Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Search Results: Google

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Us and them: reconceiving trees

    • Cristy Clark
    • 04 July 2018
    8 Comments

    Grieving the death of a tree seems a common experience, but I had rarely heard about it. We share stories of the loss of loved ones or pets, but not of specific trees. Are we less comfortable acknowledging the depth of this relationship? Does it challenge our cultural understanding of the natural world and our place within it?

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Chickpeas and peace in the Middle East

    • Na'ama Carlin
    • 26 June 2018
    2 Comments

    'If only we could sit down with Palestinians for a bowl of hummus, all the problems would be solved,' says my Israeli friend, as we wipe hummus down with warm pita. He isn't the first to say this. Indeed, a film was made about the virtues of hummus, which asked if a regional love of hummus be the recipe for peace. Personally, I'm not so sure.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Finding my religion in Indonesia

    • Erin Cook
    • 04 May 2018
    9 Comments

    The church has always been more about family than religion to me - my grandmother's grandmother did it all in Latin, but isn't it cool that we went through the same motions? - and I thought it always would. Then I got lucky: I moved to the world's most populous Muslim country.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate champion SA Labor's dark stain

    • Greg Foyster
    • 16 March 2018
    5 Comments

    The complexity of environmental policy in SA echoes a broader trend in environment issues: climate change has monopolised the debate, squeezing out local conservation concerns. The upshot is a Left-leaning government can be progressive on clean energy, while holding a regressive stance on less prominent topics.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bitcoin has a massive energy problem

    • Greg Foyster
    • 19 January 2018
    1 Comment

    The digital currency Bitcoin consumes more electricity per year than New Zealand. Yes, the entire country. Escalating energy intensity is actually a security feature of the currency. With the related carbon dioxide emissions from this escalating electricity consumption, Bitcoin is a formula for climate change catastrophe.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    What to do about shareable lies

    • Fatima Measham
    • 09 November 2017
    4 Comments

    Last week, executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter had to answer questions about how their platforms were used to influence voters in the 2016 US elections. It is a significant moment. Other media like radio, newspapers and TV have never been grilled like this, though Fox News and The New York Times surely influence voters, too.

    READ MORE
  • EDUCATION

    Bringing the classics back to schools

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 31 October 2017
    9 Comments

    American-British writer Amanda Foreman is campaigning to return authors such as Austen, Dickens and Eliot to curricula in famous schools. But teachers have told her that a generation reared on smartphones and iPads finds such authors too ‘difficult'. So what? is my inward cry.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    Is Google and Facebook's imitation game doomed?

    • David James
    • 26 September 2017
    3 Comments

    There are very few examples of companies that have been able to genuinely change when confronted with new circumstances. It looks increasingly that Facebook and Google are approaching this situation. The challenge is likely to come from some quarter that is new and surprising, just as the demolition of conventional media came from companies that could have barely been imagined 20 years ago.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    The sad history of Australian media reform

    • Andrew Dodd
    • 19 September 2017
    5 Comments

    The big media players eventually get what they want by wearing down the government of the day and latching on to whatever opportunity comes their way. This month the government handed them the reform they've long craved while Xenophon attempted to win some concessions. We can assume Australia's media market will now become more concentrated. What we don't know is whether Xenophon's trade offs will do enough to protect public interest journalism and media diversity.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Life lessons from the Abuja-Keffi expressway

    • David Ishaya Osu
    • 17 September 2017
    2 Comments

    On 12 May 1996, I was knocked down by a car, along the Abuja-Keffi expressway in Nigeria. I was five years old, a small boy whose fingers almost always hung in my mama's. Nigerians call this 'mummy's handbag'. But I was impatient; I wanted to be the first to cross. The things that followed were: boom! Screeches, shouts of 'Jesus', etc. I woke up in the midst of people praying for me at the nearby hospital.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Sexual harassment in Australia and the US

    • Sara Vukojevic
    • 18 July 2017
    10 Comments

    I couldn't believe it. It was the most obvious example of street harassment ever. Builders? Check. Cheesy pickup lines? Check. Innuendos? Check. Trying to prevent a woman from moving away? Check. It could've been a lot worse. Something worse happened to me in California. But this situation got my heart beating. It's six, large, capable men. They can do anything they want to me. I can't prevent it from happening if they decide they need to do more than look.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Victory claimed in Mosul, but other battles loom

    • William Gourlay
    • 14 July 2017
    2 Comments

    With ongoing celebrations in Baghdad and scenes of devastation in Mosul, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has announced the 'liberation' of Iraq's second-largest city from ISIS. This moment, after an umbrella force of military units fought for nine months to relieve Mosul of the ISIS yoke, represents a victory for the people and government of Iraq. However, many challenges loom, among them reconciling conflicting interests amongst Iraq's peoples and restoring the ravaged landscape.

    READ MORE