Arena Online

Pressure: A Personal Reflection on British and Western Establishment Racism

To the uninitiated, this might seem like a severe personal history but among Black Britons, these types of events are often treated as tame, standard encounters that easily occur in a society in which Black Lives Matter’s deaths at the hands of the police are regarded as mere policy.

Better Access to What?: Australia’s mental health strategy misses the point entirely

Thinking about mental illness as a discrete phenomenon limits the need for broader social transformation to create a healthy and safe society.

Giving the Bird: Toondah Harbour Developments

If the project goes ahead, this well-patronised public park will be built over. Both leisure and aesthetics will be privatised.

Africa is the last roll of the dice for Big Oil

A significant part of this is about an industry in the death throes of relevancy, thrashing about for and latching onto one last opportunity for legitimacy, power and profits in the midst of crisis.

Fusion Net Gain Is Manufactured Ignorance

Almost every word written about ‘net energy gain’ from a fusion reaction is a species of manufactured ignorance generated by managing uncomfortable knowledge, which is complicated by a tension between the desire to trust fusion experts but and the knowledge that those experts operate under powerful incentives to engage in hype.

Will Politics Re-Organise Around the Question of Technology?

By the 1980s, the deep critique of technology, growth and the culture and psychology arising from it had been exhausted—beaten by the impasse of the historical moment.

Three Recommendations for Your Summer Reading Pile

Three extraordinary books—an activist’s memoir, a journalist’s eyewitness account and an academic’s lockdown project—are deeply interlinked.

Brave New Wild: Why ‘Resurrecting’ the Thylacine is a Dangerous Idea

Any public debate on de-extinction technologies must take account of the broader processes that are bringing such affordances into being, and the long-term social and psychological effects of regarding the latter as self-evident progress.

The LGBTIQ Community Must Stand Up To Drug Companies To End HIV/AIDS

The widespread medicating of the LGBTIQ community is not something to celebrate – it’s deeply troubling.

Pandemic Politics

In epidemiology, MacIntyre says, not everything is as it seems. She mistrusts some of her colleagues who put their reputations and grant applications ahead of scientific evidence and public health.

The Technoking and the Town Square: Musk, Twitter and radical individualism

Many of its frequent users have spoken recently of the tragedy of Twitter being destroyed 'as a community', it is clearly nothing like a community in any real sense. Indeed it substitutes for real community in its absence.

In the Pink

Dunstan had led the way with clothes reform in parliament, first with safari suits and then by appearing with neither coat nor tie.