Richard Brautigan’s 1971 novel The Abortion tells the story of a librarian in charge of a library with a voracious and unusual collection development policy: it...
Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson was once asked to name an aspect of economics that was both true and non-trivial. Samuelson came back with the concept of...
America’s stunning 2016 presidential election result, which reportedly shocked even winner Donald Trump, elicited from the country’s mainstream journalists a flood of introspection, mea culpas and...
Among the countless online resources devoted to “the future of work” is a video that is required viewing for the Year 10 class at my daughter’s...
Where do musical ideas come from? It’s a question, I suppose, for scientists as much as composers. I have no idea where mine come from and...
When John Howard announced that Australians were heading for the polls in late 2007 I was in my second year as editor of the Canberra Times....
Mainstream media outlets continue to suggest the presidential election will be decided by a historically wide gender gap, with women much more likely to side with...
I write this on my return from Carlton’s Cinema Nova, where Paul Barclay, presenter of Radio National’s Big Ideas, was discussing a recently published memoir, A...
Reading the well-known English satirist Craig Brown’s latest book, A Voyage around the Queen, I’m struck again by how, in terms of symbolic theatre, republics pale...
The fascinating story of how two new books — Sandhill Girl and Enlightened Aboriginal Futures — came into being centres on three people: the Lutheran missionary...