They have found Noah's Ark again. Or perhaps they are about to find it. I have been hearing variations of this story since I was a child, which by now gives Noah's Ark the unusual distinction of having been discovered as many times as it disappeared. The latest story concerns the Durupınar formation in eastern Turkey, not far from Mount Arara...
Albanese's line this week sounds like a break with the past. It is not. He concedes that the post-1945 order is "no longer fit for purpose," then asks for the thing that order always was: institutions with more legitimacy, nations that agree to abide by rules, and Australia in the room that writes the replacement. Strengthen the furniture. Ke...
There is something almost irritating about Liechtenstein. According to much modern political thinking, a country like this should either not exist or should have been swallowed long ago by something bigger, more centralised and supposedly more efficient. Instead, squeezed into the Alps between Switzerland and Austria, this tiny principality has sur...
Something strange has happened to the Australian university. It still speaks the language of scholarship, public service, teaching and research. It still receives enormous public support and enjoys privileges justified by its educational mission. Yet at the top of the institution an executive remuneration culture has developed that increasingly res...
1. The central proposition Dr David Martin presents COVID-19 not as an unexpected natural emergency but as the culmination of decades of coronavirus research, patenting, commercial planning and biological manipulation. His principal argument is that the history of coronavirus research must be examined as a continuous proc...
Processed meat has acquired one of those health labels that everybody recognises and surprisingly few people can define. We are told to eat less of it because it causes cancer. Fair enough. But what exactly are we being told not to eat? Is a steak processed because the butcher cut it? Is mince processed because it went through a grinder? Is frozen ...
The Prime Minister just came out and said it: their digital duty of care laws are not about protecting the kids, but come from a fear that "misinformation" is pulling Australians "away from the centre and more and more to the extremes". The IPA identified this very point weeks ago. Earlier this month, Dr Andrew Bushnell outlined how the digital dut...
Donald Trump has given Iran something that advocates of nuclear proliferation in Tehran could scarcely have devised for themselves: an argument for why Iran might ultimately need the bomb. Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, Trump presented Iran with an extraordinary alternative. There could be an agreement allowing Iran to r...
The internet did what the internet does. Within hours of AI Anthropic's announcement, YouTube thumbnails and social-media posts were declaring that artificial intelligence had "cracked the secret of DNA," "unlocked the code of life," or produced something comparable to CRISPR. Those headlines are not merely exaggerated. They describe somethin...
Roy Morgan's mid-September analysis is the first large-sample look at One Nation support by country of birth. It is based on 26,418 electors interviewed across January–July 2026, when One Nation's national primary was running at 24 per cent. Australian-born electors sat almost exactly on that average (25 per cent). The variation is among people bor...
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." — Henry David Thoreau, Walden Few sentences from nineteenth-century literature have survived quite as successfully as Henry David Thoreau's observation that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It sounds modern enough to have been written yesterday. The commuter staring through the tr...
Elon Musk has spent two decades arguing that humanity must become a multiplanetary species, and that a self-sustaining city on Mars is the insurance policy for civilisation. The idea is stirring. It is also being sold as a matter of engineering and willpower, when the problems involved are mostly biological, chemical and planetary, and no amount of...
John Mac Ghlionn's Blaze piece (linked below), is written as black comedy because the booking system it describes would be a farce if anyone had designed it on purpose. Europe has not abolished hotels. It has changed who the guest of honour is. A design hotel on Hamburg's inner harbour, built with tens of millions to lure paying visitors to a renew...
The old temperance campaigners must be enjoying themselves somewhere in the hereafter. For generations they were portrayed as joyless puritans determined to separate ordinary people from one of life's harmless pleasures. The saloon, the pub and the evening glass of wine survived, while temperance disappeared into history alongside stern women carry...
There is something almost reassuring about UK's Jacob Rees-Mogg. While other politicians disguise alarming propositions beneath focus-group language, Sir Jacob can still sit in an elegant room and explain, with the manner of a Victorian gentleman discussing the correct port to serve after dinner, that some of Brits may shortly have to die. "It is n...
The London Times handed its critics a gift they did not need. An anonymous Home Office decision-maker told the paper that, at best, one per cent of asylum claims are genuine. The headline put the figure on the front page. Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The American Conservative, calls that an unforced error: a number with no method attached, precise ...
Australia went first. From December 2025 the under-16 social-media ban has been live: platforms in the eSafety net: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X and the rest of that list, are supposed to keep children off, and the regulator has already talked in millions of accounts removed. Britain has now said it will copy the model and, in ...
Donald Trump's latest blast at the Supreme Court is the sound of a man discovering that appointees are not employees. After the Court left in place a block on his mail-in ballot plan, he took to Truth Social to call the ruling a bad decision, to praise Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as legends for dissenting, and to say that certain other justice...
The Australian Government has launched its latest attack on men: axing specialist prostate cancer nurses. We all know they would never do the same to breast cancer, says Bettina Arndt. Australians are used to their Government's war on men — treating males like a species to be managed, and boys like suspects in training. But last month, out of the b...
There are songs one hears once and never forgets, and there are songs one hears for half a lifetime without ever really hearing them. Wayne Fontana's 1966 hit Pamela, Pamela fell into the second category for me. I have known the song for decades. It was pleasant, catchy, nostalgic, unmistakably of its period, and I never thought very much more abou...
