Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
Loving Cats: ‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain’
The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. —Nikola Tesla
Many people believe that the fashion of keeping cats as house pets was popularised by the nineteenth-century English illustrator Louis Wain, whose colourful and gay anthropomorphised drawings of felines smoking pipes, pushing wheelbarrows, standing on their hind legs and reading magazines, in London’s top newspaper of the day, the Illustrated London News, made cats socially acceptable. (One of those illustrations is reproduced atop this page.) Before Wain, other than the odd secret cat club, which no one of respectable social standing belonged to, man’s best friend, the dog, was the traditional house pet, with most cats living as strays or mere mouse-catchers. In the 2021 British film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, Louis Wain’s wife, Emily, tells him:
Throughout history, cats have been worshipped as mystical gods and…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins
