News and Features

Memory, Climate and the Post-Soviet sphere

The Saturday Paper •

Mussolini: Son of the Century is a warning for our times

Throughout the eight-part miniseries Mussolini: Son of the Century, available on SBS On Demand, we almost never see the sky. The camera is instead pressed up against actor Luca Marinelli’s face, tracking every bead of sweat, every throbbing vein, as chiaroscuro warps and pivots across his features. This is Mussolini as Iago, confiding his machinations against the teetering Italian democracy. “Make Italy great again,” he declaims in English, staring directly into the camera. Such a gleeful recog...
The Saturday Paper •

The art of not forgetting in Barcelona

We’re running late. By the time we have woven through central Barcelona’s warren of alleys and plazas to reach Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, the square’s entrance is fenced off by a flimsy yellow barricade. Beyond, a dozen schoolkids squeal and chase a ball over the grimy paving stones, dodging around a dormant fountain where a lone girl sits. Except for a few leafless trees, nothing dampens the crack as the ball ricochets against the façade of the Sant Felip Neri church, its sandstone rudely gouged...
Condé Nast Traveler •

In Georgia, Wine Forges National Identity—and Deep Pride

“How do you know when it's ready to harvest?” I think aloud, staring at what is, now, just a dusty bunch of grapes.Third-generation winemaker Bacho Burjanadze holds the fruit up for us, a group of sixteen travelers who just met this morning. “You see this mist?” he says, rubbing a film of natural yeast off the grape’s skin to reveal shiny sea-green flesh below the brown nebula of sugar. Last season’s late hail ruined much of the harvest, but this year has been warm and dry. Burjanadze is optimis...
Condé Nast Traveler •

An Unforgettable Train Journey Across the Stunning Landscape of Eastern Turkey

I awake at dawn. Sivas begins with apartment blocks and minarets lancing a peach sky shaded with haze. The city’s station, like every stop, is an opportunity for the smokers to file out but they have to hurry. Before the city wakes, we are off again, plunging deeper into Anatolia.From here to Erzurum was the most complicated track to build. A hundred and thirty eight tunnels were needed to traverse the Eastern Anatolian High Plateau that had once made these communities famously remote. The Turki...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Eight years’ jail in absentia: The Russian-American journalist writing today’s history

Germany has some of the world’s strictest historical regulations and considers the Holocaust a singular event that is beyond comparison. Gessen’s essay wove together official and unofficial ways the Holocaust is remembered, how the boycott-Israel movement is framed as antisemitic in Germany, and how charges of antisemitism are now wielded by the right against critics. The German-Israeli Society obliquely accused the essay of being antisemitic, important considering Gessen is Jewish and had a gra...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

It’s next to one of Italy’s most famous sites, but few visit this side

Ercolano station whips by, a blur of terracotta and graffitied concrete. We are supposed to be out there negotiating a bus ticket up Vesuvius, the only active volcano on the European mainland. Napoli’s low swagger demands local knowledge, which includes its public transport system of overlapping modes and companies. It’s a dialect we don’t speak, so we remain crammed among the armpits and steadying hands of tourists, squawking school children and their underpaid teachers.Vesuvius, the only activ...
The Saturday Paper •

How Japan built a market onselling Australian natural gas

By all accounts, Takayuki Ueda’s March 2023 speech in Parliament House rattled senior Labor ministers. The message from the INPEX chief executive was barely softened by the language of international diplomacy, in which he, as a former trade minister, was fluent. As the head of Japan’s largest oil and gas producer, Ueda took aim at a key tool the Australian government was using to reduce domestic exposure to price spikes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year earlier. The Australian Domes
ABC Religion & Ethics •

When the thrill is gone: What AI is doing to the creative process — and how humans can resist it

In March of this year, a Reddit post titled “I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night” sparked a flurry of sharing and comments across social media — the original garnering some 4,100 upvotes. Before long, it was being picked up (and picked over) by the tech commentariat; the story was confirmed in a WIRED article, for which the author of the Reddit post was interviewed. We’ll call her “Steph”. The post detailed how a recent version update to the image generation
The Age •

His book was rejected 13 times, now it’s a hit TV show

There’s an irony in the small-screen adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer being a hit with viewers and critics alike, as Hollywood has long been one of his targets. “The Unofficial Ministry of Propaganda for the United States” as he calls Hollywood in the book is “a part of the mechanism of American military and political hegemony, and imperialism that produced someone like me”, Nguyen says, referring to his own experience as a refugee who fled Vietnam, yet who accepts that he
The Saturday Paper •

Federal government unveils New Vehicle Efficiency Standard

On Sunday the federal government released the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES), a proposal that would introduce limits on vehicle emissions averaged across automotive manufacturers’ fleets, beginning on January 1, 2025, but stepping up targets to eventually bring Australia into line with standards in the United States by 2028. The proposal distils 2700 submissions from the public, lobby groups and organisations. “This is required because almost every advanced economy has implemented a New
The Saturday Paper •

The companies monitoring staff using bossware

John Pane, chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, says it is like the panopticon. “You never know whether the boss is watching you, which is why it’s called bossware. It works in the same way.” Pane has a long history in senior privacy roles in the big banks, Australia Post and Deloitte. Over this time he has witnessed the evolution of the internet and with it workplace surveillance that has evolved into “bossware”. Pane emphasises that surveillance is nothing new. It began as soon as the in
The Saturday Paper •

WIRES’ unspent bushfire donations

During the Black Summer bushfires, images of injured and charred wildlife flashed across international news. Australia’s largest animal rescue service, WIRES, raised $91 million through its bushfire appeal. In the four years since, less than a quarter of that money has been spent. Critics complain the funds are not evenly distributed. Frontline volunteers say they are under-resourced and forced into onerous compliance procedures. In some instances, they are paying vet bills themselves. They say
The Guardian •

The office returns: are the days of Australians working from home numbered?

“For me an office environment is quite overwhelming and quite difficult,” says Josh, looking out his kitchen window at the suburbs of western Sydney. He works for a major corporation that recently requested staff come back in to offices for half their working week. The in-person workplace is a complex place to navigate for Josh, who lives with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. “I didn’t realise how much of the energy drain was actually just from being in the office until I di
The Sydney Morning Herald •

‘Do you know how many followers I have?’ Dodging influencers in Bali

Bali has many reputations. Kuta, once the centre of the tourist universe, is in decline having never recovered its pre-COVID glory when hordes of Bintang-singleted Aussies staggered through the Hard Rock Cafe foyer loaded with pirated DVDs. In the last few years, attention has shifted west to Canggu, into influencer territory, where every cafe, restaurant and bar is styled to be the perfect backdrop – the visually stunning but bland dragonfruit featuring frequently. At a beach club after a frie
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Inside the town the CIA dubbed ‘the most secret place on Earth’

Historical places are often anticlimactic to visit. Expecting they will maintain their resonance indefinitely, you arrive to find the concrete and flaking paint strangely mute. This is why most have museums – to do the talking. Yet some places wear their history indelibly. One such place is Long Tieng. Known within the CIA as “the most secret place on Earth”, a slew of swashbuckling declassified Cold War tales emerged from when the site became Lima Site 20A. From this runway the US conducted its
The Saturday Paper •

Quitting the energy sector to fight climate change

James wasn’t long out of university when he started working as an engineer for energy giant Santos. He remembers feeling tremendous respect for the “high-stakes” work and technical prowess of his colleagues, but he also remembers his alarm over the climate crisis building, followed by the inescapable conviction that Santos’s core business was contributing to the problem. “I saw it all with a growing sense of real, deep cynicism,” he says, asking not to use his real name. James recalls becoming
The Sydney Morning Herald •

The secret underground city the US tried to bomb out of existence

How long you’ve been in Laos will decide how you react to Viengxay’s landscape. To new arrivals, bungalows nestled between towering misty limestone peaks will constitute an achingly beautiful sight but to the acclimatised, this is just more Northern Laos. And that’s the point. Viengxay was a secret underground city used by the Lao Communist Party (Pathet Lao) between 1964-73, to provide shelter from Yankee bombs, allowing the upper echelons here to conduct a revolution and win a civil war. At it
The Saturday Paper •

The costs of becoming a digital nomad

I am speaking with Zackery Bertram from a sound-insulated booth in the co-living co-working space Alt_ChiangMai. Through the padded door is a sleek shared office of flatpack desks and chairs, empty for the weekend but for a few diligent digital nomads affixed to their screens. Outside is a sunny Saturday in Thailand’s second largest city, although seasonal burning in the surrounding mountains placed yesterday’s air quality among the world’s worst 10 cities, between Kathmandu and Krasnoyarsk. De
ABC Everyday •

'Don't expect to live inside a brochure': The reality of my life as a digital nomad

Throughout my twenties I binged: working, saving hard while living in a dingy share house then cashing out for a big trip. From a career perspective it was reckless. While often I would be accepted back to the same job when I returned, I was too risky to promote. In my thirties I needed a more sustainable model. Once upon a time these were mythical creatures who had escaped the gravitational force of conventional employment: they lived a purely remote lifestyle, logging in from hotel rooms, c
Traveller •

Travelling a Chinese 'Belt and Road' railway through South-East Asia

Singapore to Luang Prabang by train became possible only in December 2021 as the world was peeking out from lockdown. Part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, the Laos to China railway, one of three planned branches, the others through Myanmar and Vietnam, will one day converge on Bangkok. For passengers this closes a chain that more-or-less connects Singapore along four thousand kilometres of metre gauge track to the Chinese network. More-or-less because the purist will take exception to the
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Criticism

Books

The Age •

In the era of the tech bro, Bill Gates’ memoir is refreshingly human

MEMOIRSource CodeBill GatesAllen Lane $55It was a raw March morning when the first hint came that I might not be as smart as I thought. Through the chalk-dust fog, the lecture’s 200 students were fidgeting on perilously tiered benches. Each seat was occupied by another student who had just finished near the top of their school. Was the chill crawling up my spine the first hint of autumn, a jolt of competitive adrenaline or the beginnings of identity collapse? Each semester the class size halved,...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Alexei Navalny’s memoir is a reminder of literature’s true purpose

The West’s Alexei Navalny is a sketch joining three data points: his miraculous survival from poisoning, his return to Russia and his death in prison. To Putin, he was another Rasputin who bewitched Russia with the promise of democracy and survived the Kremlin’s attempts to poison, smear and assassinate. Until he didn’t.Patriot, his memoir, renders Navalny back to human proportions, a man who gets butterflies before public speaking, enjoys Rick and Morty, i...
The Saturday Paper •

Working for the Brand

Consider a government that monitors its citizens’ private behaviour according to contradictory laws that are arbitrarily enforced and can change without warning. Any perceived violation will be summarily punished as a threat to government legitimacy. Such an entity would be sanctioned and protested as Orwellian. Yet corporations, universities, publishers, media outlets – basically any entity with a brand – have increasingly fallen into such behaviour. So says frontline labour relations lawyer a...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

From brunch to living in a war zone: how war upended a writer’s life

In an article in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Oleksandr Mykhed frames the Russian invasion of Ukraine not as belligerent power play or geopolitical stunt but an outright assault on Ukraine’s very existence.The passage begins with a dream Mykhed has one night, a “whimsical homage” to Catcher in the Rye, but instead of catching children falling from a cliff,...
The Saturday Paper •

The Great Divide: Alan Kohler’s rock-solid analysis on the Australian housing crisis

I reached adulthood the moment housing prices bolted. Now ownership is an uncomfortable subject that silently divides my peer group between those who are mortgaged to the hilt and many who have given up on home ownership entirely. In The Great Divide, an expansion of his 2023 Quarterly Essay, Alan Kohler meticulously sorts through the economics and historical roots of every Australian’s favourite subject: housing affordability. It is the basis of our inequality and getting worse. Everyone shoul...
The Saturday Paper •

Adam Forrest Kay’s Escape from Shadow Physics

Since pretty much the beginning, quantum mechanics has been marooned in a quiet crisis. Its vague pronouncements find no purchase in our macro-level intuition. Instead, it sparks wild corollaries such as the multiverse or pronouncements like “the moon exists only when we’re looking at it”. In Escape from Shadow Physics: The Quest To End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory, Adam Forrest Kay argues that physics is adrift in an age similar to when epidemiology relied on disease-carrying miasma or comet...
The Saturday Paper •

Slick: Australia’s toxic relationship with Big Oil by Royce Kurmelovs

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of these pages that the fossil fuel lobby has captured both major parties. That’s evident from the way in which Labor’s Future Gas Strategy, in the words of one political observer, took “Morrison’s gas-fired recovery, put it in the microwave and heated it up.” So how did we arrive at the point where a change in government is merely a rebranding exercise, where the demand for action from the scientific community and the Australian public is still bar...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Why adapting is the key to survival in climate change

THE ENVIRONMENTLiving HotClive Hamilton & George WilkenfeldHardie Grant, $27.99Clive Hamilton is a peddler of unvarnished truths; politically unpopular in the moment, they are often accepted in the fullness of time. His 2018 Silent Invasion – about Chinese influence in Australian politics – was dumped at the last moment by a jittery publisher. Today, its findings are broadly accepted with the political wind blowing in the opposite direction.In Living Hot: Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Plan...
The Saturday Paper •

Love Across Class

Class has fallen out of fashion. Today, gender, sexuality and race are the dominant prisms through which we refract Australian identity. Perhaps it’s the Americanisation of our discourse: invisible barriers never suited a nation of “temporarily frustrated millionaires”, as Steinbeck once labelled Americans. But class hasn’t evaporated, as anthropologist Eve Vincent and sociologist Rose Butler demonstrate in Love Across Class, using love’s desires, negotiations and conflicts to map its contours.
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Myths, spin and outright lies: the truth behind the logging industry

It was once possible to walk the 1500 kilometres from Melbourne to Brisbane enclosed in native forest. Today Australian forests have been pushed to the margins, surviving as scattered islands, logged around and through. In most states this continues, enabled by expedient myths about forest’s resilience and replaceability that have become entrenched in popular wisdom. These range from “logging is good for fire safety” to “wildlife can simply scuttle away to another tree as soon as one is felled”.
The Saturday Paper •

Wild Quests

In Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals, Satyajit Das, an avid birder and former banker, writes of 30 years visiting wild places from the Congo to Antarctica. Das has witnessed ecotourism’s entire cycle – from idealistic and heady exploration to now, when the last pockets of wilderness are compromised and on the brink of vanishing. Ecotourism once promised a chance to immerse yourself in nature, contribute to conservation and provide opportunity to locals. Naturally,
The Saturday Paper •

The Shortest History of Italy

For the past three months I have been wrestling with pre-modern bureaucracy, soothing my nerves with Renaissance art and gaining belt notches thanks to complex carbohydrates here in Italy, a country that remains an enigma. Well, until I began reading The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King, which answered how a loose conglomeration of city states that has prized beauty over practicality at nearly every turn came to be a nation. Italy begins with the Roman Empire. There’s the parade of famili
The Sydney Morning Herald •

China’s ‘counter-historians’ challenging the Communist Party

POLITICS Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and the Battle for the Future Ian Johnson Allen Lane, $55 In 2012, I took a five-week bullet-train tour of China’s East Coast. Hoisted on pylons, I soared above the fields and villages of old China, to the surging cities of a bold new country. My final stop was a visit to Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing. A long stream of mourners filed through to view the Great Helmsman, wrapped in the hammer and sickle. Many lay yellow roses, which, lest the pile ti
The Saturday Paper •

Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places

Mining is a dirty business but one we all need. Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places by Christopher Pollon explains just how dirty and how necessary. The book concentrates on mines throughout the global south, in Papua New Guinea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia and Chile. It’s as bad as you expect. In some pristine location, prospectors discover a rare element coveted by the increasingly complex electronics manufacturing sector. Immediately a foreign opera
The Saturday Paper •

Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space

The title of British philosopher A. C. Grayling’s new book – Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space – offers a more urgent question than you might think. The race is already on for the moon’s platinum, lithium and titanium, as well as for control of the ice that can be processed into fuel for onward leaps to Mars and beyond. In addition to the ex-Cold War powers, India, China, Japan and the European Union all have space programs. Private companies are also locked i
The Saturday Paper •

Quantum Bullsh*t: How to Ruin Your Life with Advice from Quantum Physics

The problems with Canadian quantum physicist Chris Ferrie’s new book, Quantum Bullsh*t, begin at the title. An intent to confront misinformation should be stated directly, without the wink of an asterisk. The underlying concept is solid: the language of quantum physics – entanglement, superposition, Schrödinger’s cat – has been hijacked by peddlers of New Age hogwash desperate to harness some reflected credibility. The author says this must be stopped and he is right. Throughout the Covid-19 pan...
The Saturday Paper •

The Shortest History of Economics

How did everything become so unfair? As a child I had a keen sense for the rigged. During family games of Monopoly, frustration mounted until some unlucky roll condemned me to jail and I would flip the board. I have now curbed my Godzilla tantrums but today’s real estate ads are enough to summon the same storm clouds. Andrew Leigh’s excellent The Shortest History of Economics explains this was the point of Monopoly. Writer Lizzie Magie created The Landlord’s Game to educate players about 19th-c
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Tyson Yunkaporta’s book bristles with revelation

“There is certainly magic in the world, but it only works when you don’t try to control it and scale it.” says Tyson Yunkaporta in Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. Tyson Yunkaporta worries that Indigenous knowledge will be appropriated and exploited. To prove this point he posits a thought experiment: what if snake scales, the most efficient form of propulsion in the natural world, could be mechanised into a perpetual-motion machine? The surplus energy would need to b
The Saturday Paper •

Best Australian Political Cartoons 2023

Cartoonists are the court jesters of the news section. While journalists are constrained by fact, cartoonists speak truth. Consider Glen Le Lievre’s frame of the ghosts of robo-debt at the foot of Scott Morrison’s bed, captioned with “I don’t accept the premise of your question” – a brutal reference to the former prime minister’s shameless lack of accountability in the face of the scandal’s suicides. How would this be conveyed in print without a defamation suit? To flip through editor Russ Radc
The Sydney Morning Herald •

How AI forces us to look inwards at our own minds

“At the heart of artificial intelligence is a fundamental deceit,” claims AI doyen Toby Walsh, in Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World, his fourth book on the subject. The con starts at the name. AI is not true intelligence. It does not arrive at conclusions (or outputs) through understanding or reason. Instead, these are predictive machines, reared on vast data sets, which simulate coherence based on the probability that one word or pixel will follow another. The difference is cr
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Out Now: The Red Wake (Random House)

Kurt Johnson's extensive journey through contemporary Russia and its old satellites is a vivid portrait of how the ghost of that order still haunts the present. But it is also underpinned by a strong family tale, his grandparents having fled communist Czechoslovakia, part of the story taking place in the family's substantial old summer house with the Kafka-esque name, the Castle. He visits the last existing gulag and the ex-KGB headquarters in Moscow. The writing ... has an evocative immediacy, is historically informed and nuanced, ideologically alert and alive to Western narratives and Russian revisionist nostalgia.

Steven Carroll, The Age