Society
Zora Simic #MeToo: Stories from the Australian movement edited by Natalie Kon-yu et al.
How do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or anti-sex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns ...
... (read more)Tom Bamforth reviews 'Breaking Point: The future of Australian cities' by Peter Seamer
In Breaking Point: The future of Australian cities, Peter Seamer quotes satirist H.L. Mencken: ‘There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.’ Seamer, a former CEO of the Victorian Planning Authority, Federation Square, and the City of Sydney ...
... (read more)David Rolph reviews 'The Coddling of the American Mind' by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
In 1987, Allan Bloom published his best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind. The American mind must have remained sufficiently open to allow it, three decades hence, to be coddled. The mind that is being closed or coddled is, in the first instance, the young adult ...
... (read more)Daniel Juckes reviews Call Them by Their True Names: American crises (and essays) by Rebecca Solnit
On the first page of her book Hope in the Dark (2004), Rebecca Solnit quotes from Virginia Woolf’s diary: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.’ Such optimism is, Solnit acknowledges, surprising. But it’s a persistent theme in her work and it finds ...
... (read more)Ceridwen Spark reviews The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the future of liberalism by Russell Blackford
Recently I was speaking with a friend about the impact of the #MeToo movement on gender politics and the implications for male academics. He suggested that there are only two speaking positions for men. The first is as a cheerleader from the sidelines. The second is as a critic, offering challenges or raising questions ...
... (read more)Sara Savage reviews 'What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City' by Michael Sorkin
Early in What Goes Up, Michael Sorkin shares an anecdote from the final collection by fellow architecture critic, the late Ada Louise Huxtable. ‘Just what polemical position do you write from, Madame?’ asks a French journalist of Huxtable, who, to Sorkin’s discomfort, fails to produce ...
... (read more)'Witch-hunt or a great awakening?: Tensions surrounding the #MeToo movement' by Felicity Chaplin
Earlier this year, following the infamous Barnaby Joyce affair, Malcolm Turnbull called for a rethink of the parliamentary code of conduct to ensure this ‘shocking error of judgement’ on Joyce’s part did not happen again. New ‘guidelines’ would prevent senior politicians from engaging in a sexual relationship with their staffers ...
... (read more)Alecia Simmonds reviews 'Rape and Resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation' by Linda Martín Alcoff
Linda Martín Alcoff ends her book Rape and Resistance with the question of love, as it has been explored in the fiction of Dominican- American writer Junot Díaz. There are no easy moral binaries in Díaz’s writing, she notes. Sex lives are navigated in the midst of intergenerational trauma transferred from mothers who are rape victims to daughters and sons. As Díaz says ...
... (read more)Marama Whyte reviews 'The face that launched a thousand lawsuits: The American women who forged a right to privacy' by Jessica Lake
Privacy is having its moment. Google users have unknowingly permitted the corporation to track their every movement and record every web search, YouTube video watched, and more. Facebook allowed data to be collected from users and their friends via a third-party application, which were then used by data analytics firm ...
... (read more)John Arnold reviews 'The People’s Force: A History of Victoria Police' by Robert Haldane
Australians tend to have an ambivalent attitude to their respective police forces. We automat- ically expect that they will be there in an emergency. We share their grief when one of their number is killed while on duty, yet we regard Ned Kelly as a folk hero, even though he was responsible for the murder of three policemen in ...
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