Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
The key to combatting increasing levels of loneliness and social isolation will likely start in the way we think about cities, public spaces and social care to enable meaningful connections between people, and help to guard against harms caused by habitual loneliness. But we'll need to get creative.
An examination of school reading lists and libraries unveils striking parallels with the debates and concerns surrounding the Referendum, highlighting the pervasive societal anxieties and the intricate interplay of national identity and values, and the ongoing need for empathy.
Despite taking place 250 years ago, the Jesuit Suppression remains a deeply felt experience. Today, as exiles shape headlines, this chapter in Jesuit history poses a resonant question: How does a faith community endure and evolve when its very existence is challenged by the authority it holds sacred?
It's all very well to remove excess furniture, but furniture is not books. How many chairs does one need? Chairs are not books. To reduce a library as a household expedience is to objectify the books. Their contents are emptied of value, their history relegated to out-of-date. They have no more meaning than books in an Ikea display room. (From 2019)
As the world moves towards digitalisation, the importance of physical libraries is increasingly being questioned. But as local libraries struggle with underfunding and centralisation, the question remains: where else have we found their equivalent today?
As the AI revolution begins, the question publishers must consider is how to integrate AI as a tool that enhances human skills and wisdom without replacing them. Ultimately, the goal should be to make our contribution to society more human, not less.
Do you get imposter thoughts? Do you have an inner critic who has nasty things to say whenever you set out to create? You're not alone. If you are looking for a fun activity that will bring you into constant confrontation with your inner critic, write a novel. I did, and here’s what I learnt along the way.
Edward Cole understood that books encouraged community. The businessman could rub shoulders with the tramp in his Arcade. Now, in an age of division and isolation, more than ever we need spaces which facilitate community; light-filled cathedrals dedicated to the love of knowledge and stories, and their power to cross borders, politically, ideologically and culturally.
A house bursts into flames as it’s submerged in floodwaters. A doctor tells a cameraman filming a dying Ukrainian child to send the footage to Putin. A newspaper delves into the murder of a young woman. It’s like a fever dream: a pandemic bleeds into the edges of a global war. The news presents information, and it has no moral duty to tell us how we should feel about it or help us untangle the knot of feelings which emerge.
Sins have often been divided into those of thought, word and deed, with deed regarded as the worst. Today we pay more attention to sinful words, realising the harm that they can do. Bad words can bring social exclusion. Yet complex questions surrounding the use of words remain.
While we can’t conflate accusations against Roth’s biographer with his subject, this recent Blake Bailey scandal invites us to revisit, through a 21st century lens, the world of someone considered one of the definitive writers of the 20th century.
He enters a university library at thirty-five feeling like an imposter, rougher-hewn from suffering than most students, wrapped in an aura he thinks religious pilgrims experience shuffling along echoing naves of Gothic cathedrals, sombre, joyous.