Our universities have scrapped degrees on peace making, preferring we learn to make war. Last year, Sydney University stopped offering its Peace and Conflict masters program, one of the only degrees on peace in the country. At the time, a…
I first discovered the films of Paolo Sorrentino in university, when I watched his most famous work, The Great Beauty (In Italian, La Grande Bellezza). The film begins in Rome, with the protagonist Jep Gambardella at his birthday party. The…
It was Tuesday when Akira disappeared. I got home early to find the house ransacked. Her clothes had been meticulously removed from the cupboard, her shoes were gone from their resting place in the hall, and her toiletries were picked…
I’ve been thinking a lot about Emily Hobhouse lately. The British welfare activist who, in 1901, denounced the British army for their treatment of enemy civilians at war. Hobhouse was the first civilian to decry the government for creating the…
When I was young, I would speak incredulously about the futility of war. We are raised peaceful in Australia, and in our lifetimes we spend on beaches and rocky coves, the threat of violence is always something far off, that…
In 1947, the Austrian philosopher Frederick von Hayek organized a gathering of economists, historians and philosophers at a Swiss spa at the base of Mount Pelerin, to discuss the state of the world following World War 2. The group called…
Martin Heidegger was born in Germany in 1889. He grew up to become one of the most influential philosophers of existentialism: the sphere of philosophy that questions human existence and our responsibilities as free and independent beings in the world.…
With the release of The Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime this month, I thought I’d explore what drew me into the books many years ago, and why I keep going back to them. I grew up reading Robert Jordan’s…
In the middle of lockdown, Russell Bugden posts a video to a local community group on Facebook. The video shows him in his front yard, playing a flugelhorn, similar to a trumpet, to the tune of John Lennon’s Imagine. Images…
This week I had the pleasure of collaborating with Chang Che on a video essay on the Japanese concept of “Omakase,” which literally means “I’ll leave it to you.” But the word means more than that. It evokes a calculated…