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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

May 2014, no. 361

Mirror, Mirror: The uses and abuses of self-love by Simon Blackburn

Everyone knows the emotions of self-concern – self-esteem, pride, vanity, self-respect – and associated character traits ­– authenticity, arrogance, humility, and the like. Yet as soon as we start to think seriously about them and the roles they play in personal and social life, they tantalise with their ambiguities and their resistance to easy definition. Some forms of self-concern, such as arrogance and hubris, are disagreeable. Yet others, such as self-respect, seem desirable. Why? And what is self-respect exactly, anyway? How much do these various emotions and dispositions contribute to (or detract from) a good or decent life?

From the Archive

From the Archive

October 1978, no. 5

East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism by Jill Jolliffe

A curious fact of modern history is that it seems to take a single decade, sometimes less, for an exploited or colonised people to become, in turn, exploiters or colonisers. This is especially true in Asian history: the Chinese conquest of Tibet, the forceful takeover by India of Portuguese Goa and more recently, in 1975, the military campaign launched by Indonesian forces against East Timor.