Kurmelovs writes at this level of confusion and contradiction for an audience whose unspoken but vaguely progressive politics he takes for granted and yet whose assumed knowledge resembles that of an outraged teenager. There should be a young adult genre of political journalism to accommodate books like this.

Political journalism follows scandal like a loyal dog. The Murray-Darling Basin is a gift to such an enterprise, breeding scandal and tragedy, windfall and downfall, wealthy abundance and mass ecological death.

Masculinity, like hunting, cannot on its own explain the persistent tensions between environmentalism and labour. Work itself dominates the formation of our relationship with nature, so that even in play and leisure we are shaped by the physical and mental techniques applied to us in employment.

Carbon sequestration proposes to reverse the ongoing particulate re-distribution of the air; that is, to turn the world upside down. The increasingly suffocating proportion of carbon in the atmosphere must be withdrawn and re-buried, whether through mineralisation as stones, which do not leak, or in unstably lachrymose carbonaceous deposits like trees and soil. Such a material inversion — the interment of air in the ground — rewinds historical time, which was knotted tightly in the deep past’s geological substrates. What burning unravelled, carbon sequestration proposes to restore in a ceremony of apology and appeasement that returns historical time to its safely deposited sediments.

At precisely the moment that the housing crisis has caused centre-left parties and think tanks to begin proposing price controls on rent, and calling this ‘a democratic question rather than an economic one,’ the financial world is working to insulate itself from democratic control.

In monetary terms, investment firms have both a lot to answer for and a lot to supply in terms of achieving the pace of transition required to mitigate some of the catastrophic effects of climate change. Pragmatists on the left, including proponents of the Green New Deal, eye the enormous resources floating around in the financial world as possible sources of green investment. Adrienne Buller’s The Value of a Whale answers this temptation with a firm, detailed ‘No.’

Every Substack page contains a glowing white box just waiting for your email address. This becomes, unavoidably, part of the work being produced. What began as a way to fund work and bring existing ideas into fruition is funnelled by hungry platforms towards an engine of content production that demands we churn out words in structurally-required scripturience. None of this is to denigrate the work of writers, artists and creators supported by such platforms. My point is that we should try and understand the effect these platforms have on the work they claim to enable.

We discovered Bargain Hunters: The Curtin NTEU EBA Podcast as our own university, Monash, and the local branch of the NTEU) enter their own bargaining round. After years of workers bearing the burden of rapid COVID changes, cost of living pressures, overwork and decades of growing job insecurity, this bargaining round feels different: an opportunity for workers to articulate a vision of the university against the neoliberalised, corporate managerialism that dominates the sector and most workplaces in the country.

Dost thou think, because thou artvirtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Sir Toby Belch, Twelfth Night I was a teenage teetotaller. From the age when my friends began experimenting with intoxication, I abstained from alcohol and other intoxicating substances. It seemed transparent to me that alcohol masked social anxiety, and by resolutely […]

Amid the slightly muted jubilation about a long-awaited change in government, certain similarities between Greens insurgents, ‘teal’ independents and, to a lesser extent, hard right fringe parties have received less careful analysis. These point to a shared anti-establishment, anti-corruption populism that, in almost every instance, articulated itself in terms of a ‘scientific’ consensus on either climate change or health policy.

Perhaps we consume each other’s speculations, trading in the flimsy security of a community based in nothing but the hope of financial gain. The risk is not that we lose something—that is almost guaranteed. It is that we lose more than money: autonomy, accountability, equality and democracy. Ideals of justice have very little purchase in the world of crypto, which is what makes it a bleak vision for the future.

In order to genuinely, rather than emptily, condemn the fraud and harm of Theranos and similar investment scams, we need a comprehensive critique of financial capitalism. As Walter Benjamin proposes, Brecht’s striking portrayal of crime as a business in The Threepenny Opera might be a place to start.

Shows like Parks and Rec and Schitt’s Creek (or Rosehaven) represent the continuation of the pastoral fantasy in the context of social and political upheaval. The pastoral endures in the English imagination, the context where Williams excavated its grip, but the category is just as applicable elsewhere in an age of environmental catastrophe, political upheaval and economic immiseration.

Judyth Emanuel’s Yeh Hell Ow is a work of suburban (high) modernism, a successor to Joyce or Woolf and worthy contemporary of Eimear McBride and Claire Louise Bennett, transplanted into tropical suburbs and surgically given a new tongue. It is a novel that plays on the unsteady, drunken relationship between sound and meaning and the equally unstable relationship between what we think and what we say.

Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid, Grindr, Scruff and Brenda offer affordances that are built into the way they are designed. These affordances import all the assumptions and norms of both those who make them, and adapt primarily to what sells: they turn daters into consumers of each other, and unwitting producers of data for the monopolistic behemoths of the digital world. Dating apps are actively involved in reproducing the traits of contemporary capitalism, transforming our very desires in ways that reshape and homogeneise how we love each other.

All our lockdowns are different versions of the same restrictions, from flats ringed with police to suburban houses and beyond. We’re trapped with each other without the possibility of solitude. As the online world takes over many of our social rituals, we are also lonely without privacy.

Along with efforts at environmental management – increasingly futile in the face of both climate change and the intensification of water hoarding – the dams along the Murray Darling Basin are the barricades that reveal the contested political economy of water.

The left cannot let this crisis go to waste. People need to be prioritised over markets and economies, which are terms that homogenise and disguise massively unequal distributions of power and wealth. Let the markets crash; look after each other instead. Mutual-aid societies might open up greater networks for later political activity. And the demands of employers need to be resisted before we walk into the trap of a future they have been planning for us long before COVID-19 ever made their task easier. Stay at home, but reach out, start thinking, strategising, and planning.

Crashed is a history of how financial markets took precedence over people, and moreover, how a profoundly anti-democratic politics prevailed.

If the conceit of post-history was that we have achieved a liberal capitalist paradise, the definitive burial of the future has been heralded in recent culture by an obsession with the afterlife.

The general condition of malaise among a growing class of securely but meaninglessly employed people fosters contempt for genuine work, withdrawal from substantive forms of public life, a sense that things cannot change, and an ambivalence about the world bordering on nihilism.

‘Just like super-typhoons, rising seas and heatwaves, border build-up and militarisation are by-products of climate change,’ Miller writes. We should not overlook the brutal and racist policies of the current Trump administration as a defining factor in the increased securitisation of the border. But the military’s worldview puts migrants under the category of ‘threat multiplier’, and replaces the shared dangers of climate change with the external danger of forced displacement.

Tolerance is a counterweight against political discussion or genuine cultural contact. It maintains the polite, banal civil order and ensures that the business of de-politicised globalization forges on unimpeded.

Despite its impressive scope, and obvious personal investment, Griffiths’ much-praised book fails to uns­ettle. It re-affirms the role of science and knowledge, provoking the question of a standing unsettlement between colonial settlers and the original inhabitants of the Australian continent.

There is the possibility of something new – an experience, a fleeting change in our way of seeing – under this highly ritualised passage under the arch. There is respite from ritual anaesthesia and habit, and also new fantasies within to which we might succumb: Magnificent Modernism beckons.

We all know that universities produce research like banks produce money. They hoard knowledge, turn it into the ignorance of the rest of society that they might better arbitrate from above. Organise it into disciplined shapes that do not touch for fear that the meeting of different types of knowledge might produce something new, uncategorisable, unassimilable to the corporate plot (‘A thought would be ignited.’).

In Amanda Lohrey’s ‘Primates’, the first story in the collection Reading Madame Bovary, the unnamed corporation for which the first-person narrator works is undergoing a dreaded ‘restructure’. Her manager, Winton, is attempting to introduce Theory Z, the Japanese business equivalent of a Danish lifestyle trend. It promises to get rid of ‘hierarchies’ and bureaucracies’ in favour of a ‘clan’ mentality with ‘a high state of consistency in their internal culture’.

Reading ‘nonfiction’ can be like staring into a dark hole dug in the side of reality with just a penlight. The writer has excavated reality’s detail and arranged it neatly into words for our examination. Reading fiction, on the other hand, can be like staring at the stars for signs of the future: luminous and beautiful but not particularly illuminating, unless you’re an astronomer.

Picture the treadmill. What could be a more conspicuous sign of our times than the sight of adult humans running on the spot compelled by nothing but the norms of society?