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
#1 With A Bullet in North Korea
As Banjo Paterson put it, “There was movement at the station”: the movement of lips enunciating “mea culpa”. Hitherto those who follow the topic had assumed that musical history’s giants are people like Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Beyoncé. Yet the real musical history was being made in beautiful downtown Pyongyang.
The following Christmas gift – not from The Onion but from KCNA, North Korea’s rival to Reuters – arrived in yours truly’s news-feed some weeks ago:
Lots of songs in praise of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) and the socialist motherland have been created in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at a time when confidence in the WPK is growing deeper than ever before among the local people. Among them is the song Always Under Party Flag, a paean for the WPK and one of the masterpieces in the era of supreme leader Kim Jong Un. For its high ideological and artistic value, the song evokes strong emotions for the party flag among the people,…
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
