Vol 34 No 6

25 March 2024

ARTS AND CULTURE

Nam Le's 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
- Peter Craven
- 05 April 2024
1 Comment
Nam Le is one of the strangest writers in the history of Australian literature and is also one of the most incandescently brilliant — which is very weird if you bear in mind that his primary claim to legendary status is a book of short fiction published in 2008. With 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Le returns with a new work that encapsulates the brilliance and complexity that fans and critics have come to expect.
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ECONOMICS

Where does nuclear fit in Australia's zero-carbon future?
- David James
- 04 April 2024
2 Comments
Big changes are occurring in the financial sector that suggest the climate change agenda is starting to lose crucial support with the world’s largest fund managers. As support for ESG goals wane, the conversation is shifting to nuclear energy. But does it make any financial sense?
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AUSTRALIA

Dodgy brothers lawmaking
- Andrew Hamilton
- 04 April 2024
1 Comment
This week, the Federal Government quickly introduced a new policy in response to a recent High Court decision that prevents them from indefinitely detaining a small number of individuals they wish to remove from Australia.
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AUSTRALIA

Will AUKUS lead Australia down the nuclear path?
- Binoy Kampmark
- 04 April 2024
3 Comments
Nuclear energy has snuck its way onto the table of Australian public policy. Given that Australia is a country that hosts military nuclear platforms, the impetus to translate it into a civilian context is proving powerful.
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INTERNATIONAL

Americans look after each other because their government won't
- Sarah Klenbort
- 03 April 2024
3 Comments
Americans, facing high healthcare costs, frequently resort to crowdfunding for essential treatments, highlighting a reliance on volunteerism to fill government gaps. Meanwhile, Australians, benefiting from a higher tax-funded safety net, donate less to charity. So how do differing approaches to social welfare influence the spirit of community and generosity?
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RELIGION

Old rituals, new revelations
- Geraldine Doogue
- 02 April 2024
5 Comments
Each year, the Stations of the Cross liturgy affects me more than I had planned. Annually, I am left wondering: why does this ritual work? Well, it has much to offer: a narrative with exposition, climax and denouement; characters big and small; blood, gore, politics, virtue, cowardice and a pointer towards mystery.
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RELIGION

Flowers for Father Rahner
- John Honner
- 02 April 2024
12 Comments
Karl Rahner, a Jesuit priest whose ideas helped modernize the Church, left an indelible legacy on contemporary Catholicism. On the 40th anniversary of his death, what can a flower left at his niche tell us about the lasting bonds between belief, memory, and the enduring search for human connection?
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AUSTRALIA

Tunes, tales and true connections
- Julian Butler
- 02 April 2024
There is beauty in returning to places that experience has made so full of memory that they have become layered with meaning. Just as there is in hearing music that you have listened to at different moments of your life, and that is filled with meaning, not just for you, but even moreso for the artist standing before you and in myriad different ways for the audience with you.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Sins of the fathers
- Ken Haley
- 29 March 2024
2 Comments
Recent years have made clerical child sexual abuse a badge of shame within Australia’s Catholic hierarchy, and rightly so. But Anne Manne’s new book, Sins of the fathers, will give pause to those who blame these offences on the rule of hieratic celibacy.
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ARTS AND CULTURE

Easterwards
- John Kelly
- 28 March 2024
Dante and Hopkins named it lavishly: Christ’s vita nuova, shared to Easter in us; Ignatius of Loyola called it: magnanimity . . . How could we then, receiving, hoard or dispense it stintingly, like Scrooge before his Christmas haunting?
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AUSTRALIA

Spare the rod and respect the child
- Andrew Hamilton
- 28 March 2024
2 Comments
As a response to a wave of youth crime, some State Governments and Federal politicians have committed to policies that neglect the human reality of the young people concerned. This will likely have negative consequences both for those immediately affected and for society at large.
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AUSTRALIA

Shifting the goalposts on discrimination and inclusion
- Michael McVeigh
- 28 March 2024
How do we live and work happily together with people whose views on the world and human nature are fundamentally different to our own? Can different beliefs within organisations be lived with, or even celebrated, without necessarily undermining the organisation’s own core mission?
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AUSTRALIA

How Sam Kerr sparked a national conversation on racism
- Joel Hodge
- 27 March 2024
8 Comments
Sam Kerr’s alleged comment to a UK police officer has divided opinion as to whether it constitutes racism. The central question involves whether a structural understanding of racism should supersede a universal, neutral sense of racism of the kind that is enshrined in law.
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AUSTRALIA

The Easter immortality project
- Justine Toh
- 27 March 2024
2 Comments
As the world grapples with the promise and perils of technological advancement, billionaire Bryan Johnson's quest for eternal life underscores a broader societal fascination with defying death. Can science truly outpace the inevitability of mortality?
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AUSTRALIA

40 Days: Unbounded love
- Andrew Hamilton
- 27 March 2024
Love is a much-used word, and, like domestic cutlery, it tends to lose its shine. Its boundaries then shrink to the average rather than to the inspiring. For that reason we need stories that stretch the ceiling of love beyond anything we could imagine. Not because we think that we could reach such far places, but because it enlarges the horizon of our lives.
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RELIGION

Palm Sunday protests and the pursuit of peace
- Andrew Hamilton
- 27 March 2024
1 Comment
Palm Sunday stands at the intersection of the world of justice and goodness and the brutal political realities in human societies. It mocks the pretensions of power that considers only the expediency of actions and not the human reality of the people affected by them. At that intersection today, refugees lie in the centre.
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AUSTRALIA

Lest we regret
- Barry Gittins
- 21 March 2024
4 Comments
Considering how whistleblowers were punished for reporting the misdeeds of our warriors alongside the judicial exposure of war crimes, we've experienced something of a cultural about-face when it comes to celebrating the Anzac mythos.
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Vol 34 No 6