In 1983, actor Noni Hazlehurst was invited to London by Robyn Archer to be part of Archer’s new cabaret Cut and Thrust. Hazlehurst, less than a decade out of acting school and having just been fêted in Cannes for her performance of Nora in the film adaptation of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1982), was ‘thrilled to bits’.

A recent advertisement in The Guardian headed ‘Can’t get enough of the US election?’ prompted reflections on our seeming obsession with the current presidential campaign. Myriad readers follow the contest closely, almost compulsively. On the hour, we check the major websites for the latest polls or Trumpian excesses. In a way, the election feels more urgent, galvanising, consequential, and downright entertaining then next year’s federal election.

It is a sign of the times that A Better Australia: Politics, public policy and how to achieve lasting reform begins with a discussion of climate and energy policy. No policy field better illustrates the deficiencies in Australia’s politics over the past generation. It is a tale, as one of the book’s authors, John Brumby, reminds us, of avoidable failure and lost opportunities, as the issue was subjected to the narrower, more immediate incentives offered by partisanship and opportunism.

A gang of cones hangs before me, long and cylindrical,
neither dark nor light – the colour of Milchkaffee.

One would overfill my palm. Last night the field
reinvented itself as one of those beds we lie down in

In a survey on humanity’s most vital inventions, the British public ranked the flush toilet above mobile phones, beds, shoes, and the combustion engine. Who can blame them? In a well-sewered world, we are protected from many of the infectious diseases that contributed to making our unplumbed ancestors’ lives nasty, brutish, and short. Cholera, hepatitis, polio, and the diarrhoeal diseases that continue to kill more people globally than acts of violence all implicate faecal transmission. It seems only rational to dispatch our excrement as quickly as possible in a cleansing torrent of water.

What an uneven battle! Thomas Blamey, the little guy, rural-bred, rough, rumbunctious, distrusted; Douglas MacArthur, nobly bred, imperious, destined for greatness, the darling of his own heart. Roland Perry shows the true picture. MacArthur (1880-1964) was a scheming, narcissistic, lying braggard and manipulator. Blamey (1884-1951) fought to keep his Australians from fighting with the Americans, and tried, often with little effect, to influence his prime minister to act in the interests of the Australian troops and the Australian people, while displaying worrying moral failures of his own.

As leading US historian Eric Foner wrote in his classic account, The Story of American Freedom (1999), it is the ‘story of freedom’ that conveys Americans’ favourite idea of itself. Of course, its meaning and uses change over time. It is a flexible value. We only need to look at candidates’ promises in the US election, with Kamala Harris declaring, ‘We choose freedom’ and Donald Trump (‘We believe in the majesty of freedom’) planning to build ten new futuristic ‘freedom cities’.

Kate Fagan is a writer, musician, and scholar whose third collection, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. She is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and runs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers. She also chairs the Sydney Review of Books advisory board. Her latest volume of poetry, Song in the Grass, was published by Giramondo in June 2024.

A book connecting Artificial Intelligence with storytelling around a Stone Age campfire certainly piqued my interest, especially given the stratospheric success of its author’s earlier works. Indeed, historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011) was so successful that in 2019 he and his husband, Itzik Yahav, cofounded ‘Sapienship’, an initiative advocating on global challenges through focused conversations and global responsibility. In this spirit, Harari’s latest book, Nexus, focuses on the AI revolution. His Homo Deus (2015) also tackled this theme, but here Harari recapitulates ideas from both these earlier books and then develops them using an innovative framework that reviews history in terms of the impact of information networks. It is the relaying of information, says Harari, that connects Stone Age storytellers and AI.

Would it all have turned out differently had InterActiveCorp stared down the online mob? In December 2013, a public relations executive with the company, Justine Sacco, posted a joke on social media, satirising American insularity and racism. Sacco was about to board a flight to South Africa, from where her anti-apartheid family had emigrated, when she tweeted: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding, I’m white.’ While Sacco was in the air and offline, her tweet went viral. A social media mob condemned her as a racist, established that she worked at InterActiveCorp, and pressured the company to sack her. ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time,’ posted one of her critics. The company duly sacked her.