Scott Stephens

1 week ago | abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Amanda Roberts

If there is ever a time when politicians should be able to expect a fair share of the public’s attention, it’s during an election campaign. After all, this triennial event is when they can demonstrate to the Australian public that they’ve been attentive to their aspirations and concerns for the future, and have developed a series of policies able to address those hopes and fears.

2 weeks ago | abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee

This is the second of two episodes recorded in front of a live audience as part of a special “Week with Students”, a collaboration between Radio National and ABC Education. Shortly after OpenAI made its powerful generative AI tool, ChatGPT, available to the public in October 2023, there was a torrent of reports forecasting the “end of the essay” or warning that the advent of advanced chatbots would sound the death knell of academic integrity.

2 weeks ago | abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee

This is the first of two episodes recorded in front of a live audience as part of a special “Week with Students”, a collaboration between Radio National and ABC Education. Of the three great dystopian novels published on either side of the Second World War — Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1931), George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949) and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) — it is Bradbury’s vision of a future without books that can lay legitimate claim to being the most prescient.

4 weeks ago | abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee

We arrive, at last, at the end of our Ramadan series — and the second of our pair of positive responses to radical disappointment with the world. For some, hope is untrustworthy, amounting to little more than dreaming or wish-fulfilment. For others, hope can turn into kind of bad faith demand, leading to dishonest politics (in the name of being up-beat or staying positive) or even to habituated practices of avoidance.

1 month ago | abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee

For the last two episodes, we’ve been discussing what might be called negative or aversive responses to radical disappointment with the world — even though, as we’ve seen, both despair and fear have characteristics which commend them. In the next two episodes, we’re turning to rather more positive responses. There is little doubt that pessimism enjoys a certain cultural cache these days. It is easy to say that things are bad and getting worse.