Our booming café culture is fuelled by urban growth

Café culture is now a firm fixture in urban life around the world, providing new social spaces for a diverse range of people. While craft beer is also increasingly popular, more of us are bonding over coffee.

Moving between different cultural worlds

Young Australians from migrant and refugee backgrounds are close to their families, but this can mean they have to negotiate a balance between different cultural expectations.

How creativity can help us cultivate moral imagination

Whether it’s a painting, or a patchwork quilt, when we create something, we step into the future, we trust in the destiny of our own creations. We learn to trust that we can create our own reality.

The ancient roots of your humble garden

You don’t have to be an avid gardener to appreciate the opportunity for reflection that a stroll in the garden can afford us, but gardens are also bound to their political and religious history, traces of which can be found in our ongoing cultural obsession with them.

The unacknowledged fictions of Yuval Harari

Yuval Noah Harari may be a popular and highly influential writer on the past and future of humanity, but replacing one set of myths with another is no basis for confronting the earth’s existential problems.

Rediscovering NSW’s pioneering female cricketers

While the nation follows the fortunes of our men and women’s cricket teams over summer, ANU and the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust are shining a light on the dawn of women’s cricket in New South Wales, pioneered by the Gregory sisters in the 1880s. 

Making New Year’s resolutions more personal could help them stick

Many of us embark on life-improving resolutions in the new year, but few of us maintain the effort. Picking personal goals, rather than those suggested by others, could be the key to success.

Art helps us see when we don’t want to look

Australia’s under appreciated colonial art is a window to the past that can help us understand the fraught and violent history of settlement.

Organic, free-range, fairtrade or vegan: sifting fact from fiction

Making it easier for consumers to assess the ethical credentials of products – through in-store information, accredited labeling systems or apps – would help people make more informed choices about the food they buy.

Happy Christmas to all our readers

Open Forum would like to wish all our readers a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Family films to watch this Christmas

The holidays are here, the family is around, so which feel-good movies can you watch together to reconnect with something meaningful? Here are ten family films which offer more than the usual Christmas fare.

The curse of identity politics and the case for shared values

Without a continuing trust in shared values we run the risk of being unable to convince people different from ourselves why they might wish to think or feel, let alone vote or act, like we do.