~ Franz Kafka
FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers find way to unblock aging brain vessels, improve memory
The end of Fairfax as we knew it
If ever there was a time of grief for journalism in Australia, it is today, with the announcement that Nine Entertainment is taking over Fairfax
Annamarie Jagose, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney: "Great journalism changes laws and lives. Hear from reporters about
what it takes to build an investigative project, how they find and
protect sources, compile evidence and structure complex stories to
resonate with audiences. And hear about how these kind of stories change
people’s lives for the better: from exposing cancer clusters and
financial malpractice to global investigations like the Panama Papers.
How can
investigative journalism projects change the world?
The event's key insights from the panellists, available
now on SoundCloud.
The second talk in our series co-presented with the Walkley
Foundation, Journalism's
new bottomline: Impact, will be held on Thursday 6 September, so make sure you register
for that event before it sells out! Many of our other upcoming events also discuss similar
themes, so sign up for our newsletter or have a look at our upcoming
events page for other events you
might be interested in.
The Speakers:
- Alison Sandy, Freedom of Information editor at the Seven Network,
two-time Walkley awards finalist and 2018 Women in Media mentor.
- Mark Schoofs, Investigations & projects editor, BuzzFeed News
(US), 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner for International Reporting for his
series on AIDS in Africa.
- Michael West, Founder & editor of MichaelWest.com.au journalist,
stockbroker, editor and finance commentator and 2017 Adjunct Associate
Professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political
Sciences last year.
- Gerard Ryle, Director, International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, reporter, investigative reporter and editor in Australia
and Ireland, including two decades at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
- Carrie Fellner, investigative journalist, The Sydney Morning Herald
Hoffer wrote one of the greatest lines I’ve ever read, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
“Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.”
―
Socrates
Our tears haven't dried: 7 track tribute to the late Amy Winehouse
What
it takes for a senior bureaucrat to be fired
Victoria's State Trustees boss fired as the case of misused public funds is
referred to IBAC. The former CEO denies any wrongdoing, and will contest his
dismissal.
The outrage over a police shooting of an unarmed black teenager unfolds at the same level of intensity as the outrage over what might or might not be a case of racial profiling by a sales clerk in a small Brooklyn boutique. This is intentional: The general feeling seems to be that distinguishing between degrees of morally repugnant conduct will lead to some sort of blanket pardon of all such conduct; that to understand is always to forgive. Such concern is understandable, but misplaced — it flattens and obfuscates, rather than clarifies. … Read More
Fed-up
John Lloyd speaks out against 'smears'
"Outgoing public service chief defends himself and his achievements in the
job." (The Canberra
Times)
McCaskill’s Husband Scored $131 Million In Federal Housing Contracts During Her Senate Tenure.
What is it like to be a man? We talk plenty about masculinity, but the topic resists straightforward discussion — even as men suck the air from every other conversation Amen
Simon Longstaff knows that he can make people uncomfortable. As the director of
The Ethics Centre for 25 years, Longstaff has worked harder than almost anyone to help leaders and the community understand how to grapple with ethical dilemmas. But Longstaff is no angel. In fact he had to learn to rein in some less attractive habits.
“When I went to university my supervisor told me there was just one rule: ‘Always go for the jugular.’ So I became pretty adept at doing that,” says Longstaff in his small office in Sydney’s downtown. “Then I found myself, to my shame, applying it in a way which was bullying.”
“Not everybody wants to have a forensic discussion about something. Some people just want to feel something and tell you what they feel and not have it subject to question.” He no longer uses his mental acuity as a weapon or to change people’s minds.
Longstaff’s childhood incubated a philosophical approach to life. His mother died when he was seven and he and his three siblings were raised by their father on Sydney’s north shore. Three days after his 17th birthday, Longstaff started his working life as a cleaner at BHP’s manganese mine in the Northern Territory.
A. ent
Role of his mother’s death
Longstaff recently had cause to reflect on the role his mother played in deciding his life’s work, even though she died when he was seven: “When I was in my 30s, I was visiting an aunt of mine who was a nun. And she pulled out a letter and said, ‘Have you seen this?’
“It was a letter that my mother – who was a very devout Catholic – had written. My mother described how she’d just come back from the doctor who had told her that if she was to proceed with the next pregnancy, the fourth child, she would certainly die and the child would probably die too.
“So she’s writing this to her sister: ‘I have a husband, Robert, that I love, three children, but as a Catholic I feel this child must be born so it can be baptised.’ And then she says, ‘There’s no one I can talk to about it other than write this letter to you.’ And then finally as she works through this painful process, she finishes the letter, describing me as a five-year-old standing beside her, colouring in.
“So I’m sitting here now at the Ethics Centre, already doing this work, having created a place where this woman could have come. I think, ‘OK, now is this a coincidence? Did this woman say something to this five-year-old boy that lodged in his brain? Was there this intimacy between the mother and the child, so there is a sense of her?’
“I have no idea what the answer is. All I know is there’s this brute fact about my existence. I stood next to a woman and she wrote that letter and I’ve built a place where she could come today. ““My dad would say to me, “Look, you’ve had a great education, you’ve been in boarding school. That’s it. Anything else you want to do with your life, you’re going to have to fund it yourself.”
Longstaff went on to study at Cambridge, but the schooling he got at the mine, among cleaners, truck drivers and miners – working men who were “smart, sophisticated, engaged” – had a lasting impact that ultimately drew him into a career as a public philosopher, rather than an academic in a university.
Role of his mother’s death
Longstaff recently had cause to reflect on the role his mother played in deciding his life’s work, even though she died when he was seven: “When I was in my 30s, I was visiting an aunt of mine who was a nun. And she pulled out a letter and said, ‘Have you seen this?’
“It was a letter that my mother – who was a very devout Catholic – had written. My mother described how she’d just come back from the doctor who had told her that if she was to proceed with the next pregnancy, the fourth child, she would certainly die and the child would probably die too.
“So she’s writing this to her sister: ‘I have a husband, Robert, that I love, three children, but as a Catholic I feel this child must be born so it can be baptised.’ And then she says, ‘There’s no one I can talk to about it other than write this letter to you.’ And then finally as she works through this painful process, she finishes the letter, describing me as a five-year-old standing beside her, colouring in.
“So I’m sitting here now at the Ethics Centre, already doing this work, having created a place where this woman could have come. I think, ‘OK, now is this a coincidence? Did this woman say something to this five-year-old boy that lodged in his brain? Was there this intimacy between the mother and the child, so there is a sense of her?’
“I have no idea what the answer is. All I know is there’s this brute fact about my existence. I stood next to a woman and she wrote that letter and I’ve built a place where she could come today. “
Simon Longstaff on why The Ethics Centre's an antidote for people behaving badly | afr.com - Financial Review
“With the philosophy I did, it made me want to be where stuff happens, in the space in which people are going about their jobs; to find a way to be really part of society and part of an enabling capacity to help it,” he says. “That’s what Socrates did. He was in the marketplace, stopping people on their way to court.”
Dangerous ideas and moral seriousness
Simon Longstaff: That’s the unexamined life. But that’s not what gets people in trouble, in the case that I think you were asking about where people come to you and they say, is it that they haven’t thought about it. No they actually have thought about it if they’ve got to the point where they’re coming to us.
But they’ve encountered a situation which is a mysterious part of the human condition in which you might be inclined to live an examined life, you might actually be fully committed to doing that and you might be doing it in practice in relation to your own circumstances. And yet you reach a point where the matter is undecidable.
So to take a common example, you might be in a situation where you know something that needs to be said or done, something to do with the truth which you feel compelled to disclose. So you’ve got this strong orientation to truth telling.
On the other hand, you might also know that you’re committed not to causing harm to people where that can be avoided.
So one horn of the dilemma is a commitment to truth telling. The other is not to cause harm to other people where that can be prevented. And yet you know that in this particular situation if you tell somebody the truth, you’re going to hurt them. You know, truth/compassion. And there’s no amount of thinking that necessarily resolves that for you...
Richard Aedy: I want to ask about you now because you dedicated your book, Hard Case, Tough Choices, to your father. And you wrote, “For my father, Robert, who has faced more hard cases and tough choices than anyone deserves and who has come through with his honour and integrity intact.”
Can I ask, what were those hard cases and choices?
Simon Longstaff: Well, it’s around his part in the decision-making in events that led to my mother’s death when I was seven. She was fine with me being born. Then there’d been some illnesses associated with brothers and sisters and it got to the point where the doctors told her that if she was to have a fourth child, she would die.
She fell pregnant and she went to the doctor and the doctor confirmed the diagnosis that to proceed with the pregnancy would certainly lead to her death and probably to the death of the child.
And she was a very devout Catholic and wrestled with this issue. And, in fact, I found years and years later, after I was doing this job, a letter she’d written to her sister in which she described this terrible dilemma with a husband, three children she loved and having to make this decision, and then describes me standing next to her, you know, while she writes this letter, which is kind of curious in terms of what I ended up doing. But Dad’s part …
Richard Aedy: And heartbreaking to read, Simon.
Simon Longstaff: Yes, but then I’ve always thought in terms of my own life that I’m happy with where I am in my life, and I can’t pick and choose the bits that have made me who I am or given me the opportunities that I’ve enjoyed. So I take my life as a whole, good and bad. And so ... but that’s to distract from Dad.
Dad was not a Catholic. He’s an Anglican. I don’t think he personally would have felt constrained in the same way as she did around the choice.
But what he did do – and this was the, I think, the extraordinary thing – he said to my mother Margaret that he would support her in any decision that she as a matter of conscience chose to pursue, and that he would do that knowing that he would then, if she chose to proceed with the pregnancy, have to contend with her death and being by her while she died, and then being left with three - or if the child had lived (and he did, my brother) - four children, which he would have to care for, including a newborn baby, and that he would support that.
And I thought that in a life which, of course, has its imperfections, where decisions are made which may not have been ones that always should have been made, that was such a big one. And so much flowed from it and was acted out in other parts of his life that I wanted to dedicate the book to him in those terms.
Brian Portnoy, The Geometry of Wealth: How To Shape A Life Of Money And Meaning (2018):
In The Geometry of Wealth, behavioral finance expert Brian Portnoy delivers an inspired answer based on the idea that wealth, truly defined, is funded contentment.
It is the ability to underwrite a meaningful life. This stands in stark
contrast to angling to become rich, which is usually an unsatisfying
treadmill.
Robert Wiblin interviews Yew-Kwang Ng. And from Wiblin’s email:
“Hi Tyler,
…I
spoke with Professor Yew-Kwang Ng,
a 75 year old Chinese-Australian economist in Singapore who was
impressively ahead of his time and I would never have expected to exist.
He:
- Was an active columnist in Chinese newspapers in favour of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 80s.
- Was perhaps the first to write an analytical paper on wild animal welfare/suffering, in 1995!
- Wrote about the great importance of investing to prevent human extinction in 1991,
well before this became a mainstream view. He also tried to tackle
resulting infinitarian paralysis before this issue was widely
appreciated.
- Is an advocate of direct brain stimulation, as a drug-alternative which humans don’t abuse or develop tolerance to.
- Advocated over 50 years for utilitarianism, philosophical hedonism and cardinality in welfare economics and made major theoretical contributions to welfare economics.
- Developed a theoretical basis for interpersonal utility comparisons.
- Since forever has been promoting the correct reading of Harsanyi’s Social Aggregation Theorem rather than Rawls’ bastardisation of it.
- Was a communist revolutionary in colonial Malaysia, but then studied economics and deconverted.
- Figured out about half of what’s distinctive about ‘effective
altruist’ thinking, totally independently and on his own well before
most people got to the questions.
- Was the first to introduce non-perfect competition in macroeconomics
by combining microeconomics, macroeconomics, and general equilibrium
analysis into ‘mesoeconomics’, showing that Keynesianism and Monetarism are special cases.”
It made me sad that he isn’t more widely appreciated already, even by people building on his work today, so I made
a guide to his most pioneering or influential publications to go along with the episode.
It would be great if you could post on MR and Twitter! :)”
Malcolm Turnbull's chief of staff Peter Woolcott will be the
Coalition government's new public service commissioner receiving
$706,000 a year after his predecessor resigns next month.
The
prime minister announced the Foreign Affairs Department deputy secretary
and diplomat would begin the role on August 9, following the outgoing
commissioner John Lloyd's retirement.
Mr Turnbull said Mr Woolcott was an experienced public servant with three decades in the Australian Public Service.
Woolcott
appointed next Australian Public Service Commissioner
Turnbull's current chief of staff, Peter Woolcott, has been on leave from his
three-decade DFAT career, but will soon head the agency responsible for
workplace matters, bargaining, culture and leadership development across the
Australian Public Service