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Keywords: Comic

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Jane Austen's guide to flourishing

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 02 February 2022
    11 Comments

    Jane Austen’s exploration of a narrow social world illuminated issues central to public life in our own world. In particular, the importance of character in building harmony in her domestic world raised questions about its place, presence, and importance in political life today.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The promise of alchemy

    • David Rowland
    • 01 November 2021
    8 Comments

    Ben Jonson is one of the great English Renaissance playwrights but he can also be challenging for the modern reader. When I first came to Jonson some years ago, I attempted a comedy from 1610, The Alchemist. I soon felt out of my depth. Conceding defeat, I put the book aside and told myself that there would be some ‘other time’. This year in Melbourne, with the theatres closed, the streets largely deserted, and travel restrictions firmly in place, that ‘other time’ arrived.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ted Lasso's workplace

    • Michael McGirr
    • 20 September 2021
    11 Comments

    It’s not hard to understand why so many people are watching Ted Lasso (Apple TV), nor why it was nominated for twenty Emmy Awards and won seven. Believe it or not, it is twenty years since The Office first premiered on the BBC. Not since then has a comedy series cut so close to the bone of our cultural needs and anxieties.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Or else an eagle

    • John Allison
    • 24 November 2020
    4 Comments

    You are transfixed, steering your car but so captive to the bird’s powerful flight that you could readily follow it as it breaks away and lifts above the forest into the setting sun. Sometimes you do not want it to end. The eagle soars into the light. Away and up into the sky. And here is the corner, down towards the dirt road leading home. You are there.

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  • RELIGION

    Francesco the film: ‘The path is opened by walking’

    • David Holdcroft
    • 27 October 2020
    9 Comments

    Insofar as there is hope in Francesco, it emerges gradually through an intimate viewing of the Pope’s engagement with the ‘hot button’ issues of our day, the environment and climate change, refugees and immigration, violence and conflict, disparity of wealth and poverty, women’s place in society and Church, family and sexuality, and sexual abuse within the Church.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    No joke: OCD is not a punchline

    • Anonymous
    • 15 October 2020
    7 Comments

    ‘You’ve got a bit OCD about all this handwashing, haven’t you?’ People say things like this all the time, to mock others’ habits and the routines they follow a little too closely. Usually, it’s not meant to be offensive. Just harmless teasing. But when I hear someone say something like this, it hurts. Because I actually have OCD.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Don’t blame 2020, blame pragmatism

    • Cristy Clark
    • 01 October 2020
    5 Comments

    It’s tempting at this point to blame 2020 for the almost comically bad situation we are facing right. But here’s the thing: this isn’t bad luck or even some kind of testament to the power of numerology. This dire situation was entirely predictable and even, sadly, entirely preventable. We walked right into it — or, at least, we allowed ourselves to be led here.

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  • MEDIA

    Will we ever learn from the war on terror?

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 22 September 2020
    10 Comments

    The strange thing is that those chest-beating about terrorism rarely made an issue of when terrorists of the modernist Islamist variety (such as al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah and ISIL) attacked mosques, Muslim shrines and Muslim congregations. Nor do they report of just how fringe and hated these groups are in their own countries where the bulk of their attacks take place.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Living in a gendered pandemic

    • Fernanda Fain-Binda
    • 27 August 2020

    When I read Jess Hill’s piece in The Monthly which calls the coronavirus lockdown a ‘gendered pandemic’, I felt heard. I wanted everyone to read this article, to understand that feminist wins were being erased in the name of a national emergency, and that women were stepping up to the now larger domestic workload with a career cost further down the line.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We are home already

    • John Carey
    • 07 July 2020
    6 Comments

    Topple them roll them into the depths of the sea to join their coffin ship. Make space in the air fit to breathe. We are come home to roost. We are home already, never left, just slipped your mind.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Year of the mask

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 18 June 2020
    5 Comments

    2020 has been the year of the mask. The masks worn during the smoke of bushfires, during the threat of COVID-19, and during the Black Lives Matter protests. Masks are a powerful and complex symbol.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The 'ugly boredom' of a very Brexit election

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 13 December 2019
    16 Comments

    Tired and world weary, the British electorate went to the polls. Rarely in history can there have been such an assemblage of unelectable or disappointing types standing for office or trying to remain in it. It proved to be an ugly boredom, though it was uglier for some than others.

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