Society

The social media melee is hurting leftist organising, leaving us attacking each other rather than working together.

Will Albanese’s astonishing election victory mean Labor will finally address wealth inequality in Australia?

Stoicism has had a popular revival thanks to the practical guidance it offers on how to withstand adversity. Yet out of the ashes of ancient philosophers has emerged a new kind of self-help influencer who sells outdated masculine ideals.

Can fear be ecologically productive? Hit TV series The Last of Us capitalises off ecophobia with its fungus-zombie plot line, but the most affective genre narratives often reveal the uncanny truth that nature is not some antagonist outside us.

While the arrival of ChatGPT will see us inundated with low-creativity work, human expression remains as vital as ever.

The placenta is among the least understood of all human organs—both a fascinating symbol of immunology and nourishment, and a messy reminder that our bodies are not completely our own.

We have learned to think of Australia’s grid of roads and highways as ecological ‘non-places’. Tracing a trail to its end allows an undoing of infrastructure, and a reminder of the floodplain, wetland, scrub and forest beneath the bitumen.

As a blak attendee and participant at writers’ festivals, I love making connections but hate seeing First Nations voices excluded. How can we encourage better literary spaces for our communities, free of inappropriate questions and tokenistic curation?

The now-blocked merger, which would have seen a publishing behemoth become even larger, exposed some of the uncomfortable realities of a romanticised industry, and the very real gap between culture and commerce in the sector.

As the climate crisis worsens, it’s easy to think all hope for the future is lost. But such fatalistic thinking is neither realistic nor helpful. How do we honestly confront the current reality in a way that builds hope and action rather than despair?

Humans have looked to the sky for millennia, wondering what is out there—an expression of hope that we will matter even after we are gone.

In a time of increasing surveillance, digital privacy is a fundamental right—but one that can also be weaponised by the powerful against the vulnerable. How do we navigate the tension between theory and practice to make privacy a source of empowerment for all?

Creativity and mothering are often posited as opposing forces. But in the tedium and euphoria of parenting, writing no longer feels like a self-indulgent distraction but a necessary means of expression.

There are strict rules around what journalists can write about when reporting on crimes. But these limitations, coupled with the media’s taste for the sensational, can prevent the public from grasping the crushing scale of sexual and domestic violence.