It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an interpersonal bond —…
It is suitably ironic that one of the most poignant, and pertinent, moments in Homer’s The Odyssey was airbrushed out of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. The first time we meet Odysseus,…
It is hard to imagine a series of events more tragic, more unseemly, more emblematic of the performativity and polarisation that dominate our time, than the premature rise, sudden fall and untimely…
At a time of profound polarisation, when the fracturing of media ecosystems has been so complete that any agreement on threats to our common life seems impossible, an issue has emerged capable of…
The widespread availability of GLP-1 based drugs has been lauded as a “revolution in weight loss” and as inaugurating the “end of obesity”. As we’ve discussed previously, health benefits aside, there…
Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports…
Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are…
According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last…
It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a…
Essential to the profitability and widespread adoption of modern technologies is the need to conceal their costs — the human labour, the unjust or exploitative working conditions, the environmental…
