The digital revolution is counter-intuitive to copyright. Technological change is moving too fast for adequate laws to be implemented – and for affected industries to keep pace.The bottom is…
‘Advertising’s re-branded public image troubles me. I’m an old employee of the industry, and The Gruen Transfer reminds me of conversations I had within the walls of advertising agencies, where…
Visiting from the United States for the Rationalist Society of Australia, Sean Faircloth speaks to the issues raised in his book Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms Us All – and…
Privacy in the digital age is a hot-button issue, from WikiLeaks to who owns your Facebook photos. With Liberty Victoria, we present a hypothetical discussion encompassing the church, child abuse…
At the 1960 games in Rome, the first known Olympic doper, Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen, died after being given Roniacol before his race – a drug intended to increase blood circulation.Yet…
Late last year, the Wheeler Centre hosted a Fifth Estate discussion of food culture. ‘It seems to me it’s become out of control,’ said host Sally Warhaft, of our current obsession with food.‘I’m…
Popular comedian and contrarian John Safran is known as a seeker of awkward and unusual truths. He infiltrates a secret world of madness, agitation and unrest. In this event, he’ll present his…
The online age has heralded the rise of the celebrity journalist: ‘personalities’ with headshots, Twitter accounts and guest spots on Q&A. How does this impact on the quality of our journalism? What …
In the clash between money and conservation, money usually wins – with devastating results in a land that tolerates few mistakes. Tim Flannery delivers a wake-up call about the consequences of…
Death is the most personal of matters, but it’s also a political hot potato.Most of us don’t choose (or even expect) the way in which we die, but for the terminally ill, death is a looming certainty …
Death is the most personal of matters, but it’s also a political hot potato.Most of us don’t choose (or even expect) the way in which we die, but for the terminally ill, death is a looming certainty …
China is fast becoming the next world superpower, while India – with its vast young population, booming jobs market and burgeoning economy – is on the march. Meanwhile, Wall Street has plunged the…
The Wheeler Centre and St James Ethics Centre combine once again in 2012 to bring you another series of Intelligence Squared debates.Established in 2002, IQ2 has spread from across the globe…
Susan Neiman is an optimist; and a progressive. Hope is at the core of her quest to take back words like ‘moral clarity’ and ‘moral values’ from conservatives.Her book Moral Clarity (2008) is the…
Most audience members for Tuesday night’s Intelligence Squared debate, Animals Should Be Off the Menu, murmured to each other that they were clearly in the majority company of vegetarians, vegans…
On Tuesday 20 March, the Intelligence Squared series of debates kicks off with a look at the ethics of eating meat. Six speakers will divide into two teams to speak for and against the proposition…
Intelligence Squared’s 2012 series of debates kicks off with a look at the ethics of eating meat. Six speakers are divided into two teams for lively and insightful arguments for and against the…
In the past week, we’ve heard from vegan-turned-ecotarian Cristy Clark and interviewed passionate food lover Charlotte Wood on how they frame their ethical approach to how they shop, cook and eat.…
Charlotte Wood is best known as one of Australia’s favourite novelists, but she’s also becoming known as a passionate food lover. She blogs regularly about food at How to Shuck an Oyster – and her…
Melbourne-based writer Cristy Clark has always been passionate about the ethics of her food. She shares her story of how she shifted from vegetarian to vegan to ecotarian – and why sometimes animal…
In her book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm argued that if they are honest with themselves, most journalists know that ultimately, they betray the people they cover. What did she…
When should the international community intervene in civil conflict? What made last year’s Libyan conflict suitable for intervention, while Syrians continued to struggle against despotism alone? In t…
One of non-fiction’s most enduring ethical dilemmas is balancing the public interest against the interest of its subjects. The dilemma has come to the fore again following news that Norwegian…
As Italian pensioners prepare to cop the brunt of bank foolhardiness, one minister has found it all too much. Italy’s welfare minister, Elsa Fornero, was delivering news of cuts to pensions at a…
A Columbia Journalism Review feature called ‘Confidence Game’ has taken up the case for newspapers. Dean Starkman argues that a group of intellectuals he calls the ‘Future of News’ group, or “FON…
The words ‘psychopath’ and ‘psychopathy’ have a chequered history in psychiatry. Widely used in the mid-20th century, they’ve become more contested in recent decades as the psychiatric community…
In a feature published in today’s Age, US psychologist Christopher Ryan likens monogamy to vegetarianism, saying a monogamous lifestyle is possible but not necessarily what human beings are…
Jonathan Safran Foer is one of the most celebrated writers working in the English language today. Named among Granta’s Best Young American Writers and the New Yorker’s 20 Best Under 40, he’s one of t…
Jonathan Safran Foer is one of the most celebrated writers working in the English language today. Named among Granta’s Best Young American Writers and the New Yorker’s 20 Best Under 40, he’s one of t…
Today’s edition of Crikey features a link to a YouTube video of a BBC interview with London-based independent trader Alessio Rastani speaking with unusual forthrightness, if not downright nihilism…
This year has seen unprecedented scrutiny of Rupert Murdoch’s empire in Britain. There’s even been talk of the end of the empire. Some of that has spilled over as far as our shores – where it all…
This year has seen unprecedented scrutiny of Rupert Murdoch’s British interests. There’s even been talk of ‘the end of imperium’. Some of that has spilled over as far as our shores – where it all…
The Australian yesterday published an extensive piece by editor-at-large Paul Kelly in which the newspaper’s former editor responded to the current issue of Quarterly Essay, penned by Robert Manne…
As part of the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival, a two-day conference called ‘New News’ was held at the Wheeler Centre last weekend. The keynote speaker was Jay Rosen, who chairs the journalism…
A two-day conference being held tomorrow and Saturday as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival is taking a look at the impact of digital technologies and culture on the business and practice of…
“If journalism and the media industry in Australia are serious about rebuilding their absolutely disastrous standing, the work starts with reforming the self-regulation media ethics system.”Johan…
Among our favourite moments during the televised parliamentary inquiry into phone hacking at News International was when James Murdoch was asked if he was familiar with the legal term ‘wilful…
“There are some people who don’t like change. For everyone else, there’s WikiLeaks.” A viral YouTube ad produced by WikiLeaks and featuring Julian Assange is using guerrilla advertising techniques…
One of the world’s largest and most powerful media dynasties threatens to unravel after a scandal that has veered from high to low drama and back again. Join a panel of leading media commentators…
One of the world’s largest and most powerful media dynasties threatens to unravel after a scandal that has veered from high to low drama and back again. The scandal may well permanently reshape the m…
Crumbs!
Dailies · Wed, 10 Aug 2011
The Enthusiast reports that legendary US comic artist Robert Crumb has cancelled a scheduled appearance in Sydney later this month following a Daily Telegraph report he believes misrepresented him…
What’s the difference between WikiLeaks and the News of the World? More than meets the eye, according to Michael Fullilove, director of the Global Issues Program at the Lowy Institute for…
Natalie Sambhi, co-editor of the blog Security Scholar, attended last week’s Intelligence Squared debate on the merits of Australian involvement in Afghanistan. She’s reviewed the event on Security…
The Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas released its program today, and for many Melbournians, the festival’s most dangerous idea is that we would have to skip the AFL Grand Final to…
“[A] reviewer is entitled to be spiteful as long as she is honest,” wrote Mr Justice Tugendhat last week in his summing-up notes of the first libel case against a national newspaper in the UK since 2…
Image via WikiCommons
Expensive, time-consuming, redundant – and still necessary. News of the death of investigative reporting has been greatly exaggerated, if Hackgate is …
The News International scandal, or ‘Hackgate’, set the Australian public imagination alight this week. For proof, we need only be reminded that every single television network, other than SBS…
In today’s New Matilda, Mark Fletcher asks, has News Limited done anything wrong? For those looking for a neat summary of why the Hackgate story is such a big deal, not just in the UK but for the…
Tony Wilson reflects on his eerie, and entirely unintended, prescience.My novel is coming true. It happened with my last novel too. No sooner had I written Players (Text 2005) – the story of a Sam…
The panel discussion featured in this video is the intellectual equivalent of the Big Day Out, Lollapalooza or Glastonbury. Three of the world’s most outspoken figures in philosophy and journalism…
Any hope senior New Limited executives might have harboured that fallout from the phone hacking scandal might be quarantined in the UK seems to be fading. The Nation, an openly progressive weekly…
For as long as we can collectively remember, humans have struggled with the problem of memory. Its unreliability was compounded by the dishonesty and disingenuousness of the mind, in both its…
Will they use a condom? Cover art of an historical romance novel by Tom Miller, c1960s, courtesy anoldent/Flickr
It’s perhaps the most common controversy in the world of…
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries…
An image posted on the Facebook page ‘Free Amina Abdalla’
In his 2010 book Reality Hunger, US writer David Shields argued against traditional realist fiction in favour of a…
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox, author and academic Sarah Maddison tackles the issue of mainstream Australia’s unacknowledged, unresolved guilt over the brutality of white settlement over two centuries…
Fantasy master Terry Pratchett has come under fire in the UK for his involvement in a television documentary screened on Monday night advocated assisted suicide. In the documentary, which was…
“The two key rules that now govern the practice of Australian politics are: (1) look like you’re doing something; and (2) don’t offend anyone who matters.”In 2010, one of the Wheeler Centre’s most…
The Federal Court action against columnist Andrew Bolt has sparked a heated debate between those who believe that his comments contravene the Racial Discrimination Act and those who argue that the…
To what extent can advertising be ethical? What should it be allowed to spruik, and to whom? And, when ads enter controversial territory, how does the industry respond?Our panel of ethicists and…
Is death something to be feared or embraced? Broadcaster Phillip Adams chaired this discussion with Julian Burnside, Tony Coady and novelist Amanda Lohrey as they examine the ethics of the end from e…
Alan Kohler, Stephen Mayne and Tom Elliott discuss when big business looks at its conscience from political donations to bloated CEO salaries.
The release of the American Library Association's "most challenged books of 2009" this week has created quite a stir. The Atlantic explains why the books that made it to the list are doing their job.
The author of Growth Fetish, co-author of Affluenza and co-editor of Silencing Dissent talks about the coming climate change crisis.
Peter Singer argues for a beef tax.
A panel of top journalists and ethical thinkers, including Paul Chadwick, Mark Danner, Gay Alcorn and Tony Coady, under the guidance of former Age editor and CAJ director Michael Gawenda, tease out t…
The Times Literary Supplement reviews Andrew Linzey's new book Why Animal Suffering Matters, which looks at the ethics of how humans use and treat animals.The …
