Over the last two years, the capacity to manage mood has been monetised through the sharing of fake news and political feeds atuned to reader preference: you can also make people happy by confirming their biases.

There was a farmer who lived in the nineteenth century on the Currawong Creek, about 20 minutes as the crow flies from me in southern New South Wales. His name was James Roberts and that name should be known in Australia but it is not. Roberts lived in a big stone house, which in the style of the times hid its occupants from the hard Australian sunlight. He was born in 1812, the son of a pardoned convict called William, who made his living building roads. James was one of the first white settlers in the district and subsequently squatted […]

There were settled people here when Cook claimed the continent. We are still here, have always been here and are going nowhere.

Reflections of Truth and Truthfulness When I told a friend what I intended to call this essay, he said, partly to provoke me, that we do not need essays on epistemology or conceptual analysis to understand Trump’s rise to power. We need to understand the powerful economic interests he served, he explained. To that I answer, yes and no. We do, of course, need to understand the economic and other social forces that have taken us to this extraordinary moment in the history of post-war democratic politics. We need also the insights of social theory, history, social psychology and clinical […]

The smile is glittering, the young face shines, lined with sweat, the grey-blue suit is shiny too, like armour. Tricolours flying, and the stage around the young man is crowded, people are all but falling off it, his blonde wife is, as always, at his side, a little older than he (24 years!), but with a Bardot styling. The crowd is going wild. They have a very French way of doing it, a sort of sudden excitement that goes from poise to infinity in no time at all, a jigging and dancing, in good suits, seamed stockings and high heels. […]

Elites, democracy and the taint of the clever Has our obsession with success created an electorate of the aggrieved and the disenchanted? Years ago, after a family do, my brother-in-law and I had a drink at the back bar of his local. Joe was a regular; many of the other regulars had also been to the function. I am not uncomfortable in such bars. I spent a fair few years in my twenties working on building sites and on the council. I had lived, for most of my childhood, on a commission estate. But Joe’s mates knew that in the […]

Progressive social discourse almost seems calculated to alienate lower class whites.

Scented Memento by Kathryn Hummel

The political life is no life at all by Katharine Murphy

Halal Chops and Fascist Cupcakes Shakira Hussein