Reading

UPDATE (12:03 pm ET on 8/20/24): This piece has been updated to include information on...

A Trump administration, and even a Harris one, will pose new challenges for Australia: sycophancy or independence? Non-alignment or more complicity in US wars? Continue reading »

Readers note that it is a month since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handed down its advisory opinion on the Palestinian occupation (on 19 July). No doubt some are wondering what is happening. I am one of you. We are aware of course that the Australian Government has done next to nothing: refer The Continue reading »

History has too stately a progress to be the guide to tactics. But those who make history that does not fit logically into a pattern of principle, consistency and good judgment are doomed to stumble in the short term and earn the contempt of its core followers. The size of the gambling industry, and its Continue reading »

One of the first things Tony Abbott did soon after becoming Prime Minister of Australia in 2013 was to abandon the fibre-to-the-premises model that had been the hallmark of the previous Rudd Government’s National Broadband Network rollout. Shortage of labour and supplies had bedevilled the rollout under Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, but it promised a Continue reading »

A well-known Australian band, The Cat Empire, has decided not to perform three shows scheduled with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra over the treatment meted out to Australian-British classical pianist Jayson Gillham. In addition, MSO musicians passed a vote of no-confidence in senior management following which the board said it would carry out an independent review Continue reading »

One would’ve had to have been living in a cave not to have been aware of the recent street violence in the United Kingdom. For those of us who lived through the riots here in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020, there was an extreme feeling of déjà vu as we watched attacks on police, Continue reading »

Australia’s AUKUS submarines could be “wildly out of date” by the time they arrive, according to David Sanger, the White House and National Security Correspondent for The New York Times. He says the Pentagon is focused on transitioning the US to unmanned submarines “for either surveillance or for attack”, and that the subs Australia negotiated Continue reading »

A recent article by Michael MacKinley provides an accurate reflection on the (lack of) value placed on human life by those who propagate war. It brings to mind a statement of the past that, to paraphrase, states “a bayonette is a weapon with a working man on either end.” Michael points to two salutary lessons Continue reading »

As anyone who knows me or reads my work knows, I have an infinite amount of interest in writing about the Holocaust, in whatever genre: history, fiction, essay, travelogue, diary, memoir, poetry, whatever. I also have an infinite appetite for voices in writing about the Holocaust: sardonic, ironic, bemused, impatient, poignant, heroic, anti-heroic, sociological, callow, creepy, fantastical, comedic, whatever. But the article in the September issue of Harper’s, “My Auschwitz Vacation,” by the writer Tanya Gold, tested my patience. It’s unbearably familiar and hackneyed. How many articles can we read on the silliness and stupidity of a tourist’s response to an extermination camp? Teenagers go to Auschwitz and take selfies. Justin Bieber visits the Anne Frank House and writes in […]

Saudi Arabia won’t pay the U.S. back for fueling its warplanes as it bombed Yemen, but the U.S. recently resumed weapons sales to the kingdom.

The post Senator Calls U.S. Support for Saudis a “National Disgrace” After Intercept Reveals Unpaid Debt to Pentagon appeared first on The Intercept.

“In a 2020 podcast interview discussing the benefits of grandparents in children’s lives, J. D. Vance agrees when the host says, ‘That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.’” — Vanity Fair

Sure, I might be a childless cat lady with a solid career as a quantitative analyst, but Senator Vance and a podcast host researching the theory of everything have helped me see the lack of meaning in my existence, so I’m applying to become your child’s surrogate grandmother, with my husband’s approval.

As someone who studied hard, worked late, and allowed myself to be interrupted more times than even I, a researcher, can count in order to get to where I am today, I understand your wife’s need to work, but in my role as your child’s surrogate grandmother, I would offer the added benefit of being a mentor and a model for what your wife can expect once she experiences menopause. I can also help her to see, as I do now, that the purpose of a woman’s life is far greater than a career.

Secretaries of State allow passenger numbers to soar by 38% at business airport, despite objections from locals and climate campaigners

It’s probably been done before, though I don’t know of the book if it has, but one could write a terrific book on Marx and his breakups. The model here would be Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives. Instead of a book about five Victorian marriages, however, and the mix of intellectual, personal, and political sparks they emitted, this would be a book about Marx’s intellectual and political divorces. And how each was a critical turning point in his thought and life. The criterion for inclusion would be that Marx had a personal relationship with these individuals. No chapters on Hegel or Smith or Aristotle. Otherwise it would be too sprawling and insufficiently personal, more of a standard intellectual history rather than […]

There’s a lot of worship of intelligence in our society. Some of it is justified but much isn’t.

I’m reasonably intelligent: I’m at the level where I’m startled if someone is much smarter than I am; it doesn’t happen often.

But it does happen. There are people who make me feel stupid.

Intelligence is essentially two things: ability to perform mental operations, and speed of operation. A smart enough person can perform operations a less smart person can’t; can more swiftly learn how to do operations available to both, and processes faster.

Intelligence at its highest levels leads to polymaths: people who have mastered multiple subjects. All that speed matters.

Generally speaking, though, a smarter person will just get to the same conclusion a stupider person who knew the same things would get to faster. Think the kid at the front of class putting his hand up first.

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Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. This election year, with the very real possibility of Trump returning to office, we know it’s important to be reminded of these horrors and to head to the polls in November to avoid experiencing new cruelties, collusions, corruption, and crimes.