Saturday, June 30, 2018

GRATTAN: The loners who lead, and trash, ‘personality’ parties

Great writers and artists should take part in politics only as a defence against politics.

–Tchekhov


A Midwestern woman narrates how she came to politics—and the Left—during unemployment.
↩︎ Salon

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul to the grave...
~Douglas Coupland

 

Short stories are a luxury which only those writers who fall in love with them can afford to cultivate. To such a writer they yield the purest enjoyment; they become a privately elegant craft allowing, within very strict confines, a wealth of idiosyncrasies. Compared with the novel, that great public park so often complete with draughty spaces, noisy brass band and unsightly litter, the enclosed and quiet short story garden is of small importance, and never has been much more…. The short story gives the release of a day off, when something happened at The NSW Bear Pit which one remembers with a smile or a start of interest, with a pang or a pause of fear.

 Walking the City with Jane: An Illustrated Celebration of Jane Jacobs and Her Legacy of Livable Cities

 


The loners who lead, and trash, ‘personality’ parties
MICHELLE GRATTAN: We may be in a “celebrity” age but personality parties, based around a “name” implode, explode, or fizzle. In the last few years, we’ve seen them do all three.

A minimum-wage worker can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S. Washington Post  

People kicking these food delivery robots is an early insight into how cruel humans could be to robots SFGate


WAYNE SWAN. Foreign influence and foreign donations in Australia.


The debate over foreign influence in our domestic politics and policymaking is an important one for our country – too important for political point-scoring and manipulation by vested interests and political vendettas.   Continue reading