Is the concept of a country obsolete?

Responding to a huge volume of questions on borders, refugees and migration, Geraldine Brooks, Tom Elliott, Voranai Vanijaka and Mark Colvin search for insight and progress on this charged and crucial subject. 'I've had a lot of experience in places where people squander a great deal of human life…

What is the best way to destroy the internet before it destroys us? Cory Doctorow and Alan Brough

It has to be said: the cat pictures might not be enough. The internet definitively sucks sometimes. It’s a willing and fertile host to our most objectionable prejudice, anger and desire; an open marketplace for exploitation, child porn and illicit drugs and weapons. It provides a container for our …

What’s the ‘good’ in the good fight? Questions for ethical thinking in strange times

If we peel back religion, politics, economics and other big players in our collective pursuit of the ‘common good’ … what do we end up with? How are our ideas of goodness formed – and can they ever be agreed upon? The panel: Mark Colvin, Anne Summers, Alan Duffy, Raimond Gaita and Gregory Phillips…

When is Australia racist? Questions of difference and fairness

Australian racism is a slippery thing. We’ve seen it (at the football, on a bus with a singing French tourist, in select policies of successive governments, at anti-something protests). We know it exists. But as a nation – a deeply multicultural one, arguably defined by migration – we haven’t progr…

Why are people nicer when it’s your birthday? Questions of relativity and hope

How are you? Such a habitual, everyday question remains one of our most difficult to answer honestly and fully. Where do we even begin? Are we ever possessed by just one state or feeling? What moves the tides of our emotional lives? 'Friendships are chosen. Family are not chosen. By definition, i…

One last question: Cheryl Strayed, on jumping off mountains

As part of The Interrobang, Cheryl Strayed – author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things – shares a story of her children leaping, literally, into the unknown. 'When I contemplated the question of the relationship between words and actions,' she begins, 'I thought about a recent experience I had with…

One last question: Mary Norris, on the importance of words

The chicken is just the egg’s way of making another egg.Mary Norris 'Well,' says Mary Norris – New Yorker copy editor and author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, 'it’s true that my life has been completely squandered on words. I’ve hardly ever done anything!' As part of The Inte…

Adam Liaw: What is the difference between muffins and cupcakes?

In this rollicking short lecture, MasterChef Australia-winning chef and Destination Flavour presenter Adam Liaw attempts to pick apart the differences – etymologically, compositionally, and culturally – between muffins and cupcakes. Along the way, he touches on how we assign meaning to what we eat,…

Upulie Divisekera: How does the world end?

Scientists have told us how the world began, but how do they think it will end? Explore pre-human mass extinctions (and how close it came to ‘the end’) – and why our thoughts often drift toward apocalyptic predictions and end time fears – with a half hour talk from molecular biologist and science c…

Mary Norris and Jane Caro: Why does ‘i’ come before ‘e’, except after ‘c’?

In the hierarchy of improbable things, a grammatical error in the pages of the New Yorker must certainly sit close to the top – and as copy editor at the notoriously fastidious literary institution, Mary Norris has been at the frontline of the fight against errant apostrophes for several decades.  …