Society
Brian Matthews reviews 'City Dreamers: The urban imagination in Australia' by Graeme Davison
In The Oxford Companion to Australian History, of which he was a co-editor with John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, Graeme Davison begins his essay on Geoffrey Blainey by saluting him ...
... (read more)Maria O’Sullivan reviews 'Not Quite Australian: How temporary migration is changing the nation' by Peter Mares
Migration is widely regarded as one of the most important policy issues on the global agenda. Not only does it have economic implications for states, it also poses certain challenges for ...
... (read more)Renata Singer reviews 'Advanced Australia: The politics of ageing' by Mark Butler
Tuesday, 24 May 2016Even before I'd finished talking, hands shot up from the grey heads in the audience. 'I'm very concerned,' said the jowly chap with the sailor's suntan, 'that advances ...
... (read more)In 1971, the Boston Women's Health Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, which became an international phenomenon and was translated into twenty-nine languages. For second wave feminists, taking control of their lives and their bodies was a basic principle. The book provided information related to sexuality, birth control, abortion, pregnancy and chil ...
The Economist’s foreign correspondent John Hooper turns to a quintessentially English theme: Italians. Italians seem to be a sort of recurring obsession, a presence that periodically intrudes into the English imaginary. The cultural construction of Italy is a particularly sensitive and timely topic in the context of debates about the future of Europe. The a ...
Simon Tormey reviews 'To Save Everything, Click Here' by Evgeny Morozov
What are the implications of the ever-accelerating revolution in information communication technology on our lives? Is the Internet a force for good, for increased freedom and democracy? Or are we so in thrall to the prophets of Silicon Valley that we have lost sight of the perils that lie in ‘big data’, the extension of algorithms and quantification into every ...
When Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, it created a sensation. Within six months, it had almost sold out its second print run and had been translated into eight languages. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the influence of which critics see in Greer’s book, had come out in France in 1949. The Feminine Mystique, b ...
In her long-form essay Dear Life, columnist and fiction writer Karen Hitchcock considers how we in Australia treat the elderly and dying. To the task she brings her formidable skills as a writer and her experience at the coalface, working as a staff physician in a Melbourne public hospital. The result is a sensitive, rigorous, and moving account that ex ...
Russell Brand made headlines when he revealed in an animated interview with Jeremy Paxman that he had never voted. Fresh from guest-editing an issue of New Statesman, Brand had issued a call to overthrow the system responsible for the income disparities and environmental degradation in the world ...
Paul Roberts’s The Impulse Society is the latest entry in a now familiar subtype of polemic: that of the society in decline, the symptoms of which run the gamut of Western post-industrialist ills from childhood obesity to the meltdown of global economic markets, and the syndrome of which is, at root, advanced capitalism. The lineage can be traced back throu ...