Project 2025 is iconoclastic and dystopian. Those who wish to understand Trump and the movement behind him, and the active threat they pose to American democracy, are obliged to take it seriously.
Indigenous people have long spoken about coercive practices of officials and experts around birth control, as late as the 1960s. Now historians are finding evidence in the government’s own records.
So much is being lost due to climate change, one can feel deranged. But the world still hums with beauty and astonishment – there is much for us to save.
What makes us human? Greek and Roman thinkers were preoccupied with this question. And some of their observations of animals foreshadowed recent findings in the behavioural sciences.
Many argue Samuel Griffith, twice Queensland premier and our first chief justice, is guilty of colonial war crimes. Raymond Evans searched for the evidence to nail him but found a different story.
An innovative project pairs young Palestinian writers with overseas mentors. Even now, writers in Gaza are continuing to tell their stories, despite their very real fear that they might die.
Zora Simic has never been married, nor wanted to. She assesses two new books about feminism and marriage – Clementine Ford’s polemic against it and Rachael Lennon’s history of its reformation.
Establishing the facts – and disentangling fact from legend – is not always straightforward when it comes to biography. Frank Moorhouse’s biographer unpacks his process.
Jem Bendell encourages us to think about societal collapse in ways that are ‘profound and startlingly original’, with the potential to birth whole new social movements, says Tom Doig.
Australians could once claim compensation for injuries arising from a broken engagement. Today, the responsibility for romantic injury has been individualised and feminised, its pain trivialised.
John le Carré and Ian Fleming, the world’s most famous spy novelists, share experience in UK intelligence and difficult childhoods. But their heroes, George Smiley and James Bond, are very different.
When Jane Gleeson-White’s marriage ended two years after her mother died, she lost her voice. Books by women writers like Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson helped her find it again.
What makes a great writer? A key element is the right teacher. Belinda Castles reflects on her own guides, as do authors such as Margaret Drabble, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Paul Theroux in a new book.
Briohny Doyle picked up Lessons in Chemistry not for its sassy-romance cover – which this subversive international bestseller does not deliver – but because she heard it featured a ‘good dog’.
Before the 1970s, there were no trans organisations or publicly advertised gender clinics. But camp cultures brought together a variety of sexually- and gender-diverse people.
Alison Watt’s grandmother was diagnosed with ‘puerperal insanity’ and institutionalised not long after giving birth to her father. He didn’t meet her – or know she was alive – until his early 20s.
As we age, it can be hard to fathom the gap between our younger selves and the bodies we inhabit. Carol Lefevre explores this strange form of homesickness.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne