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There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
Australian cultural icon and erstwhile publisher Hilary McPhee calls Telltale ‘a rare thing, an ingenious memoir,’ and she is right. It is interesting and reassuring to note that books about reading and recollections of reading habits seem to be proliferating. Perhaps such writing is a defence measure against worrying developments like universities in England, for example, axing their English Literature courses.
When former Facebook employee Frances Haugen released a trove of documents revealing internal research on the negative effects its social media products were having on mental health, the darker side of social media became hard to ignore. So how might the harmful effects of social media be mitigated into a social benefit for a saner, more coherent society?
Salman Rushdie is a writer with a most defiant sense of humour. If you want to get to know him, I wouldn’t start with The Satanic Verses (1988), the book that has brought him so much grief. Thirty three years after Ayatollah Khomeni imposed a fatwa on the author, it would seem to have led, on August 12, to a young man called Hadi Matar making an attempt on Rushdie’s life at a public event in New York.
Few Australians of Irish descent will now be familiar with this history and the experience that accompanied it. They would see themselves as simply Australian. But the emphasis on social justice, the recognition of the value of community, and the concern for people who are marginal that are communicated through Catholic schools and the sympathy with the underdog owe much to the Irish heritage.
Five years ago, the beloved and I were in a reality show called Everyone’s a Critic. The show took us all to art galleries, mostly in Melbourne and Sydney, plonked us in front of some artworks, asking us to say what we thought of them. I realised TV norms being what they are, that we could have a ten-minute conversation about artists with whom we were familiar and all that would make it onto the program would be ten seconds of me mentioning my mum.
Journalist and author Elle Hardy spent 15 months researching and writing her 2021 work Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World. She notes the estimation that by 2050, one billion people around the world (one in 10 humans) will be a Pentecostal follower of Jesus (and their pastor).
The ‘Land Rights Now’ banner is hoisted against the wind, and the marchers set off for the Embassy. A young Aboriginal woman walks ahead of the banner. She has dyed her hair red. She turns and leans into the wind to face the marchers, holding a megaphone to her mouth. ‘What do we want?’ she shouts, ‘When do we want it?’ And she keeps going, exhorting the marchers. We reply ‘Land Rights … Now!’ The crowd tires before she does.
Over recent weeks many people have expressed alarm and despondence at the rising number of infections and deaths from COVID. Just as we were enjoying freedom from restrictions we found ourselves encouraged to work from home if possible and to wear masks. The crisis and the recommendations recall the first onset of COVID in Australia. Yet the response of Governments is much less forceful. The differences between the responses and the reasons for them merit reflection.
Two months into a 10-month prison sentence, I was placed in solitary confinement after having a nervous breakdown. I’d originally made a fruitless attempt to keep my breakdown to myself, because I’d been told what would happen if Corrective Services found out I was having mental health issues. One of the first friends I made in prison, like many of the inmates, was suicidal. ‘The best advice I can give you if you’re struggling with your mental health’, he told me, ‘is to do everything you can to keep it from the officers.’
Pope Francis recognised that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was ‘perhaps somehow provoked’ and said he was warned before the war that Nato was ‘barking at the gates of Russia’. In an interview with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica the Pope condemned the ‘ferocity and cruelty of the Russian troops’ but warned against a fairy tale perception of the conflict as good versus evil.
Exposure to pornography has been linked to an increase in in sexually aggressive behaviour and adolescent dating violence. This mass, industrial-level grooming of our young is causing lasting damage to their social and sexual development and leading to even more women and girls being viewed as less human.
Is there nothing Government can do to turn around the ever-increasing numbers of children requiring intervention by child protection, youth homelessness and justice systems? Government can start with policies that support families, in all their diversity, and begin to prioritize the needs of children above all else. And given all the evidence tells us that fathers matter to children, isn’t it essential to get fatherhood right?
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