The ‘Braveheart effect’ – and how companies manipulate our desire for freedom

Being mindful of the Braveheart effect can help us to be active decision makers guided by reason, rather than passive victims of evolution or corporations, no matter how they try to ‘nudge’ us towards buying their wares.

Can Usain Bolt really make it as a footballer?

What do retired Olympic sprinters do: coach, commentate, agency work, celebrity TV appearances, or just rest on their laurels? Bolt had different ideas, openly expressing his desire to play professional soccer. An Australian club offered him an opportunity – but can he take it?

Why do women take sexy selfies?

New Australian research suggests that women around the world take sexy selfies to compete with their peers and climb the social ladder in economically unequal environments.

How Soviet tanks shook up the Australian left

The crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968 posed a problem for Communist sympathisers and apologists in Australia. It would be another 20 years before eastern Europe freed itself from Russian occupation.

Australia has a long way to go on responsible gambling

Even with responsible gambling measures in place, excessive gambling remains a problem in Australia and has a significant cost to both individuals and society.

How to build self-control by copying others

Self-control can appear an inborn trait but identifying with people who display it can help build our own willpower too.

The ‘great Australian silence’ 50 years on

It’s 50 years since the anthropologist WEH Stanner gave the 1968 Boyer Lectures — a watershed moment for Australian history. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn’t “be explained by absent mindedness”.

Who is doing what on the homefront?

More progressive attitudes regarding gender roles aren’t translating into reality in Australian households. If both parents work full-time, housework and care remain the domain of mothers.

Sticks and stones – beating the bullies by building resilience

Bullying is never acceptable, but encouraging a resilient mindset makes a big difference to how much damage bullying does – parents and teachers should help kids learn that they have the power to cope with difficulty, rather than paint them as helpless victims.

Why the ABC must stand firm against threats to its independence

Editorial independence does not mean giving journalists licence to broadcast or publish whatever they want or to avoid accountability for their mistakes. It means encouraging journalists to tackle important stories regardless of what people in power might think.

The harsh realities of the global sport industry

The World Cup final will no doubt draw millions of enthusiastic viewers around the world, including young men in impoverished regions who dream of sporting success as the only way to escape poverty, however most of these dreams will end in disappointment.

Have we really given up on progress?

Although it joins a growing list of jeremiads about the possible end of Western civilisation as we know it, Edward Luce’s ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ usefully puts the debate in context and argues that Trump is a symptom, not cause, of many of America’s and the world’s problems.