Society

Our Love Affair with Digital: Are we Being Led Astray?

The stark realisation of just how wedded to digital technology we have become gave me a strong sense of unease recently. Am I alone in feeling a growing sense of communal vulnerability in this relationship?

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An Open Letter to My Kids before Christmas. Dear Girls…

You know that uncomfortable sagging feeling you get when you leave for school camp knowing you’ve left something behind – you just don’t know what? It’s horrible the way the hunch sits in your gut like too much cake until, as you open your bag at the other end, the realisation hits: it was the [...]

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Portrait of the Artist as a New Media Mogul

While working in a ‘real’ job and then later for myself, I had no idea how little society valued the arts. Now that I’m a writer, I’m learning fast – and the image I see is not very attractive.

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Hurry Up and … Slow Down

Over forty years is a long time to work on a single task. Yet that has been the lot of the four editors of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The massive 3,952 page double volume will be released this month, the culmination of the editors’ entire careers. In our world of fast, [...]

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Happiness Sheds its Hippie Heritage

I was listening to a talkback radio discussion last night about what constitutes achievement and success in work and life. While not a particularly original topic for evening radio, I was struck by the tone of the calls. During quite a lengthy discussion, not a single caller suggested that success is about climbing the corporate ladder or making money. Could it be that success – for everyone, not just the hippies – is about being happy?

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The Scourge of Human Spam

My mother taught me that it is rude to interrupt. It is something that my wife and I, like most parents, try to instil into our daughters. With all that happens in the modern household it is hard enough to find time to have a conversation of more than 30 seconds without those precious sentences [...]

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Steve’s Diabolical Challenge

Like Senator Steve Fielding, I am a lapsed engineer. Like Steve, I have attempted to understand the science of climate change. Unlike Steve, I eventually understood that the task is beyond ordinary mortals. In fact it is even beyond the intellect of a single engineer. I realised that we should be leaving it to the [...]

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Our Life at Work Stripped Bare

Most of us spend a healthy slice of our lives working. We spend additional time thinking about work, but these thoughts are generally focused on the job at hand. We think through an upcoming meeting, worry about a deadline or scheme about our next job change. Much less often do we think about the wider connection of our work to our community. Rarely, if ever, do we think about the extent to which others’ work impacts on, and is essential to, our way of life. In ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’, Alain de Botton does this for us in a thoughtful and entertaining way.

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Experts Agree – or Do They?

The expert is the shaman of our time. The expert offers a guiding arm, steering us through bustling and confusing crowds of information. Experts help us understand complex issues. Experts teach us. Experts help us make choices. Experts help us solve problems. But can we rely on them?

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Why Budgets are Dangerous

In the last week or so, the International Monetary Fund released another of its major economic outlook statements. Business and financial media all over the world earnestly pored over the numbers as if the future had been foretold by some all-knowing wizard. The strong sense was that, with this new-found certainty, decisions could finally be [...]

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When Disaster Strikes Close to Home

We are all used to disasters. Modern communications bring images of disaster from all over the world, directly to our living rooms, as they happen. You would think this relentless exposure to the cruelty of both man and nature would prepare us for when disaster strikes close to home. It doesn’t. Saturday, February 7, 2009 [...]