In June, British Labour MP Steve Yemm stood in Parliament and asked a question about artificial intelligence – “Who is shaping whom?” It was a reasonable concern, made all the more interesting by its unusual delivery. When his remarks were run through Pangram, an AI-detection tool, the speech was flagged as entirely machine-written. The episode has an almost delicious irony – a politician warning about technology’s influence while apparently relying…
The students who began blocking the gates of Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil last month were protesting something far more elementary than the great abstractions of French politics. Within weeks, demonstrations had spread across the country, accompanied by complaints about overcrowding, deteriorating school buildings and Parcoursup, the university admissions platform that has become a repository for anxieties about the future. By October 1, more than a thousand high schools had been…
Every few years, Australians perform a ritual that much of the democratic world finds rather peculiar. On a Saturday morning, millions make their way to school halls and community centres, queue beneath election posters and emerge from cardboard voting booths with their democratic obligations fulfilled. Some follow politics obsessively, while others could barely name their local member. Yet all are expected to participate. For a country so attached to the…
The Cold War is full of stories about words that nearly started a war. They are irresistible because they present catastrophe as a clerical error, something an alert interpreter might have prevented. Most of them do not survive inspection. The famous cases often turn out to be failures of context, myths about errors that never happened or embarrassments with no strategic consequence at all. The following four cases demonstrate this…
The road from studio to statehouse is older than television. Ronald Reagan began as a radio sports announcer, recreating Chicago Cubs games in a Des Moines studio from pitch by pitch wire reports, then hosted General Electric Theater and toured the country giving speeches for the company, before a televised address for Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 launched his political career. He kept this habit in office, delivering a radio…
Few phrases in political commentary do as much work for as little evidence as 'echo chamber.' The left deploys it against Rupert Murdoch and the Facebook algorithm, while the right uses it against the legacy press and universities. Each side is certain the other lives in one, yet almost nobody stops to consider about what it actually means. The term can be attributed to two people: legal scholar Cass Sunstein…
In February, at a gala marking its thirtieth anniversary, Sky News Australia announced it would retire its own name. The announcement came during the official opening of the network's new Surry Hills headquarters, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns presiding over the launch while Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott were among the guests, an eclectic turnout for a network about to shed the very…
Open any newspaper, scroll any parliamentary Hansard, and the same three words seem to appear over and over again - "cost of living." It has morphed into the default vocabulary for economic distress across the Anglosphere, from Westminster to Canberra to Washington. What merits attention here is not that politicians discuss prices, but that they have converged so completely on this particular formulation, one that erodes the substance of the…
Discussions of Australia's peculiar discomfort with visible success typically start with entrepreneurs who leave for the United States, or executives accused of getting ahead of themselves. Those are undoubtedly real examples, and ones worth taking seriously in their own right, but they are downstream of something that starts much earlier and gets far less attention. Long before anyone is founding a company or running a business, Australian schoolchildren are already…
Every generation of Australians seems to discover anti-Americanism for the first time, certain that its objections are a uniquely justified response to the uniquely bad behaviour of whichever president happens to occupy the White House. Donald Trump's approval ratings in Australia are now the worst ever recorded for an American president, which mainstream commentary seems to treat as a self-evident verdict: the tariffs, the erratic diplomacy, the war in Iran.…