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The Sydney Morning Herald •

The untold story of the Australians who helped fight Franco

HISTORY Anti-Fascists: Jim McNeill and his mates in the Spanish Civil WarMichael SamarasConnor Court Publishing, $39.95Doubtless European leaders today use the Spanish Civil War as a lesson to harden resolve against Vladimir Putin and Russia. Like Ukraine, the Spanish War came to represent a global struggle against authoritarianism. The Western democracies’ milquetoast non-intervention response deteriorated into appeasing Adolf Hitler, failing utterly to check fascism’s advance early, leading to...
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 •

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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