Anna Funder is an internationally acclaimed bestselling Australian author whose debut Stasiland recounted the personal stories of people who worked for the East German secret police, and those whose lives were affected and even destroyed by their covert activities. The book won a swag of international prizes. The manuscript of her follow-up first novel, All […]

By his own admission, Anders Breivik’s act of mass assassination was politically motivated and designed to ignite a revolution in which a lengthy war would be waged against Muslims in Europe. Breivik’s motives have been outlined in a 1500 page manifesto containing a farrago of political and historical influences laced with thematic resentments and prejudices. […]

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. – Emma Goldman NSW voters can be forgiven for taking an axe to the ALP government that held state power for sixteen years. Last Saturday’s election gave voters the opportunity they had been waiting for and the ALP was dumped with enough conviction to keep them out […]

For eighteen consecutive days I was glued to Al Jazeera English and Twitter, watching and tweeting in awe as the Egyptian revolution unfolded. As Hosni Mubarak stepped down from the Egyptian presidency handing power to the military, an email alert drew me to a story from Tunisia: People streaming into a house to congratulate the […]

The Best Australian Essays 2010 Robert Drewe (ed) Black Inc. The first task of an editor of a volume of essays is to arrive at a working definition of the form. Accepting that an essay is a ‘shortish piece of non fiction on a focused subject, often written from a personal point of view’, Robert […]

A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to influence the actions of the state is near its end – Julian Assange, 2006 In 1948, the New Yorker published a short story by Shirley Jackson called ‘The lottery’. It is the story of the public stoning of a woman in […]

Not long ago, Peter Bishop stepped down as the Creative Director of Varuna, the writers’ house in Katoomba. The house is the former residence of Eleanor and Eric Dark and after their deaths it was retained as the centrepiece of the Dark Foundation as a place for writers to work. The Darks were politically engaged […]

In August 1855, members of the Sydney Stonemakers’ Society working on the building site of the Holy Trinity church laid down their tools and called for the introduction of an eight-hour working day. The workers celebrated their victory at a dinner on 1 October, now known as Labour Day and recognised by a public holiday. […]

Two books came lovingly wrapped to the breakfast table on Father’s Day. The first was Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and the other was Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America. At first glance the two books appear to have very little in common. I am a fan of the […]

C2H5OH, or ethyl alcohol, is a clear, colourless, volatile and flammable oxygenated hydrocarbon produced by the fermentation of sugar that is used, among other things, in the preparation of beverages. It is also one of the oldest and most efficacious of psychoactive drugs – and we love it.

Gaza – Morality, Law, Politics Raymond Gaita (ed) UWA Press Philosopher and author Raimond Gaita has assembled a collection of essays drawn from a lecture series on the subject of Gaza. The contributors are all academics; international law, anthropology, political science, history and ethics are among the disciplines represented. Gaita’s project is to subject the […]

The Greens are the only major party to publish an arts policy for the 2010 election. Neither the ALP nor the Coalition websites provide even a bullet point on arts policy. It doesn’t rate as an issue. This is both and good and a bad thing. It’s good because there is no suggestion that the […]

In an article in the latest edition of The Monthly, former Iemma staffer Mark Aarons says this of Labor Right backroom artists Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar: Enter Arbib and Bitar and their focus groups. Their technique involves targeting the least politically committed voters in key marginal seats. Swing voters of this kind care most […]

As far as metaphors go, the destruction in 2001 of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre could be regarded as both the most potent and vilest in the world’s history. It was both a tactical, quasi-military strike against the most prominent architectural symbol of American global power and a pointedly symbolic blow, which […]

In a state of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell Kevin Rudd is definitely not the man you want on the megaphone during an emergency and probably not even the best person to place the order at the drive through. As a communicator, Rudd suffers from a lethal mix of ailments: […]

We are gathering at a critical moment in history – with a world still reeling from the near collapse of the global financial system and threatened by the prospect of catastrophic climate change. Assembling some of the finest minds in Australia and the world provides an opportunity to understand these crises and a range of […]

Trouble: Evolution of a Radical/Selected Writings 1970–2010 Kate Jennings Black Inc Kate Jennings suggests that the subtitle of her new book of collected writings could be regarded by some as an overstatement, and that ‘Devolution of a Radical’ may have been a more accurate choice. Jennings’ trajectory as a political activist began in 1970 with […]

Don DeLillo’s novella Point Omega begins with an art installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on 3 September, presumably in 1996. The narrator, about whom we learn very little as the story unfolds, is absorbed in the experience of watching 24 Hour Psycho, a work by Douglas Gordon in which the Alfred […]

A lot of ink, chemical and virtual, has been devoted to commentary on the HBO television drama series The Wire and rightly so because it is, without doubt, a unique and compelling production. For those of you who are not familiar with the show, the DVD boxed collection of all sixty episodes is available at […]

Melbourne writer and philosopher Damon Young’s wonderful, little book Distraction (MUP, 2008) landed on my desk recently, courtesy of a very old friend. She had been struck by a reference in the book to the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. A lens grinder by trade, Spinoza spent his leisure hours in […]