It's one of the inevitabilities of music criticism that eventually, someone somewhere declares a formerly beloved genre dead. The movement usually goes something like: underground from first...
What we didn't know that we knew about Afghanistan In his book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, philosopher Slajov Zizek laid out an ad-hoc taxonomy for various kinds of knowledge, via a reference to then...
Last week in Australia, Julia Gillard became the first female Prime Minister in the country's history. Three or four months out from an election, Gillard went to (now former) Prime Minister Kevin...
As the ongoing fight about a trans-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) bill rages on in the United States, a recent report in New York has raised questions about the effectiveness of...
A clip on Rachel Maddow's show Thursday showed that the oil leak still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico bears an uncanny resemblance to one from 1979. Each one of the failed containment plans (top...
The American satiric comedian Stephen Colbert famously introduced the word “truthiness” into the contemporary English lexicon. Dictionary Merriam Webster named it their Word of Year in 2006,...
For a number of years now, the so-called “War on Christmas” has been a favorite meme of the Christian Right in the United States. As the title of Fox commentator John Gibson's book goes,we should...
The fight over reproductive rights keeps dragging on in the United States, but in Australia, hot-button issues like abortion and contraception are rarely a subject for public debate. In Australia,...
I was at a wedding several years ago when the celebrant made a comment that pricked up my ears. She said, “in Australia, marriage is between a man and a woman.” I initially thought, Way to state...
