Political Flak: A War Reporter’s War on Woke (Australian Book Review: paywalled)

Superficially, at least, David Rieff seems well placed to write a book about woke culture. For one thing, cultural criticism runs in the family: his parents were Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff – both intellectuals with a keen understanding of how subjectivities are shaped by social change. For another, his own work has often displayed an astute grasp of the fraught relationship between the historical, the political and the psychological.

The Limits of Social Cohesion (Arena)

My sense is that political cartoonists are finding it pretty difficult to encapsulate the events of the last two weeks in our sunburnt country girt by sea. Not because they are so depressing: a good cartoonist can always wring dark humour from a tragedy. But because they are so clearly self-satirising.

On Tessa Mackay’s Social Realism

When Tessa MacKay first got in touch to suggest that we meet for a coffee and a chat, I did what everybody does these days and immediately fed her name into Google. What I discovered were some remarkable paintings, but also – and less remarkably – a creation entitled ‘Tessa Mackay’ whose talents, successes, ambitions and interests had been (to some extent) curated in the ‘experience machine’ that is the Worldwide Web.

Two Hours of Despair (Arena)

As far as I can recall, the audience laughed just three times at the Perth preview of Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5: once when the cinema manager, introducing the film, almost said ‘Enjoy!’, before correcting course and wishing us ‘a meaningful experience’; once on hearing Orwell confess his desire to give Sartre ‘a kick up the arse’ in his review of Antisemite and Jew; and once at some footage of a Trump supporter batting away a reporter’s questions on the basis that any criticism of her President was fake news.

On Enshittification (The Saturday Paper)

As neologisms go, ‘enshittification’ is not the most efficient specimen. Unlike, say, ‘nearlywed’ or ‘broligarch’, it is neither wholly self-defining nor reminiscent of some other word to which it is related in meaning. Clearly the term has struck a chord: both the American Dialect Society and Macquarie Dictionary have bestowed word-of-the-year status on it in recent times. But what, specifically, is going to shit, and what are the processes by which it does so?

Podcast for Fremantle Shipping News

Today I had the pleasure of sitting down with Michael Barker, editor of the Fremantle Shipping News, to chat about technology and the human condition. We went deep! https://fremantleshippingnews.com.au/2024/06/17/interview-with-richard-king-thinker-author-critic-poet

Nuclear frisson: On Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we... Continue Reading →

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