Australia

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The banality of Meghan the Martyr

The great Dolly Parton once quipped “get down off your cross, honey, someone needs the wood.” This remark, aimed at attention-seeking self-described martyrs, could almost have been dreamt up for the Duchess of Sussex. Meghan, along with her ever-subservient husband Prince Harry, is currently bringing the gospel according to Meghan to Australia. During her quasi-royal tour to promote a wellness weekend that she is the keynote speaker at, Meghan has invented a new catchphrase – “Call me Meg” – and has been photographed smiling and looking appropriately radiant. The Netflix cash might be drying up, but enough has been banked for her to look a million dollars in the various Instagram-friendly outfits she has been sporting.

Meghan

Saturday

Ed Tarnowski

Age-verification for social media puts kids at risk

The Heritage Foundation’s tech policy team has endorsed European-style age verification laws for social media, likening them to alcohol and tobacco age restrictions. This is a comparison worth taking seriously – just not in the way Heritage intends.Walk into a bar, and a bouncer checks your ID. In about 15 seconds, you’re inside. That’s it. Online age verification would be a very different experience, requiring the collection, storage and verification of sensitive personal documents at scale. This is a breach of privacy and free expression for adults. It also puts minors – a population 35 to 51 times more likely than adults to fall victim to identity theft – at risk.

Age-verification

Wednesday

Terry Barnes

The disembodied brain cells playing video games

In a suburban Melbourne industrial estate, hidden in a clutter of brutalist buildings and parked trucks, tomorrow’s world is taking shape. Here, an Australian tech start-up called Cortical Labs has caused an internet sensation. More than 40 million people have watched a clip of disembodied human brain cells playing the 1990s video game Doom. These cells are kept in petri dishes, wired up to computers and trained to do whatever the researchers want. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer,” says neuroscientist and Cortical Labs’s chief scientific officer, Brett Kagan. “But they can shoot, they can spin, they can seek out enemies and, while they die a lot, they are learning.

Tuesday

Julie Burchill

Spare us the girls’ weekend, Meghan

I almost spat out my toast (smothered with the As Ever, The Raspberry Spread Trio – "Made To Keep On Hand And Enjoy Often," $42 – naturally) in pure molten anticipation when I read that my role model in spreading jam to flour, sorry, speaking truth to power, will be hosting a women-only weekend "retreat" in Sydney during her forthcoming Australia jaunt, with tickets "a steal" at $2,699 AUD ($1,930 USD). I already had my credit card in my hot little hand until I remembered that, though I love to lunch tête-à-tête with one lady, being in the company of many women at once – with not one awful toxic man around – makes me feel like drawing crude approximations of penises on fragrant toilet doors after around half an hour.

Monday

Stephen Reicher

Why you are probably a hero

The Bondi murders painted a picture constituted out of the contrast between shade and light. This was the chiaroscuro massacre. But, perhaps because we have become desensitized by endless dark descriptions of mass killings over the years, our attention was as much on the moments of brightness on that Sydney beach: the onlookers who grappled with the shooters, the lifeguards who sprinted towards danger, those who shielded strangers with their own bodies. These acts of heroism seemed all the more remarkable because of all we have been led to believe about how people act in emergencies.This can be summarized in one word: panic. When the going gets tough, ordinary people fall apart.

Bondi

Thursday

Terry Barnes

Anthony Albanese has failed to step up after the Bondi beach attack

It’s been three days since the jihad against innocent Jews at Sydney’s Bondi beach. A nation’s grief is swiftly turning to anger and Australia’s prime minister is floundering. As more is learned about the father-and-son killers who took 15 lives and wounded many more, questions are piling up. How did the father enter the country? How did security agencies lose track of the son, who not only imbibed his father’s Jew hate, but may have been further radicalized by reportedly studying with one of Sydney’s most notorious Islamist hate preachers? How did they manage to go to a militant area of the Philippines as recently as a month ago? How did the father manage to hold a gun license, given his own history and that of his son?

Monday

Terry Barnes

Bondi Beach and the heroism of Ahmed al-Ahmed

As the appalling story of Sunday’s anti-Jewish mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach continue to unfold, and 16 people are now dead, there have been few glimmers of light in the darkness. The men identified as the shooters are a father and son, Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24. The father was shot and killed by police last night, and the son was overpowered and taken into custody. The New South Wales police commissioner says little is yet known about the pair, but Sajid Akram was a licensed gun owner, with six guns in his possession. Old social media posts have also emerged of Naveed Akram being praised for his Islamic studies in 2022.

ahmed
Bondi
Brendan O’Neill

The Bondi Beach shooting was a pogrom

This is not a time to mince words. Moral clarity is our sole duty on this dark day. What happened in Bondi in Sydney was an act of fascist barbarism. It was a pogrom on a beach. It was a massacre of Jews that brought to mind the horrors of the mid-20th century. If this pitiless atrocity doesn’t prize open the eyes of the West, nothing will. The details are beyond grim. At least 11 people mercilessly slain in an attack targeted at Sydney’s Jewish community. More than a thousand Jews had gathered near a playground at Bondi to mark the first day of Hanukkah. Then two men opened fire. They marked the innocents for death. It was an act of savage racial hatred. Australian officials have confirmed that rancid Jewphobia was the fuel of this crime against humanity.

Wednesday

Terry Barnes

Will tech companies bend to Australia’s social media ban?

It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good uses, but it also has its bad ones. Staying in control of your social media life is difficult enough as an adult, but for children it can be an especially dangerous world in which to dwell. Too often children are glued to their phones and devices, staring, scrolling, disengaged from the world around them. Many children are exposed to online harm, including bullying, grooming and shaming. Appallingly, many children are emotionally and psychologically damaged from social media exposure. Terribly, and tragically, some have taken their own lives as a result of what has befallen them online.

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Down with exclamation points!

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation points and it’s been difficult. Exclamation points are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, a marker that says: “No offense!” You add them to the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation. Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as “markers of friendly interaction.

Punctuation

Tuesday

James Tidmarsh

Why Trump is freezing out Five Eyes allies

The most powerful intelligence alliance in the world is breaking up. In January, Donald Trump restricted intelligence-sharing on Russia and Ukraine, cutting allies out of negotiations and freezing certain channels entirely. Then in March came the so-called “Ukraine intel blackout,” an unprecedented freeze that shut Britain and Australia out of updates on Russian troop movements. And last month, the Dutch said they were scaling back intelligence-sharing with America over fears of “politicization.” Trump tends to treat intelligence as leverage, a tool to reward countries that fall in line with Washington and punish those that don’t. In his hands, intelligence and secrets have become bargaining chips.

five eyes

Monday

Ryan Bourne

Foreign governments have themselves to blame for Trump’s movie tariffs

Donald Trump has thrown another trade grenade. His latest idea – a 100 percent tariff on all foreign-made films – is crude, impractical and potentially disastrous for his frenemies in the Hollywood industry that he has suddenly decided to champion. Announcing the tariffs via Truth Social, Trump tried to paint movies produced overseas as a danger: not just to America’s film production industry, but national security too. “WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!" he thundered. Invoking national security to justify these tariffs is legally shaky. Practically, it’s not clear how you even impose tariffs on a complex, multi-national production like a modern movie. Films shot in Croatia, edited in the UK and funded by America pose an administrative nightmare.

marvel movie

Tuesday

Cockburn

The ‘Senate Twink’ lands in Oz

A surprising item from Down Under: Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Senate staffer who was fired after he and his partner filmed themselves in flagrante delicto on Amy Klobuchar’s desk in Hart 216, has resurfaced in Australia after touring the world. Maese-Czeropski gave an interview to the Gay Sydney News about the fallout from his December 2023 rendezvous – which readers of this newsletter were the first to learn about. Maese-Czeropski, who worked as a legislative assistant for then-senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, says he spent “a little bit in the psych ward” after his firing, before moving to Sydney by way of South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean. https://www.instagram.

Senate Twink Aidan Maese-Czeropski

Monday

Joel Kotkin

The West faces a new type of housing crisis

Throughout the West, particularly the Anglosphere, housing costs are ravaging the middle class. Homeownership, long the key to social mobility, is on the decline, particularly among younger generations and minorities. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, house prices in high-income countries have been rising “three times faster than household median income over the last two decades,” causing the standard of living “to stagnate or decline.” Unlike previous housing crises, this one is not primarily caused by mass displacements due to wars or natural disasters or population growth.

housing

Thursday

Geoff Hill

How the Special Relationship could be renewed after US-UK elections

A record number of countries will hold elections this, including Britain on July 4 and the United States on November 5. These two great powers — each with a veto at the UN — have enjoyed a bond that has survived for so long, is it known on both sides of the Atlantic as “the Special Relationship.” There have been stand-offs: Britain refused to join the war in Vietnam, and when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982, the US did not intervene. But Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher worked in tandem to bring down the Berlin Wall. And if the view on Ukraine and Gaza is not always the same, there is a shared commitment to the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors and to a peace in the Middle East that secures the rights of Jews and Palestinians alike.

special relationship

Friday

Matthew Foldi

Congressman’s campaign site suffers X-rated hack

If you want casual sex in Australia, an online mistress, a “milf live chat,” or even just “local adult hookups now,” Congressman Henry Cuellar has got you covered.  It’s unclear what's going on with Cuellar’s campaign website, but it’s currently overrun with not safe for work topics. “Start a new adventure with local swinger couples now,” one post reads. “This really is a powerful way to explore new intimate fantasies and satisfy new people,” the Texas Democrat lets us know via his website. Separately, a post in Russian reads “Гоксбет 2 Ставь на свои цели!” telling readers that they should gamble their money. If you’re feeling adventurous and want to travel, Cuellar’s got you covered.

henry cuellar website hack

Friday

Nomi Kaltmann

Will Orthodox Judaism accept female rabbis?

Bracha Jaffe, an American-Israeli, spent decades working in tech, focusing on software development and raising her family in Israel. But following a midlife career shift and a move to New York, she now also works as an assistant rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a large Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx. Every day, she plays a key role guiding congregants during life cycle events, such as births and deaths. She teaches classes and visits the sick. “I think it’s still true that when someone says ‘Rabbi,’ what comes to mind is an older male, perhaps with a white beard,” she says. With her blonde bob, ever-present smile and warm demeanor, Jaffe is a far cry from this stereotype.

orthodox judaism

Friday

Matt McDonald

Get in loser, we’re canceling Bluey

When I saw on Twitter that Bluey was the latest victim of cancel culture, naturally my first thought was "who did she say the N-word in front of?" For those not in the know, Bluey is an Australian cartoon dog who stars in an eponymous kids' TV show that airs on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and, in the US, Disney+. She and her family go on a series of adventures that guide viewers through a healthy mix of toilet humor and confronting difficult emotions, in a tenor suitable for the under-tens.

bluey

Sunday

Alexandra Williams

Why does the ‘c’-word upset Americans so much?

Recently I dined with an old American friend at my home in Sydney. He brought up the sacking of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, reportedly for, among other things, using a terrible curse word, which my friend referred to coyly as "C U Next Tuesday." I was baffled for a minute.  “Do you mean ‘c—’?” I asked. “Oh, don’t say that!” “C—, c—, c—!” I cried. He cringed as if being assaulted physically.  Fresh from the news about Carlson, the New York Post reported that ESPN fired journalist Marly Rivera for using the word against a female colleague trying to muscle in on her interview with Yankee player Aaron Judge.  Why does it upset Americans so much?

‘c’-word

Friday

Amanda Craig

The quiet rise of Outback Noir

No Australian woman has ever won the Booker Prize — and yet in the stylish genre called Outback Noir, women reign supreme. Of these, the queen is Jane Harper. Her 2016 debut, The Dry (successfully filmed with Eric Bana), marked the start of a new kind of detective fiction that has gained an international following. Some of this may be due to the way we love this version of Down Under. Forget about Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. Portraits of small societies where embattled individuals get swallowed up by the big bad bush, parched or flooded, give an apocalyptic, Mad Max edge to a distinctly Australian setting. Arthur W.

harper outback noir