial expressions, or scenarios, or reactions. These exaggerat…

Immanuel Kant called laughter a form of the disappointment of the understanding — which is to say, surprise — for which the body then compensates: “Whatever is to arouse lively, co…

The attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump, while undeniably shocking, was not altogether surprising. It was just the latest blow in a steady drumbeat of polit…