The pandemic feels increasingly like a historic inflection point and Coronation may, over time, come to be seen as the first film of a new era. Conveyed through the lens of a dissident, its sense of destiny about China’s rise – a common theme in state propaganda – is a vision that offers no triumphalism or comfort.

Delhi has acted with impunity in Kashmir since Partition and it won’t stop now. Revoking Article 370 is not just a BJP policy. Recasting India as a Hindu rashtra is the essence of its project. It’s why it has always sought power.

Kashmir is a tourist retreat in an occupied land. Every year, as the monsoon rolls across India, bringing with it both soaring temperatures and pounding rain, the county’s elite escape to the overwhelming beauty of the Kashmir Valley. These two realities – Kashmir as a haven for holidaymakers and a warzone for locals – remain remarkably separate, so much so that when one invades the other the effect can jar, like a jolt of absolute reality.

The former Commissioner of Australia Border Force, Roman Quaedvlieg, took time out of pouring petrol on the au pair scandal last week to pen his reflections on a far bigger scandal that is somehow not really a scandal at all. Initially self-published, then re-posted on Meanjin, Quaedvlieg wrote about a trip he took to Nauru in the second half of 2015.

On several dates, usually between the fourth and fifth beer, my companion and I have found common ground over our mutual disdain for the whole hellish ritual of online dating, only for one of us to ask resignedly, ‘But how else do you meet someone these days?’ It feels impossible to stave off the inexorable force of the ever-encroaching market.

In the last few weeks, a mass exodus of more than a quarter of a million Rohingya, terrorised and starving, have fled towards the Bangladeshi border – a frontier that the Burmese military, known as the Tatmadaw, have booby trapped with land mines. This unfolding tragedy is a reminder that some people are considered superfluous. It’s a reminder that some lives matter less than others and that some people are sacrificed to serve the political and economic ends of others.

The danger lies in seeing Trump or Brexit as an aberration, rather than a reaction to and by-product of liberalism. The received wisdom is that liberalism is somehow virtuous and inherently good. But this formulation makes it impossible to understand why politicians saying openly fascistic things are garnering wide support in supposedly principled liberal democracies.

But the Church’s culpability for the violence that plagued post-colonial Rwandan society, of which the 1994 Genocide was the culmination, extends beyond its role in the invention and advocacy of ethnic ideology. As the violence and anti-Tutsi rhetoric escalated in the lead-up to the 1994 Genocide, the Church preached extirpation from the pulpit.

Like so many other well-meaning white people, Professor Garrod’s motives in going to Rwanda are ostensibly good. Having lost the sense of meaning and purpose he once derived from his Ivy League professorship, he decides to go to Africa to ‘make a difference’. The film charts the months of rehearsals and, over time, his altruistic veneer slips. Just under the surface, a mindset that’s essentially that of the early colonialist – namely the missionary – begins to emerge

Whereas the West sees the emergence of an Asian superpower as something unprecedented and potentially destabilising, China views her rise as a return to the natural order of things – to a time when she’s, once again, the world’s leading economic, technological and intellectual power.

The Foxconn deaths garnered unprecedented media attention, both inside and outside of China. It was the first many people had heard of the Taiwan-based multinational, despite it being the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. In China alone, Foxconn currently employs over one million people at twelve factories. The products it manufactures – notable examples include the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Nokia, Kindle, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Wii U – are staples of the developed world.

A ‘good caricature, like every work of art,’ said the Italian Baroque painter, Annibale Carracci, ‘is more true to life than reality.’ This is why, I think, Bill Leak’s cartoons are so often failures. Like several pundits that take up column inches at the Australian these days, his views are so out of touch with the majority of the population that they can – in moments of ideologically charged rage – seem almost deranged.

Sport has been at the centre of Australia’s national identity since the early days of white occupation. The sporting field is, today, one of the few places Australia is confident in projecting itself internationally. And to do so assumes a certain level of competence over an extended period, based on hard work and honed skills – not smarter cheating.

I’ve long harboured what’s now an unfashionable affection for the politician, diarist and columnist formally known as The Real Mark Latham. His politics are incoherent and the few hundred words he had in the Financial Review hardly gave him the scope needed to address this. Naively, I thought an hour-long ‘conversation’ with Jonathan Green at the Melbourne Writers Festival might illuminate how such an intelligent man deals with these seemingly irreconcilable inconsistencies. Instead, the audience got Latham Unfiltered.

The idea that formed the cornerstone for much of the West’s analysis of China for the past two decades was that as China opened up its economy the political system would inevitably follow. But Beijing has never had any interest in implementing US-style neoliberalism.

For James, cricket wasn’t just a sport. It was an art form, but it was also a place where one tested oneself - physically and intellectually - and provided the perfect avenue to learn about hierarchy, class, race and ideology. Cricket came first for the young James, but as he grew up it became inseparable from his politics.

There’s been high praise for the Saturday Paper. If you’ve been – as they say – living under a rock and have missed it, I’d direct you to the paper’s  twitter feed, where many of the comments are retweeted. Unbeholden to 140 characters, let me try and capture the flavor of those tweets: the paper’s commentary is insightful and well-informed; it has a stable of some of Australia’s best writers working for it and it’s a welcome addition to the Fairfax/News Ltd duopoly that’s been one of the great scourges of Australian democracy.