“What should journalists do when the facts don’t matter?” asked the American media academic Michael Socolow in the Conversation after Donald Trump won the presidential election....
Democracies have always presented themselves as beacons of human progress. In 431 BCE the statesman Pericles declared that Athens’s democracy was “the school for all Greece,”...
History will show it as one of the most far-sighted heritage decisions made by the Hawke government— Barry Cohen, The Life of the Party (1987) When...
The popularity of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, first published in 1991, revealed a big market in the West for stories of women growing up in China....
This time would be different. The lessons of the past learned. Cheats and clowns banished. Lies debarred, chaos expunged. Trust restored, law exalted. Instead of hollow...
In a book review a decade ago, I mocked academics’ penchant for running experiments with “mock juries” — people told to pretend to be jurors at...
When a negotiation consists of one side asking for money and the other offering it, there’s not really much doubt who has the whip hand. And...
We call a book good if it entertains or educates us. But when it deal with such a well-covered topic as “the glory that was Rome,”...
When the second world war began, Max Dupain and photographer Olive Cotton had been married for five months and he was thriving personally and professionally. Around...
In the old Chief Secretary’s Building, a sandstone relic of colonial New South Wales not far from Circular Quay, an episode in the state’s more recent...