Culture
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Liberal heroes are limited to superhero franchises, because they cannot be human beings; the logical incarnation of the liberal hero is the antihero. Contrary to popular belief, we still need heroes, and the lukewarm selection we have been recently served by those toiling in what Adorno called the culture industry do not pass muster
July 24, 2024
17 mins
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Delving into Quadrant's online archive, across the years from 1956 to the present, the enthusiasm founding editor James McAuley etched into his very first edition is manifest: 'In spite of all that can be said against our age, what a moment it is to be alive! What an epoch for a magazine to emerge!' A resource and wealth of reading for subscribers, it is also a reminder of how necessary it is to continue the combat he commenced
February 27, 2023
13 mins
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The 'dangerous ideas' tag is, on one reading, intended as ironic, in the sense that the ideas served up are 'dangerous' only because they are expected to disrupt what participants imagine to be the blinkered thinking of the conservative element. Thus does Simon Longstaff's carnival for the like-minded roll on, year after unchallenging year
January 19, 2023
35 mins
The latest
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These days, when poetry is taught, which isn't often, students are encouraged to wear the ideological equivalent of a Hazchem suit. They are taught to view poetry as a power-play, privileging this and marginalising that. The student’s job becomes one of dismantling a live bomb of ideological impurity. Who in their right mind would memorise such a thing?
September 3, 2021
10 mins
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Corporate leaders seem not to grasp that their embrace of 'socially responsible' agendas -- be it gay marriage, expensive electricity or any other fashionable crusade of the Left -- inherently embraces the values of some groups while alienating others. Daft indeed, yet that is happening time after time, company after company
January 24, 2019
19 mins
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Twenty-five miles east of Timbuktu, amidst the scattered acacias and […]
January 1, 2019
24 mins
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Sydney Writers Festival, that taxpayer-funded jamboree for virtue-signalling literary lefties (and only lefties), has just seen star guest Junot Diaz fly home after being Me-Too'd as a sexist pig. Progressives are funny lot, as we discovered at last year's Melbourne gabble-a-thon
May 6, 2018
26 mins
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The discontents of our time lie squarely in the domain […]
November 1, 2015
21 mins
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The Aranda’s Pepa: An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die […]
June 1, 2015
29 mins
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Only time will tell if Senator George Brandis' decision to re-direct some $104 million in arts funding will ameliorate the cronyism, bureaucratic imperatives and waste that characterise the business of getting and dispensing grants. It is a move Quadrant's Michael Connor first urged in 2008
May 14, 2015
24 mins
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Wordsworth was right. Despite all sorts of recent proclamations about “ecologically sustainable development”, “maintenance of biodiversity”, “clean and green”, we have isolated ourselves from the natural world -- to its detriment and ours Like the ancient Greeks, we formerly felt that birds had something to tell us. I suspect that, until we get back to such an understanding, none of the mechanist scientific solutions to restore environments and the like will achieve very much at all
March 29, 2015
20 mins
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