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3 days ago | 
abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee
It is a problem many people increasingly feel they can neither avoid nor ignore: we could characterise it as the problem of loving the art, but being unsettled by the behaviour or the beliefs of the artist who created it. This is a perfectly serviceable way of grasping the outline of the matter, but, on further reflection, it fails to get to its heart.
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1 week ago | 
abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee
Fresh from a commanding victory at the federal election, Anthony Albanese began to bundle his campaign policy offerings together in a new package — not just to give these political commitments a kind of internal coherence, but also to stake out what could be distinctive about his premiership as a whole. The term he reached for to sum it all up is “progressive patriotism”.
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2 weeks ago | 
abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee
Over the last two years, many in Australia and around the world have watched in horror as Sudan, Gaza and other zones of mass violence descend into humanitarian crises of devastating proportions.
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3 weeks ago | 
abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee
“Joy” is a strange kind of word. It describes a feeling that we all know, but do not know exactly how to value. It’s not happiness — which can, after all, be interior, quiet and express itself as a kind of contentment — nor is it merely pleasure (even though, in many languages, “pleasure” and “joy” are etymologically related). Joy is not only more exuberant than happiness, it is also weightier than pleasure.
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1 month ago | 
abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee
In 2000, after a hotly contested American election and amid an equally contested vote count, outgoing US President Bill Clinton famously remarked to a pool of reporters, “The American people have now spoken, but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said.”In this particular case, what was at issue is whether Democratic candidate Al Gore or Republican candidate George W. Bush won the state of Florida, and therefore the election.
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1 month ago | 
abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee
Democracy is often lauded as a peculiarly just and effective form of government — one that enjoys the benefits that flow from twin virtues of popular engagement and political accountability. And yet the effectiveness and resilience of democratic politics depends on the trust voters have in political institutions.
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1 month ago | 
abc.net.au | Scott Stephens |Sinead Lee
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first federal election to be held in Australia after the passage of Senator Herbert Payne’s private member’s bill, which made voting compulsory. In 1922, only 57.95 per cent of registered voters turned out. Payne’s home state of Tasmania had the poorest showing (45.93 per cent), whereas Queensland — where voting in state elections had been compulsory since 1914 — saw the highest (82.66 per cent).
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1 month 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.
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2 months 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.
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2 months 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.
