The Minefield

How should we wrestle with the problem of loving the art, but being unsettled by the behaviour or the beliefs of the artist who created it? It would be a mistake to see it as just an ethical problem. It is also an aesthetic problem. Because knowing what we know causes us to see the work differently.

Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of "art" — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting to be discovered? Enter US comedian John Mulaney with a 2017 comedy sketch. There is something undeniably enduring, timeless even about Mulaney's act.

When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price in order for the untrammeled supremacy of the ego to persist. But by permitting someone to "save face", are we not providing a constructive way of keeping them within a moral community?

There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences; why they favour one genre of music or one style of writing over another. And in our world of endless digital reproduction, we increasingly rely on recommendation algorithms to curate or triage our encounters with culture. But algorithms tend toward massification; they rule out the possibilities of both aesthetic achievement and...

AI is sometimes portrayed in utopian terms as the essential technological innovation. At other times, it's described as representing an existential threat to human life, a technological creation that will inevitably lay waste to its creator. Regardless of how we view it, could the cost of AI extend far beyond economics?

It is one of the casualties of democratic politics that citizens rarely remain indifferent about the governments they elect. By investing politicians with their hopes or fears, their aspirations and anxieties, voters ensure that they will take the performance of a government personally. This is why politics cannot be emptied of emotion: electors and the elected are bound together by filaments of e...

In the world of book sales, what “romantasy” is to fiction, autobiography/memoir is to non-fiction. There is an undeniable appetite for the purportedly true stories of famous or otherwise public figures whose lives are shrouded in PR or private interests. Moreover, autobiographies have a kind of inherent meaning or telos — disparate elements come together to form a narrative which always will have...

It feels like, for so much of this year, in one form or another, we’ve been trying to count the costs that technological innovations are exacting on our humanity — how AI, in particular, is altering (perhaps irrevocably) our relationship to words, to writing, to beauty, to creativity, to taste, to work, to the natural world, to our interior life. From the very beginning, our concern has been that...

Earlier this month, in response to a disturbing rise in youth crime in Melbourne, Victoria’s Labor government adopted a key policy that the LNP took to last year’s Queensland state election. The LNP policy pledged (among other things): to apply adult penalties to children under 18 who committed a range of violent and non-violent offences; to impose mandatory minimum sentences for certain offences...

Ever since 2023, a class of GPL-1 based drugs — which for two decades were used to treat type 2 diabetes — have been heralded as a “revolution in weight loss” and signalling the “end of obesity”. While these drugs go by different names, they’ve become popularly grouped under the shorthand “Ozempic”. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ozempic has become a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people in th...

The availability of increasingly powerful generative AI tools has radically altered  the creative process . Anything that we can imagine can be turned into an image, a video, a text, a song — the process is frictionless, effortless, fast and has led to a torrent of digital effluent (what is often called “AI slop”) being pumped into our online habitus. And while the content may range from the banal...

For the last two years, there has been a steady drumbeat of protests — sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly — in the centre of major Australian cities involving hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and, in one instance, hundreds of thousands of people. The vast majority of these protests have been pro-Palestinian and opposed to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. But this isn’t the only cause tha...

For the second time this year, millions of people have taken to the streets of cities and towns across the United States in response to the authoritarian tendencies and tactics of the second Trump administration. These crowds gathered under the  “No Kings” banner to register their deep disapproval of: immigration raids and deportations without due process; the deployment of National Guard troops t...

There is no doubt that silence can be a form of cowardice: a refusal to speak up or speak out on behalf of others, an unwillingness to join our voices with theirs lest we be made to bear their punishment. In such a case, we could say, the absence of words is not empty but full — full of self-protection, of ego. Being silenced, in turn, can crush the soul — to have our words treated with contempt;...

The politics of immigration has returned in recent months — and returned with a depth of feeling that suggests it never truly went away. It’s always there, lingering just beneath the surface of Western societies, waiting to be tapped into by politicians skilful (or brazen) enough to harness its power. So Donald Trump went to the 2024 presidential election excoriating his predecessor’s record on im...

In a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and political phenomena to which the label “Fascist” was being applied — to the point that he believed the word itself had become “almost entirely meaningless”. And while it conveyed little more than a term like “bully” would, “Fascist” nonetheless carried an emotional charge, a degree of opprobrium, that such an ev...

This week is the first ever “Minefield Mailbag”, where Waleed and Scott try to respond to what’s been on our listeners’ minds. The questions they take on cover such diverse topics as society’s obligations to self-professed “sovereign citizens”, whether NATO is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why “virtue signalling” may not be such a bad thing after all, and the discrete relationship bet...

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Charlie Kirk within the conservative movement and in the Trump administration. By some reckoning, his influence and social media prominence were second only to Donald Trump himself. As the founder and face of Turning Point USA, Kirk was pivotal in driving Trump’s appeal among younger voters — particularly young men. And, indeed, his singular appeal...

In August, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh from The Bookshelf on Radio National, teamed up with the indomitable Sophie Gee — Professor of English at Princeton University, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Sydney, and co-host of the podcast The Secret Life of Books — and Scott Stephens from The Minefield, to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen (1775–...

Whether it is in geopolitics or in social and personal relationships, the overweening desire to “save face” can have manifestly unjust and outright damaging consequences. Those who continue to languish under Iran’s oppressive regime take little comfort in Ayatollah Ali Khamenei being afforded the opportunity to shore up his public standing following the US missile strikes on its nuclear facilities...

There is something undeniably disorienting about the way AI features in public and political discussions. On some days, it is portrayed in utopian, almost messianic terms — as the essential technological innovation that will at once turbo-charge productivity and discover the cure to cancer, that will solve climate change and place the vast stores of human knowledge at the fingertips of every human...

In the middle of August, the Bendigo Writers Festival found itself at the centre of a firestorm after over fifty participants decided to withdraw — some claiming they were required to engage in a form of “self-censorship”, and others withdrawing in solidarity. Reports have it that, two days before the festival was due to open, a “code of conduct” was sent to those taking part in the one of the fou...

This week the federal government’s much-anticipated, and just as hyped,  Economic Reform Roundtable  has gotten underway. Central to the agenda is how to boost national productivity — which is, roughly speaking, a way of measuring the resources needed both to produce certain goods and to be able to afford to buy certain goods. Put simply: greater efficiency leads to greater affordability and highe...

In March, an ABC  Four Corners investigation detailed widespread instances of abuse, injury and neglect in childcare centres across the country. Just a few months later, in a climate of already heightened public awareness and media scrutiny, a series of deeply disturbing allegations came to light of  child sex abuse in childcare centres in  Victoria ,  New South Wales and  Queensland . The nature...

At the end of July, there was a strange juxtaposition of events that seemed almost designed to highlight the fault-lines which run through the political, legal, economic and ethical responses to climate change. On 23 July, the International Court of Justice handed down a non-binding advisory opinion  that climate change constitutes an “urgent and existential threat”, that nations have an obligatio...