There’s nothing rational about the death of someone being the moment for discussing a whole era – indeed it can be absolutely distorting (obscuring in this case, the degree to which Thatcher was the front-person for a phalanx of interconnected ideological-interest forces). But there’s no way out of it. The whole culture is replaying thirty years worth of battles over ten days.

Given the interest in my recent New Matilda article, I’d already planned to write more on the New Atheism. Now that PZ Myers, a speaker at the 2012 Melbourne conference, has replied to that piece, it seems appropriate to continue the discussion as a response to him. Myers provides the following summation of my critique […]

It is said that popular culture is becoming increasingly infantilising. JK Rowling made it acceptable for adults to sit on the train reading a book about magical boarding schools, infused with the nostalgia of books from our own childhoods (Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising), but the process was already well underway […]

In case you weren’t aware, the ever charming, frypan-hating Richard Dawkins is in the country. (If you are unfamiliar with Dawkins, he’s the man God created to illustrate irony.) The Dawks has been appearing around the place getting his knickers in a twist about people who think there might be things science just can’t explain, […]

In a previous post, I suggested that it didn’t take much courage to proclaim onself an atheist in most developed countries. I still think that’s basically true but I hadn’t counted on exactly how timid the public sphere has become. Australia’s largest outdoor advertising agency, APN Outdoor, rejected an attempt by the Atheist Foundation of […]