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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
A Question of Honour
Somewhere off Sydney’s Northern Beaches, 2006
Easing backwards off the side of the boat, I begin steadily propelling myself down into the depths. The sea takes me into herself and I am free at last to roam this mysterious element that has always felt like home. Despite all the scuba equipment my breathing always feels more relaxed underwater. Suze—that’s my wife—says I must be part amphibian: she also insists I’m getting too old for all this, and my doctor agrees. But when I’m down here I feel no different than I did fifty years ago when I did my first dives with the Navy.
Suze stays up there in the boat, watching out for me, she says. Today more than ever, as this is the deepest dive I’ve ever attempted—sixty metres, twenty over the legal limit. Suze freaked out when I told her what I was planning, threatened to ring the authorities and have me stopped. The sea is not her element, she doesn’t even like going out in the boat, is a poor swimmer and would sooner die…
What offended him was not a lack of quality, but of purpose. He simply couldn’t tolerate—perhaps due to his profession, which was accounting—things that remained forever and intentionally ambiguous. He’d been trained to view unsolved problems as errors. To John, a balance sheet was poetry, and a bookkeeping ledger, a metaphor for human life.
Aug 29 2024
14 mins
Jack and Judy had been married for fifty-seven years and, apart from a few minor marital bumps along the way, it had gone pretty well.
May 28 2024
5 mins
Before today, I had never picked up a hitchhiker. I guess I never had the courage, but also you don’t see them too often nowadays, at least not in the city or the suburbs.
May 28 2024
7 mins
