Books

I finished this audiobook last week, and I’m taking a few minutes to write down my thoughts before I forget them. It’s a hard thing to remember to do! The book is called Gangsters of Capitalism, by Jonathan M. Katz. Superficially, it’s a biography of the American Marine officer Smedley Butler, best known, I think, … Continue reading Gangsters of Capitalism →

Any Australian who has paid even cursory attention to this country’s poisonous politics over climate change these past two decades will be familiar with this long and sorry story, but to see it all laid out in sequence, in every depressing detail, is breath-taking. In ‘The Carbon Club’ (Allen& Unwin), […]

In the wake of St Barnaby’s latest resurrection/resuscitation, the ABC news flashed up with a story about an aborted attempt by his National Party of opportunists, carpetbaggers and grafters to rewrite the Murray-Darling Basin plan, a 2012 bipartisan agreement about how to use the water that flows down Australia’s longest […]

Unfortunately, for all their skills as observers of the world, journalists are notoriously unable or unwilling to see how the business that subsidised their story-telling actually worked and the economic forces that destroyed them

“How democracies can be sustained as the likely contests over climate change and energy consumption destabilise them will become the central political question of the coming decade.” Professor Helen Thompson, ’Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century’ Like others, I became aware of Professor Helen Thompson’s astounding breadth of knowledge […]

‘The Successor’: The title of Paddy Manning’s unauthorised biography of Lachlan Murdoch, oldest son of media giant Rupert, is a conscious play on the immensely popular fiction TV series Succession, which itself is clearly based on the Murdoch dynasty. So if you’re familiar with the series, one of the first […]

It’s December so I suppose I should mention these books in case you might want to incorporate any of them into your Christmas shopping. ‘50 Ways to Score a Goal’ is a collection of poems, perfect for the football obsessive in your life, whether they’re aged eight or eighty (but not thirty-four for some reason).…

— Turning hippies into Reagan voters: The values of the 1960’s countercultural movement (liberation, freedom, etc) were co-opted by corporations and used to perpetuate a culture of consumption and production. An interview with Carl Cederström, an author of The Happiness Fantasy — Mariana Mazzucato recommends 5 books explaining how political forces shape the markets: Franzen’s […]

I finished Melvin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life” today. The book covers how fungus interact with humans and the rest of life. It’s a great read; each chapter discusses different aspects of fungus. The writing is personal, multi-faceted, kind and curious. One chapter is about lichens, the complex symbiotic forms of algae and fungus that adapt so … Continue reading Entangled Life →