The Minefield

Ever since Plato, “crowds” have been associated with irrationality, emotivism, conformism, short-term thinking, and herd-like behaviour. But what if it turns out that crowds are collectively more intelligent than their individual members?

What are we trying to convey when we reach for a word like “evil”? Is it something about a person’s actions or character? Is it what they do or the manner in which they do it?

It is worth reflecting, not just on what is singular about Taylor Swift at this particular cultural moment — why she attracts both the loyalty and the animus that she does — but on what it is about live music events that now draw millions of people to them.

Over the last 18 months, enormously powerful generative AI tools have been placed in the hands of anyone who wants them; as a consequence, the internet and our social media feeds have been inundated with wholly or partially synthetic content.

Because it is sustained by nothing more substantial than a weave of trusted institutions, shared habits and moral commitments, democracies are highly susceptible to the corrosive effects of distrust; Jedediah Purdy joins Waleed and Scott to discuss the necessary conditions for democratic life.

Ours is a time when institutional distrust, digital disinformation and mutual suspicion have become pervasive — but can democracy withstand epistemic and social fragmentation of this kind?

Professor Maryanne Wolf joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether we are entering an age of widespread moral illiteracy — an incapacity to engage in the processes that make up the habit of deep reading.

It is fair to say that boredom is a distinctly modern terror. But, as Stan Grant discusses with Waleed and Scott, what if existential boredom points us to our deeper need?

Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s depiction of Saturn eating his son is a haunting portrait of lust and the fear of one’s own finitude. Christos Tsiolkas joins Waleed and Scott to look into that darkness, and discover what looks back.

Now that John Cleese has announced that the iconic series will return, it’s worth examining what made Fawlty Towers a masterpiece — and whether its interaction with the political climate of the 1970s had anything to do with it.

Platforms like Spotify have transformed the way people listen to music through their use of recommendation algorithms and customised playlists designed to cater to either a particular activity or a particular mood.

Australian novelist Briohny Doyle joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to examine Charles Dickens’s unforgettable tale of misanthropy and remorse, and discover how its aesthetic techniques and ethical vision continue to speak to us today.

What is a state for? How does its nature, actions, and limits differ from other corporate bodies? Is the relationship of a state to its citizens fundamentally that of a service provider to its clients?

If we are not careful, the use of incentives to encourage people to purchase electric vehicles could backfire by offending our sense of fairness.

The latest Mapping Social Cohesion report from the Scanlon Foundation paints a complex picture that helps us understand the conditions within which social cohesion is able to strengthen, and those factors which cause it to become brittle and even break down.

Calls for an end to the devastation of Gaza, and the death and displacement of its residents, reached a crescendo on Remembrance Day. While the moral case is compelling, it raises questions that are complex and consequential.

Nearly a century after its publication, Australian novelist Charlotte Wood joins Waleed and Scott to discuss what Virginia Woolf’s essay tell us about egotism, contempt, creative freedom and the possibility of moral transformation.

Because referenda are zero-sum contests, the message they convey is paradoxically both obscure and unambiguous — which is to say, their meaning is open to interpretation and unintentionally harsh.

Australia recently marked ten years since the introduction of Operation Sovereign Borders — a policy whereby refugees entering Australian waters by boat were met with unwavering, military-led deterrence.

The civilian massacres in Israel on 7 October and the devastation inflicted on residents of Gaza both make claims on our humanity, on our capacity to recognise and respond to the deaths of others — but some find these claims mutually exclusive.

One of the great paradoxes of democracy is that those who will have to bear the consequences of the political decisions we make now have little-to-no say in the decision-making process itself.

Most of us are aware of the environmental costs associated with international tourism. But have we considered whether travel enhances or diminishes our moral lives? 

Blame and forgiveness are two of the most natural responses to wrongdoing — and yet, increasingly, these responses are viewed with a degree of suspicion, if not outright hostility, due to the myriad ways they can go wrong.

Is there any way of retrieving the deliberative conditions under which democratic life is possible, when the social media cacophony makes hearing one another so hard?

We’ve reached the point in mass culture, to say nothing of the “higher culture” of academia, when criticism is the norm. To the point that we increasingly define ourselves by what we hate.