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ABR Arts

Book of the Week

Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter
Media

Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

On 26 October 2022, two days before closing a deal to purchase Twitter for US$44 billion (A$61.4 billion), Elon Musk walked into its San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink. He walked up to an unattended front desk in the lobby and said, to no one: ‘You can’t help but let that sink in.’ Of course, he didn’t really say this to no one. His triumphant entrance at Twitter HQ was staged, the video shared with his 120 million Twitter followers, with the phrase: ‘Let That Sink In!’

From the Archive

November 1997, no. 196

Cath Kenneally reviews 'Deadline' by Jennifer Rowe

Here’s the first in a new series from the indefatigable pen of Jennifer Rowe. Verity Birdwood is still going strong, at last check: it wasn’t so long ago that I reviewed Lamb to the Slaughter in these pages. And, of course, as Emily Rodda, Rowe has turned out a couple of dozen Teen Power books, attracting several Children’s Book Awards. She is every inch a professional writer.

From the Archive

May 2007, no. 291

What Dymphna Knew: Manning Clark and Kristallnacht

Mark McKenna’s analysis of Manning Clark’s Kristallnacht episode (The Monthly, March 2007) – in which he shows that Clark was not in Bonn on Kristallnacht, that he arrived a couple of weeks later, but that in ensuing years he appropriated his fiancée Dymphna’s experience and account and made it his own without any attribution – may be further illuminated, given another dimension, if we look more closely not at Clark, who, as McKenna shows, wasn’t there, but at Dymphna, who was.

From the Archive

September 2005, no. 274

The Indonesian Presidency: The shift from personal toward constitutional rule by Angus McIntyre

So much has been said or written about Indonesia’s political changes since 1998 it might be thought that there was little original that could be added. Then along comes Angus McIntyre with his own particular interpretation of Indonesian politics. McIntyre has long been interested in the psychological make-up of Indonesia’s political leaders and has written some fine papers on the subject, the core of which are in his new book, The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from Personal toward Constitutional Rule. His approach has been to examine the personalities of dominant individuals as a key explanatory factor in Indonesian politics. As a conceptual counter to Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz’s recent book, Reorganising Power in Indonesia (2004), McIntyre’s approach similarly begs the question as to whether it is structure or agency that shapes events. In this, McIntyre almost entirely ignores structure, at least beyond the malleable Indonesian constitution.