Guy Rundle reviews Paul Kelly’s new book, The March of Patriots: the literary equivalent of cleaning out the garage on a grey Saturday afternoon.
Columns / Guy Rundle
Levi-Strauss survived to see that he had become an era
Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, has died, age 100. His work Claude Levi-Strauss was so influential that it is impossible to imagine a whole intellectual climate without it.
A Costello on each knee, Rudd plays for laughs
What if Rudd’s appointment of Peter Costello to the Future Fund was a little too clever? What does he do if Costello takes the piss: finding safe harbour aboard the ship of state, he refuses to leave, despite continuing to denounce the government by means of messages in bottles?
Politicians try to patch up a leaky boat of their own making
The government’s current problems with the Oceanic Viking stem entirely from its being too-clever-by-half – it’s of a piece with Ruddism, the idea that a series of brilliant technical decisions can serve as policy.
We don’t need new fast trains, Albo, we need new cities
When it comes to infrastructure, what we need first and foremost are not new rail lines. Not even fast rail lines. What we need are new cities.
Review: Noel Pearson’s Radical Hope
Noel Pearson’s new essay could have given been a compelling argument for a new education approach. Instead, he indulged himself in a new airing of old obsessions.
Asylum at last from the sado-conservatives
It’s a measure of how debased Australian politics became in the Tampa years that we can now be surprised that a government would confront its opponents with the fact that they imprisoned children, and score points from it.
The basic right to fight and kick and scream to find refuge
With the 260 Tamil refugees refusing to leave their boat in Western Java and threatening to set fire to it, the asylum-seeker issue is the only game in town.
Rudd, Ruddock and the deep, dark currents of fear
Phil Ruddock has popped up to tell us of TEN THOUSAND asylum seeking illegal queue jumpers coming our way. But is he right?
Rundle’s Friday Book Review: The Land of Green Plums
Big Les Murray has been dudded again after the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Romanian-born German language poet Herta Mueller, writes Guy Rundle.
More than red faces with the collapse of TV culture
There have been two recent moments when I’ve gasped at something on TV – one was the mess that was Hey Hey last night and the other was Denton’s baby, Hungry Beast, writes Guy Rundle.
A memo from incoming Fairfax chair Roger Corbett
A memo from the new chair of the Fairfax board has fallen off the back of a delivery van. Guy Rundle reports:
You want dangerous ideas? These are dangerous ideas
The topics discussed at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas are either completely safe or totally ridiculous. Here are some thoughts that might really offend some Darlinghurst secular-liberals’ sensibilities.
Hitchens not such a lovely little thinker
Guy Rundle recounts Christopher Hitchens’ talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, where the crowd had their highly specific appetites and prejudices flattered, and loved every second of it.
The return of Friday Drive-Bys!
Q & A is madder than ever … the week of iSnack 2.0 … The Oz continues its cruel attacks on its own staff.
Spectator editor flushed out by the green left
Recent events at UK magazine The Spectator tell us a lot about the cynical way in which climate change scepticism is used to sell to the right.
Rundle: A vision of the future, written by the Left. Part III
Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. Will that future be anything like the communism envisaged in the early Marx, or Lenin’s utopian State and Revolution? Emphatically not. But what hopes are there?
The past and future of the Left
The ‘Left’ that has emerged as victorious is one whose ambitions are defined and delimited by the political culture of capitalism. So what’s actually left? asks Guy Rundle.
The week in news: The Mark Day version
Presenting, the week in news — the Mark Day version, as told by Guy Rundle.
The Australian can’t tell its left from right
The thinkers that The Australian chose for its left series weren’t leftists, they were labourists – submitting their intellectual abilities to the pre-ordained goal of selling a stunningly unambitious political programme.
Don’t mention the war around Switzer
As the Bradfield preselection hots up, prize candidate Tom Switzer must be getting a little nervous about one thing: will anyone ask him about the war?
Why Rudd said the F-word. Twice!
Kevin Rudd’s F-bomb attack caused an outbreak of “uh-maaaah”s from the News Ltd press. But there’s a way the ALP can spin this to their advantage…
