Progressive culture since 1954
Anyone of a leftist disposition who spends long enough on the internet will sooner or later encounter the online figure that has come to be known as logicbro. There he is (for he’s almost always a he), accusing you of being ‘factually incorrect’, urging you to ‘get your facts straight’, and asserting that you are ‘emotionally driven and therefore prone to making sloppy mistakes’.
On 21 July 2011, forty-two years and one day after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, NASA’s space shuttle program – a program that had spanned three decades – concluded with the final return trip of Atlantis from the International Space Station (ISS). It felt like the end of an era – and it was.
People adopt different styles of packing when leaving a place. There are the light-packers who just throw in a change of clothes, grab their smartphones and are good to go. These ones are eager to leave, discard accumulated memories, and make new memories in a new place.
On 14 July 2019, the trans and gender-diverse community and our allies rallied to show support for the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2019. If passed, the proposed law will allow trans and gender-diverse people born in Victoria to change their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity without first undergoing surgery to their reproductive organs.
Racism in Australia has long rested on not only vicious establishment slander, but on silence, or attempts to obfuscate, the agency, humanity and courage of the oppressed.
There’s no future in nihilism, but sometimes it seems like there’s no future regardless. On this level, it can be therapeutic to wallow in it for a little while – just sometimes.
Australasia’s largest philosophy conference was wrong to give transgender discrimination a free pass last week: not even academics should have a right to discriminate.
I’m a huge fan of Rooney’s work. But the things I love about her books are not the universal, the relate-able, the newsworthy. It is the way she brings her unique voice, worldview, political ideology and lived experience to the page.
There is a period in many little girls’ lives, around the age of ten, where they go completely wild. Not in the sense of Girls Gone Wild, which depressingly clogs up the search results, but in the most natural sense of the word – feral and free.
Along with all the others, I once dreamt of climbing the world’s highest mountain. I grew up in the 1980s when conquering Everest was an unattainable goal as perfect and unspoiled as the gleaming white snow at its summit.
As wild and genre-bending and hellacious as her prose is, though, Emanuel’s novel can be placed alongside things we have read: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Samuel Beckett’s body of work, and, more locally, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose. But while Cox’s debut was lauded in the Guardian and the Saturday Paper, described variously as exciting, original, and brilliant, critical responses to Emanuel seem strangely subdued.
On 24 January 1878, Vera Zasulich, a young Russian revolutionary, shot General Fyodor Trepov, the Governor of St Petersburg, in retaliation for his torture of the Tsarist regime’s many political prisoners.
Announcing the recipients of the 2019 Overland writing residencies, which are supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation.
A democracy in aged care would need to work through a series of layers. The society around us would have to be more fair. It would look for better ways to finance the system. But above all it would find a way to involve residents more in decisions about how the facility functions. Perhaps one day ‘homes’ will really be more like homes.
We must not fail to acknowledge how the demands of the neoliberal university fall disproportionately on disabled academics and students and how this perpetuates deep inequalities, of which ableism is just one expression.