The Rest

The other reviews

The Saturday Paper •

The Shortest History of Egypt

The ancient record is naturally biased towards power. For instance, anthropologists were slow to acknowledge the complexity of the Nok civilisation (1000 BCE–300 CE) that occupied a region in today’s Nigeria. Where hierarchy leaves towering monuments, the Nok expressed themselves through musing terracotta statues. Eternally relevant, materially they provided less resilient remains. While expressions of power persist, flatter societies often succumb to time.At the beginning of The Shortest Histor...
The Sydney Morning Herald •

Writer Julian Barnes bids a masterful farewell with his last novel

FICTIONDeparture(s)Julian BarnesJonathan Cape, $39.99A Belgian interviewer was blunt: “So, Mr Barnes, you are now 76 and you will never win a Nobel Prize because you are a white man — are you raging against the dying of the light?” – hinting not just at the end of the Booker Prize-winning author’s life but at the passing of his generation of writers. Julian Barnes batted away the question, but it still left a mark.These days, Barnes and his mostly white, mostly male cohort are thinning in more w...
The Saturday Paper •

Exclusive! Dispatches from The Paris End

In Australia, serious writing faces a gamut of challenges from a lingering suspicion of any elevated register to a shrinking literary market overshadowed by ravenous LLMs poised to ingest any work the moment it emerges. Now our second oldest literary magazine, Meanjin, has announced its impending closure, it leads me to wonder in darker moments if serious Australian writing has a future at all. Into this breach step three writers, Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz, who met in a pub j...
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 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 •

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 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 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 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 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 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...
7am •

Nigel Farage, the pornographer and their weird Australian tour

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. The right-wing, anti-immigration politician who led the Brexit campaign in Britain is currently touring Australia. Nigel Farage has become increasingly irrelevant in British politics, so why is he commanding speaking fees and being given a hero's welcome by Sky News presenters and One Nation politicians? It could be a cynical money grabbing exercise, a play for political influence in Australia, or both. Today, journalist Kurt Johnson, on the
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 •

What is Nigel Farage doing in Australia?

As the crumpled suits from the day’s trade shows trundle out into a wet evening, the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre prepares for An Entertaining Evening with Nigel Farage. In the foyer, a crowd of three distinct groups builds: most numerous are the white-haired retirees, dressed up for a night in town; then there are the keyboard trolls, all young males, dishevelled, eyes darting; finally, figures dressed like Fox News anchors, well-coiffed in chintzy glamour, shaking hands and kiss
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 Sydney Morning Herald •

‘At first, I was cautious’: Can a short book answer the world’s biggest questions?

Remember the “why” game? Most children discover it during their intensive questioning phase. They ask “why is something as it is?” You answer only to be instantly asked “why?” again. That’s basically it. After a few rounds it has veered into an existential nightmare for you, while the child has long-since stopped listening and is there only to ride the sadistic thrill at your facial rictus as you plumb the void for meaning. To maximise your chances of survival, come armed with something such as
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