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Keywords: Texts

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: The Jane Austen Remedy

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 10 March 2023
    1 Comment

    It's a truth universally acknowledged that a book can change a life, but can certain books help a reader live more fully at any age? Ruth Wilson, a 90-year-old author, thinks so. Her book, The Jane Austen Remedy, explores the belief that books can cure an ailing soul. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Initiations

    • Geoff Page
    • 09 March 2023

    Filling up the Webster-pak’s / a weekly exercise /  designed to keep me vertical / with sparkle in my eyes. Fresh from Chemist Warehouse as / my tempo wanes and waxes / my pills dispel my latest ills — if not quite death and taxes.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Artificing intelligence

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 09 March 2023
    6 Comments

    Who will champion humane values, enshrine them in the development and workings of artificial intelligence? This is the question posed by Plato and Socrates to our generation, and one that demands our urgent attention as the line between the artificial and the human becomes increasingly blurred.

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  • RELIGION

    Cathedrals and caravans

    • John Honner
    • 27 February 2023
    3 Comments

    The word synodality may not be familiar to many, but it's a word that Pope Francis has been emphasising throughout his papacy. It refers to a Church that listens and travels together, with everyone having something to learn from one another. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The beautiful ugliness of Roald Dahl

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 27 February 2023
    13 Comments

    Roald Dahl's beloved children's books have been given a makeover, with 'sensitivity readers' rewording phrases that might offend modern sensibilities. But what has been lost in this sanitisation of Dahl's work? Do we risk losing the very essence of what makes these works so powerful and enduring? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In praise of words

    • Ann Rennie
    • 28 September 2022
    1 Comment

    We celebrate wordsmiths, minor and major, whose gift it is to write the world for us / To create the nourishing broth, the alphabet soup, of words to work their magic / Words that exhort and advocate / That calm and soothe / Words on which to float away / Words for strength on another day.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The empty echo chamber: A conversation with Dr Axel Bruns

    • David Halliday, Axel Bruns
    • 22 September 2022

    Despite our differing social and cultural beliefs, we can mostly agree that we live in highly polarised times. But what divides us? ARC Laureate Fellow Prof. Axel Bruns studies social polarisation, and in this discussion we explore the drivers of polarisation, examining the role that digital and social media and broader social and political contexts play in intensifying social conflicts, threatening economic prosperity, undermining public trust, and ultimately destabilising societies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Live, learn, forget, repeat

    • Barry Gittins
    • 05 September 2022
    2 Comments

    Philosopher George Santayana sagely pronounced, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Yet that repetition is part of being human. We are creatures of habit and don’t necessarily notice or learn from our thoughts and deeds. Nor do we necessarily want to be made aware of that lack of learning.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: Telltale

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 02 September 2022
    1 Comment

    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.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    When the moaning stops: How porn is damaging young people

    • Melinda Tankard Reist
    • 20 July 2022
    2 Comments

    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.   

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Stalin’s patriarchate

    • Stephen Minas
    • 23 May 2022
    3 Comments

    ‘We removed him from the mausoleum’, wrote the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. ‘But how do we remove Stalin from Stalin’s heirs?’ The poem was published in 1962 but it’s still a good question. Today one of Stalin’s heirs commands a barbaric war against Ukraine with the enthusiastic cheerleading of another such heir – the leader of the Moscow Patriarchate reestablished by Stalin.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Carrying the weight of the daily news

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 29 March 2022
    13 Comments

    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. 

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