Author and literary theorist Stanley Fish is, among other things, a professor of law specialising in constitutional law, media law, the First Amendment, and jurisprudence. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that over the course of his book Law at the Movies he shows a forensic knowledge of the judicial system in the United States. This is no casual checklist of films that feature lawyers as characters, but a dissection of how particular statutes and legal procedures are represented on screen. He conveys how, in the hands of gifted filmmakers, ‘dry as dust soil of legal doctrine flowers into something truly substantive and dramatically compelling’.

The publication of this book – and its reception – reveals a good deal about New Zealand as well as Australia in the past four or so decades, not least the remarkable rise of indigenous as a cultural and political keyword.

He wakes in a city, briefly unsure which one. Already adrift. They have all begun to look alike, possessing the same anonymous modern functionality. Characterless, sleek. Architectural Esperanto, he calls it, ‘anonymous, with nothing to exclaim but their speed of construction and size’. His day is business: Asian multinationals, large sums of money. A curious vagueness to proceedings – the bigger the sums, the more abstract the work. He is little more than an intermediary. Home is an interchangeable hotel room on a high floor, but there’s always some trust-fund entrepreneur or high-powered businessman to remind him of his place. Night is drinking, piano bars, women of the night. Time itself is a kind of fluid construct, landing nowhere in particular. (‘No tense. Like the airports, what was is and will be.’) Only one place of possible return matters to him, and one courtesan there. Saigon. Tien. He is nameless and will remain so beyond the novel’s final page.

In the dying days of the ignominious Conservative government that he led from 2019 to 2022, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared his fall to that of Shakespeare’s Othello. ‘It is the essence of all tragic literature,’ he claimed, ‘that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.’ Fintan O’Toole seizes on this self-serving, deluded commentary as an instance of a widespread misconception of Shakespeare’s tragic art and one that can be traced, in part, to the playing fields of Eton.

Christians so often have problems with sex these days. Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage – if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

In her Preface to Telling Lives, editor Chris Wallace invites the reader to join a thought experiment: a group of biographer-refugees, driven by earthly global warming to reside on planet Alpha Centauri, ask themselves: ‘Did biographers play a role in the downfall of Homo sapiens on Earth?’ Were they, in other words, complicit in the culture of disinformation that contributed to global catastrophe? Writing in the ‘post-truth era’, Wallace highlights the centrality of truth in what has traditionally been termed the ‘biographical contract’.

Happy the media company that can afford to shed almost a hundred journalists without jeopardising the quality of its newspapers. That’s what Nine has done, with eighty-five journalists, many of them senior ones, taking up voluntary redundancies from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian Financial Review. Among them were Jewel Topsfield, Royce Millar, Farrah Tomazin, Jack Latimore, Osman Faruqi, and Martin Boulton, as reported in the Guardian.

In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.

I stood in the hidden holding with my keys    safe from judgement in my leaving    he asked me to stand back it wasn’t worth explaining me to his ex    my brother-in-law preyed on me relentlessly    I held the baby in my arms it was happy in my arms healthy    he said it was only once    I looked at the baby called only once

For German literary critic Walter Benjamin, translation belongs to the ‘afterlife’ of a work, by which he means the ‘transformation and a renewal of something living’. In this sense, a new translation extends this afterlife, renews and sustains it. This does not mean every new translation is worthy of the original, but it does bring it back into the light.