The Minefield

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.

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 the PM has announced the date of the referendum, it’s worth remembering that the zero-sum nature of referenda can unleash the kind of bruising rhetoric that does lasting damage to a political community, no matter the outcome.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has recently reintroduced the prospect of nuclear power as part of Australia’s commitment to decarbonisation. But what is behind the push for nuclear, and does it make sense in a nation like this?

When Oxford University proposed to confer an honorary degree on the man who ordered an atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe condemned the decision as “shar[ing] in the guilt of a bad action by praise and flattery”.

When US President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon of his crimes, did he thereby place the presidency above the law — or did he understand a hard reality about democratic politics that should inform the multiple prosecutions of Donald Trump?

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?

Are the doomsday scenarios associated with Artificial “Super” Intelligence distracting us from the ways that the pervasive use of AI is already corrupting our use of language and the transmission of knowledge?

Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden made the surprising decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions. Does the threat posed by Russia outweigh the moral considerations that place such weapons beyond the pale for many other nations?

Western culture’s association of ageing with decline and obsolescence fuels (and is fuelled by) a desire to dissociate ourselves from our age — but such forms of subtle and overt ageism express contempt for something that is essentially human.

The newly formed National Anti-Corruption Commission faces both unrealistic expectations and a potentially fraught political climate. Professor A.J. Brown joins Waleed and Scott to discuss how it can restore popular faith in democratic politics.