Roald Dahl and the Ethics of Art
The urge to censor is based on a misunderstanding of what makes literature valuable.
Iona Italia
· 11 min read
Narrated
A collection of 129 posts
Justice in Stockholm
Thirty-four years after the massacre of political prisoners in Iran, the conviction of Hamid Noury in Sweden has been a victory for accountability and for the truth.
Roya Hakakian
· 19 min read
America’s Forgotten Crisis
A terrific new account of America’s social and political turmoil during the 1910s and ’20s provides some much-needed perspective on the problems afflicting the country today.
Michael J. Totten
· 14 min read
Scientology’s War on Psychiatry
What caused L. Ron Hubbard to turn on a discipline he had once accepted?
Jonathan Salem-Wiseman, Stephen Wiseman
· 16 min read
Our Glorious Unhead of State
The idea of an Australian republic is attractive to some, but there's a strong case for a humble head of state.
Harry Lehmann
· 4 min read
The Rationalism and Romanticism of John Stuart Mill
Two strands of Mill's philosophy were profoundly in conflict.
Laurie Wastell
· 10 min read
What Explains Women's Fascination With BDSM Fiction?
Every generation or so (i.e., roughly every 25 years) a woman (it’s always a woman) writes a book about kinky sex—and a very specific type of kinky sex.
Robert King
· 10 min read
Serfing the Future?
Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them. History has oscillated between periods of greater dispersion of ownership, and those that favored greater concentration. Today, we live in an era of
Joel Kotkin, Wendell Cox
· 11 min read
The Vanishing of Peng Shuai
Whatever really happened between Zhang and Peng, the truth is that they were both already victims, having been raised in a society that completely denies the importance of the individual.
Aaron Sarin
· 6 min read
Revisiting ‘Wake in Fright,’ A Peculiarly Australian Kind of Hell
Five decades after its release, Wake in Fright remains a brutally captivating reminder that modernity is just a thin veneer over the darker recesses of the human heart.
Ryan Anderson
· 16 min read
White Lotus, Red Dragon—China’s History of Millenarian Dissent
When one woman refused and snapped at them to “go away,” they attacked her with a chair and mop handle.
Aaron Sarin
· 14 min read
For Our Own Good, We All Need a Glimpse of the Evil Queen
I have never seen a dream present something I believed to be untrue.
Jordan Peterson
· 11 min read
Australia’s Population Ponzi Scheme
The environmental havoc is justified as needed for the economy, but the evidence does not support this claim.
Kelvin Thomson
· 4 min read
The Fall of Beirut
Calling Hezbollah merely a terror group is too simplistic, and nothing in Lebanon is ever simple or easy to explain.
Art Keller
· 11 min read
Lessons from the Last Empire of Iran
Despite the uncertainties and tensions that characterize modern political life, we would do well to remember that the future we want is never the future we actually get, and that civilisation will outlast the fragility of politics.
Michael Bonner
· 10 min read