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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
The Saturday Paper •

Divided Isles

After 36 years of recognising Taiwanese sovereignty, the Solomon Islands’ switch to China was so rapid Taiwanese diplomats barely had time to lower their flag. In Divided Isles: Solomon Islands and the China Switch, Edward Acton Cavanough follows this change, from its causes to its aftermath. Cavanough notes it was inevitable that the Solomons would recognise their largest trading partner – Australia itself joined that fold in 1971. Yet this switch has had global implications, not least in Austr
The Saturday Paper •

Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived

“Imagine an enormous predatory shark weighing 60,000 kilograms,” begins Tim Flannery, summoning Otodus megalodon, a leviathan almost 20m long with the landing weight of an Airbus A320. Nicknamed “Big Meg”, this shark inspires Flannery’s latest book, a collaboration with his daughter, scientist and writer Emma Flannery. Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived begins with 17-year-old Tim spending a summer scouring beaches for fossils for the Museum of Victor
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Will a win for Donald Trump in 2024 threaten Australia?

Like me perhaps you are still coming to terms with the Trump presidency. After four years of ubiquitous coverage and surging cortisol, I began thinking he was Australia’s president. I’m not ready for four more years of fairy floss hair, barking recriminations and the impossible slipperiness of fact. Yet it might be time to start preparing for that eventuality. First, one conjoined question needs posing: What did it all mean and what would another round mean for Australia? Answering is the eminen
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Never mind the progress, what about the profit?

TECHNOLOGY Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? Richard King Monash, $32.99 The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World is Costing the Earth Guillaume Pitron Scribe, $35 Faith in technology is a volatile stock. In under a decade we’ve sunk from the Arab Spring boomtimes, when legacy media credited social media with overthrowing dictators, to our present cynical nadir. Two withering critiques of tech’s central promises could drive the price even lower. The first, a rebuke on tec
The Saturday Paper •

Taxtopia: How I discovered the injustices, scams and guilty secrets of the tax evasion game

It’s worse than you think. Whenever there’s a Pandora/Panama/Paradise Papers drop, our most cynical suspicions are exceeded. The world is divided between ordinary schmucks paying tax and the ultra-wealthy, who will do anything not to. But how do they do it? Taxtopia by The Rebel Accountant promises to expose the mechanics of tax avoidance and help us schmucks save some money. The author’s anonymity is to avoid legal repercussions. Given how candidly he describes his extensive career in Britain
The Sydney Morning Herald •

‘Time is money’: How can you avoid burnout when we’re all on the clock?

During lockdown time lost its shape. While beards sprouted beneath masks and seasons changed with more swagger against the diminished traffic, the weeks ran together. In response, I engineered a schedule that in sheer cruelty would have made Mark Wahlberg’s 3am starts reasonable. A cacophony of pre-dawn alarms from devices kept beyond reach, push-ups, cold showers, meditation and a creative writing regimen all before the day’s paid labour began. Then one day I could not get up. In Jenny Odell’s
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Misunderstood hero: This magical book will help you see mushrooms anew

If we ever get out of this environmental mess, it won’t be thanks to ego-driven men with projects and messiah complexes visible from space. It will be the quiet oddballs on their hands and knees rooting around in the underbrush that help us slow down and see the ancient wisdom around our feet. People such as Alison Pouliot, author of Underground Lovers: Encounters with Fungi, her third book on mushrooms. This is one of a slew of recent books looking to set the record straight on mushrooms. Fungi
The Sydney Morning Herald •

When a great journalist turns her scrupulous eye on herself

I began reading Janet Malcolm as did many a budding non-fiction writer with The Journalist and the Murderer. It was an affront to my cherished ideal that contributing to the record was inherently noble. To Malcolm, the journalist is half traitor, half parasite. They seduce their subject, leech their story then publish it as their own. What about when the author is the subject? “If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call me
The Sydney Morning Herald •

This ‘heroic’ book offers some hope for our future

The problem with climate change is the hot air. A belief, once widespread, was that rational discussion, awareness-raising and political debate were levers that could be pulled to correct an errant course. Today, heave though we might, these levers seem only to vent steam. Here, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope by Joëlle Gergis has a special role to play. Gergis is one of hundreds of scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessmen
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Provocative essays that belong next to those of Clive James

In the introduction to his new essay collection, Provocations, Jeff Sparrow states he feels “tremendously isolated” as a socialist writer in a country as anti-intellectual as we. Like most Australian greats, Sparrow rejects the “persona of ocker larrikinism” that mainstream writers adopt to avoid accusations of elitism. He also admits that he reads and the breadth of references he cites is difficult to find elsewhere in Australian writing. By page three, we have heard from Aurelius, Orwell, Ned
The Age •

Challenging essays that divert from the ideological rails

In the introduction to his new essay collection, Provocations, Jeff Sparrow states he feels “tremendously isolated” as a socialist writer in a country as anti-intellectual as we. Like most Australian greats, Sparrow rejects the “persona of ocker larrikinism” that mainstream writers adopt to avoid accusations of elitism. He also admits that he reads and the breadth of references he cites is difficult to find elsewhere in Australian writing. By page three, we have heard from Aurelius, Orwell, Ned
The Saturday Paper •

Of Marsupials and Men

Any history of Australian wildlife at a time of catastrophic decline is important. Too often the plight of these creatures is obscured by the very statistics used to represent them, such as the three billion impacted by the 2019-20 bushfires. Each generation normalises their experiences of wildlife but between generations the drop has been precipitous. Alistair Paton’s Of Marsupials and Men recounts the history of European colonists and the native fauna they struggled to comprehend. It begins w
The Saturday Paper •

Should We Fall to Ruin

Gallipoli’s power to sustain the culture wars is probably the only thing preventing the Pacific theatre from becoming Australia’s most important wartime legend. The Pacific resonates deeply with the present, as an ascendant Asian power expands south to the same islands contested in World War II and reawakens latent anxieties of separation from powerful but preoccupied allies. Should We Fall to Ruin by Harrison Christian – the story of the colonial outpost of Rabaul on Papua New Guinean island Ne
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