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Keywords: Plague

  • ECONOMICS

    Review: The Shortest History of Economics

    • David James
    • 22 March 2024

    Economics may be useless for forecasting, and its assertions can be overly simplistic. But it is a language that should be understood, and here is a good place to start. In simple and clear prose, Leigh spans the history of human economic activity, beginning in prehistoric times and ending with the modern day.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Telco Crash

    • John Kelly
    • 23 November 2023

    While its virtues are ubiquitously / touted and near-idolized / as advantages in efficiency, / improved contact rapidity, / and enhanced global connectivity, / it takes but one malfunction, / not to mention piracy, / to wake us up to see / the cost is very high for / an increasing faith in / and dependency on / messianic promises and marvels

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The burden of hope in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 17 November 2023

    Stone Yard Devotional is a chronicle of a huge problem in our time: the sense of futility in all our efforts to amend. Wood may make us think, because despair is a constant stalker of the bravest of warriors against the destruction of the planet and the chronic toll of human evil. When compassion becomes a disabling burden, who or what can help?   

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Shifting views of Israel and Palestine

    • Teresa Pirola
    • 16 November 2023
    5 Comments

    I am on a study tour of Israel and Palestinian Territories. It is my eighth visit over 12 years, and each time I come away with less clarity and more questions about the tensions that plague this tiny land. Who is the oppressor? Who is the oppressed? It all depends upon the lens you look through at any given moment. (From 2019)

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    David Marr's penance by storytelling

    • Peter Craven
    • 20 October 2023
    3 Comments

    In Killing for Country, David Marr confronts Australia's dark colonial past, revealing unsettling truths about the Australian Native Police's brutal acts. Published during the Voice referendum, Marr intertwines personal ancestry with national guilt, urging Australians towards truth-telling and reconciliation. This isn't just history; it's a call for atonement.

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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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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The shadow side of connectedness

    • Justin Glyn
    • 02 February 2023

    No matter how much one might wish for an end to the pandemic, Covid is transmitted aerially, especially through close human interaction, and the virus itself remains stubbornly immune to optimism as a coping strategy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The book corner: The Escape Artist

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 11 October 2022

    Jonathan Freedland’s book is an extremely harrowing tour de force: at one stage I could read only a chapter at a time. But by the end I had been reminded of the power of the human spirit, and of the way in which some people, those with a sense of mission, can endure almost any trial. Resilience is a great gift.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Second Amendment logic: The arming of school teachers

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 20 June 2022
    11 Comments

    In the context of mass school shootings in the United States, the latest of which took place at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a crude form of deterrence has made an appearance. To be safer, you do not remove guns, but spread them through a policy of mutually assured terror. Any gun toting individual entering the school grounds will think twice before encountering the hail of bullets from a protective teacher. Gun control, accordingly, becomes anathema.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The normality of Olympic brutality

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 28 February 2022
    7 Comments

    For anybody surprised about those ‘marquee tent’ moments, as an ABC journalist crudely termed them, the Olympics is as much about torment as it is about achievement. The torment is very much reserved for the athlete, the achievement reserved for officialdom and media and spectator consumption. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tidings of comfort

    • Barry Gittins
    • 07 December 2021
    4 Comments

    Without Christmas, without that beautiful bookend of closure and celebration for another rather depressing year, where would we be? Speaking for me and mine, ensconced in the oft-locked-down leafy suburbs of Melbourne, 2021 promised much and delivered little more than a continuance of stress, bad blood among some of the tribes that comprise Victorian society, and the hope that heightened vaccination rates will translate into the need for no more lockdowns. That’s certainly a present worth unwrapping.

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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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