Quillette Cetera

David Limbrick is a Libertarian Member of Parliament in Victoria's upper house. He has been a Quillette reader since its inception in 2015 and came along to our Quillette Social in Melbourne in September 2023. Zoe asks David about the work he's done in pushing for a "watchful waiting" approach to treating children with gender-dysphoria in Victoria, his attendance at the Let Women Speak rally, the...

Quillette contributor and author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, David Bernstein, joins Zoe to discuss the ways antisemitism manifests on the Left and Right, and to explore how universities should promote free speech on campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Social scientist, Quillette contributor and Heterodox Academy member, Andrew Glover, joined me in September to talk about the current issues facing Australian universities when it comes to viewpoint diversity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julian McBride is a former US Marine who served in Afghanistan and then saw active warfare in Yemen while working for the United Nations. Now trained as a forensic anthropologist, he has taught Middle Eastern History at NYU and works as a military consultant and independent journalist. After suffering PTSD, Julian found solace in art-therapy, which lead him to found a not-for-profit called the Ref...

Just how much cronyism exists in Australia? Is it true that younger generations are worse off economically than baby boomers? Is home-ownership good metric for economic success? Is there a perfect number of immigrants that Australia should allow in? Why is Sydney's property market so expensive? All these questions and more are answered in this episode with Dr. Cameron Murray, an economist speciali...

Rob Brooks is an evolutionary biologist who focuses on the evolutionary consequences of sexual reproduction. His areas of interest include the evolution of mate choice, the costs of being attractive, sexual conflict, the reasons animals age, and the interconnectedness of sex, diet, obesity, and mortality.  Leading a dynamic research group known as the SEX LAB, Rob collaborates with other researche...

Zoe interviews Virginia Tapscott, a freelance journalist and mother of four from rural New South Wales, Australia. They discuss the concept of care feminism, which emphasizes the value and importance of women's care work, whether it is paid or unpaid. Care feminism is contrasted with dominant feminist rhetoric that sometimes aims to minimize or avoid care work altogether. Additionally, they discus...

In this episode of Quillette Cetera, Zoe sits down with Christopher HF Mitchell and Jayan Nandagopan, two Australia-based artists whose show, The Marvellous Elephant Man Musical, is now showing at the Sydney Fringe Festival. The absurdist dark comedy is a crowd favourite and the winner of the Adelaide Fringe 2023 Critics' Circle Award. However, its carefree gags have ruffled many feathers in polit...

Claire and Zoe discuss how overblown the Luis Rubiales and Jenni Hermoso scandal was, and how much they enjoyed Heather Mac Donald's piece about it in Quillette. Then they go on to discuss the Australian referendum on the Voice to Parliament and how impressed they were by Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's address to the National Press Club, where she made the controversial claim that colonisation...

As a Christian lesbian and non-woke artist, Melody Rachel has always felt isolated from the communities she gets grouped into. But as Melody shows, perhaps happiness comes from accepting your own identity as an individual, not from demanding acceptance as a member of an identity group. Melody Rachel is a multifaceted artist from New Zealand who currently resides in Sydney. Melody hosts the enlight...

Do we live under a patriarchy? Should women boycott sex with men? What's the Nordic approach to prostitution? Is masculinity celebrated more than feminity? We cover all that + more in this conversation with Holly Lawford-Smith, a philosopher and academic whose work primarily focuses on topics in political philosophy. Holly has been the subject of much public discussion and debate due to her views...

In this episode, Claire and I discuss a complaint lodged with the Australian Press Council concerning one of Claire's articles in The Australian. In her piece, Claire compares Australia's method of treating children with gender dysphoria to Finland's more nuanced approach, which neither affirms nor denies gender identities. This raises the question: Has the Australian Press Council been influenced...

In 2018, Nancy L. Segal an American evolutionary psychologist and world-renowned twin expert, was gripped by a news headline saying that US immigration had threatened to break up twin boys born to gay fathers by refusing a visa to one twin. What followed was Nancy's five year journey of documenting the story of Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks and their twins Ethan and Aiden. It culminated in the publi...

Find out why Iona and Zoe hated the new Barbie movie. Iona Italia is an associate editor at Quillette. She is also the editor of Areo Magazine and host of the Two for Tea podcast. She writes for Substack at The Second Swim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spicy topics this week, as usual. Find out about the flaws in Australia's #CSIRO #Gencost report on #renewableenergy (it's not as cheap as they say), why environmentalists are hostile towards #nuclear energy, and why grifters like #pearldavis do themselves a disservice when they fall for anti-semitic #conspiracy theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claire and Zoe discuss the tragic death of Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto educator who took his life after being falsely smeared as a white supremacist by a DEI trainer. We recently published an article by Quillette editor Jon Kay who recounts Richard's story, you can read it on our website. We also discuss how mainstream feminism devalues motherhood and undermines the importance of biology. Could th...

Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French author, has consistently produced novels that explore societal challenges, often tracing back to the cultural revolution of the 1960s. His new book, "Quelques Mois dans ma Vie" (A Few Months in My Life), which was published in May 2023, reveals two recent scandals that have embroiled his life. In this episode I interview RJ Smith, an Australian author w...

Why do women post sexy selfies? And why does this behaviour anger some people? Claire Lehmann and Zoe Booth discuss the complex world of intrasexual female competition and their experiences with it, concluding that the more we know about human behaviour, the more empowered we are to make good decisions. "Slut shaming" can also be referred to as sexual shaming, sexual bullying, sexual stigmatizatio...

Claire and Zoe discuss how large corporations such as BHP, Coles, Woolworths, and the Big Four banks, leverage ESG scores issued by rating agencies to boost their reputation, despite their involvement in wage theft scandals, underpaying workers, and breaching laws. This practice of investing in ESG to deflect attention from controversies is known as 'wokewashing'. A recent example of this is them...

In Australia, thousands of children and teenagers are increasingly refusing to attend school due to anxiety, a phenomenon known as "anxiety-based school refusal". Over half of students were chronically absent last year, defined as missing over 20 days of school annually. This trend has been attributed to the impact of Covid lockdowns on mental health and the influence of excessive screen time. Soc...

Claire and Zoe discuss Queensland's new self-ID laws, how the pendulum has swung so far that "trad" is now counter-culture, and Zoe's online escapades messaging trolls who hate Quillette. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Episode 5, Claire and Zoe discuss updates on the Brittany Higgins scandal, which suggest that Higgins (and journalists such as Lisa Wilkinson) rode the #MeToo wave for personal gain. We also discuss sexual dynamics in general, including some talk of sexual assault and how to prevent it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A researcher from the University of Cincinnati who is conducting seminars on "far-right radicalization" in the United States characterises Quillette, an Australian-based liberal-centrist organization, as being more "radicalizing" than Fox News and comparable to InfoWars. This "researcher" has been awarded over $300,000 from the US Department of Homeland Security. Maybe us being characterised as a...

Quillette's community manager, Zoe Booth, asks her friend and PR whizz, Emilie Dye, on the podcast to debate the Australian government's crackdown on vapes: "The Government will work with states and territories to close down the sale of vapes in retail settings, ending vape sales in convenience stores and other retail settings, while also making it easier to get a prescription for legitimate thera...

'"Woman. Noun. Adult human female,” read the sticker applied to Queensland MP Shannon Fentiman’s office window. Walking past the window at the Waterford Shopping Centre in Logan, one might have assumed the sticker belonged to Fentiman. She was, until Thursday, Queensland’s Minister for Women. But one would’ve been mistaken. “I know the sticker doesn’t look like it says much, and most people will b...