Kurt Johnson

If tragedy plus time is comedy, then what does comedy become? Insight? Farce? Revelation? It depends on what and who is writing about it. If the anglophone world’s best historian of the Soviet Union takes over from Britain’s sharpest satirist to deal …

The miniseries Mussolini: Son of the Century tracks Il Duce’s early years in the 1920s, uncomfortably reflecting the present-day far beyond Italy.

The Spanish Civil War drew volunteers from far and wide in the fight against fascism – today its history has become emblematic of struggles around the world.

The Australian Curriculum requires Year 7 students to understand how an average smooths out a data set’s rocky terrain into a single flat horizon, an abstraction that fails to represent reality’s complexities. When senior executives at the Department …

Consider a government that monitors its citizens’ private behaviour according to contradictory laws that are arbitrarily enforced and can change without warning. Any perceived violation will be summarily punished as a threat to government legitimacy. …

I reached adulthood the moment housing prices bolted. Now ownership is an uncomfortable subject that silently divides my peer group between those who are mortgaged to the hilt and many who have given up on home ownership entirely. In The Great Divide, …

Since pretty much the beginning, quantum mechanics has been marooned in a quiet crisis. Its vague pronouncements find no purchase in our macro-level intuition. Instead, it sparks wild corollaries such as the multiverse or pronouncements like “the moon …

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of these pages that the fossil fuel lobby has captured both major parties. That’s evident from the way in which Labor’s Future Gas Strategy, in the words of one political observer, took “Morrison’s …

Music’s ephemerality is central to its mysterious appeal. How can an art form capable of such complex structure, such emotional pull, vanish the instant the final note fades? It’s a kind of magic. In The Shortest History of Music by Andrew …

While Japan criticised Australia for diverting gas exports to help cut domestic prices, the Asian power was building its own market with onsold Australian LNG.

Class has fallen out of fashion. Today, gender, sexuality and race are the dominant prisms through which we refract Australian identity. Perhaps it’s the Americanisation of our discourse: invisible barriers never suited a nation of “temporarily frustrated …

In Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals, Satyajit Das, an avid birder and former banker, writes of 30 years visiting wild places from the Congo to Antarctica. Das has witnessed ecotourism’s entire cycle – from …

For the past three months I have been wrestling with pre-modern bureaucracy, soothing my nerves with Renaissance art and gaining belt notches thanks to complex carbohydrates here in Italy, a country that remains an enigma. Well, until I began reading …

Mining is a dirty business but one we all need. Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places by Christopher Pollon explains just how dirty and how necessary. The book concentrates on mines throughout the global south, in Papua …

The title of British philosopher A. C. Grayling’s new book – Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space – offers a more urgent question than you might think. The race is already on for the moon’s platinum, …

The federal government is calling its New Vehicle Efficiency Standard proposal a ‘win, win, win’ deal – for consumers, the cost of living and the climate.

How did everything become so unfair? As a child I had a keen sense for the rigged. During family games of Monopoly, frustration mounted until some unlucky roll condemned me to jail and I would flip the board. I have now curbed my Godzilla tantrums but …

Legal ambiguity over employee data has allowed hundreds of companies to install technology that monitors the online productivity of their staff.

Cartoonists are the court jesters of the news section. While journalists are constrained by fact, cartoonists speak truth. Consider Glen Le Lievre’s frame of the ghosts of robo-debt at the foot of Scott Morrison’s bed, captioned with “I don’t …

Donations to Australia’s largest wildlife rescue service surged during the Black Summer bushfires, but only a fraction has been spent since, as volunteers complain they are under-resourced and unable to save animals.

After 36 years of recognising Taiwanese sovereignty, the Solomon Islands’ switch to China was so rapid Taiwanese diplomats barely had time to lower their flag. In Divided Isles: Solomon Islands and the China Switch, Edward Acton Cavanough follows …

“Imagine an enormous predatory shark weighing 60,000 kilograms,” begins Tim Flannery, summoning Otodus megalodon, a leviathan almost 20m long with the landing weight of an Airbus A320. Nicknamed “Big Meg”, this shark inspires Flannery’s …

The climate crisis is forcing a rethink among workers who feel their employers are part of the problem, and many are switching careers, at some personal cost, to fight for solutions.

It’s worse than you think. Whenever there’s a Pandora/Panama/Paradise Papers drop, our most cynical suspicions are exceeded. The world is divided between ordinary schmucks paying tax and the ultra-wealthy, who will do anything not to. But how do they …

The tens of thousands of online workers who call Thailand’s Chiang Mai their base are a boon for the local economy, but their lifestyle has its costs, both for the city’s social fabric and the ‘digital nomads’ themselves.

The problems with Canadian quantum physicist Chris Ferrie’s new book, Quantum Bullsh*t, begin at the title. An intent to confront misinformation should be stated directly, without the wink of an asterisk. The underlying concept is solid: the …

Scores of emails released under freedom of information show how the grand plan to take the Latrobe Valley’s coal-based workforce into the rapidly expanding electric vehicle industry was lost to politics and ineptitude.

Nigel Farage’s Australian speaking tour is part of a global conservative network being run here by the financially troubled former publisher of Penthouse Australia.

Any history of Australian wildlife at a time of catastrophic decline is important. Too often the plight of these creatures is obscured by the very statistics used to represent them, such as the three billion impacted by the 2019-20 bushfires. Each generation …

Gallipoli’s power to sustain the culture wars is probably the only thing preventing the Pacific theatre from becoming Australia’s most important wartime legend. The Pacific resonates deeply with the present, as an ascendant Asian power expands south …

The NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party has lost its only female MP in a battle over water management, prompting a three-way fight for the Murray–Darling Basin.

How does a writer condense 5000 years of Indian history into a single short book without losing themselves in what they’re omitting? India is a fluid tessellation of ethnicities and languages that shift through the blooming of religions, the clash of …

Once I had a fiction that comforted me in these apocalyptic times: regular people are mostly goodies while the baddies are the corporations that are killing the planet. As an Australian with superannuation and a bank account, it turns out I am invested …

An electric vehicle factory that could have brought hundreds of jobs to Victoria’s struggling Latrobe Valley has stalled. But around Australia the lack of government support for EVs stands in stark contrast to other nations.