• Transport

    When the bus doesn’t come


    Roger Chao |  April 21, 2026


    Until we start treating regional mobility as part of the basic infrastructure of opportunity, not an optional extra, we will keep producing young Australians who are told, relentlessly, to “have a go”, while quietly being denied a way to get there.


  • Education and Training

    Teachers need houses


    Samantha Dunn |  April 21, 2026


    With median house prices in Sydney more than 13 times a teacher’s salary, housing affordability has become one of the most significant threats to sustaining NSW’s teaching workforce.


  • Neuroscience

    Your brain for sale


    Alberto Rinaldi |  April 21, 2026


    Your browsing history, your location, your political preferences. For years, tech companies have found ways to turn personal data into profit. Now, a new and far more intimate frontier is opening: the electrical signals produced by your brain.


Latest Story

  • Goodbye is the hardest word

    Aoife Lynam     |      April 8, 2026

    Life is short and grieving those we lose along the way is a natural part of human existence, but it remains an individual process, rather than a set of stages everyone must pass through.

  • A rising of the lights

    Seth Robinson     |      April 8, 2026

    Steve Toltz’s new novel offers some ideas about the place of humans in a world redefined by AI and the precious solace of personal connection.

  • The social rat race

    Craig Donaldson     |      April 8, 2026

    New UNSW research shows social media platforms do not need to addict users to keep them – they just need to make leaving worse than staying.

  • Opera wars

    Peter Tregear     |      April 7, 2026

    Is opera’s greatest fight really about avoiding a slide into cultural obsolescence? Or is it about how it might survive in an economic system obsessed with “the price of everything, and the value of nothing”?

  • Sleeping in the driver’s seat

    Roger Chao     |      April 7, 2026

    Older women’s homelessness confronts Australia with an uncomfortable truth – the line between “secure” and “homeless” has become thin enough that a respectable life can fall through it quickly.

  • Lazy boys and shy girls

    Bec Kavanagh     |      April 7, 2026

    Authors and critics looking to cut corners by passing off AI slop as their own work still face sanctions in the world of literature and serious journalism.

  • Progressive or what?

    Max Thomas     |      April 6, 2026

    To what extent are “progressive ideas” being translated into beneficial and lasting social, economic, cultural and environmental outcomes?

  • Laughter is the best medicine

    Konstantine Panegyres     |      April 6, 2026

    We live in troubled times but the sense the world is heading to hell in a handbasket is as old as human civilisation and, inevitably, the Greeks (and Romans) had several words about it.

  • Mental health and misinformation

    Open Forum     |      April 6, 2026

    One in five Australians will experience depression or anxiety in their lifetime – and a new report finds this increases their susceptibility to mis- and disinformation.

  • Learning how to talk again

    Daniel Heller     |      April 4, 2026

    In a polarised and contentious age where civil disagreement seems increasingly impossible, we need more spaces for debate where difficult questions can be explored honestly, disagreement is not treated as failure, and curiosity is not mistaken for hostility.

  • The rotten fruit of AI slop

    Niusha Shafiabady     |      April 4, 2026

    It’s a law of human nature that the more sophisticated a technology is, the stupider the uses it will be put to. So, if you like wasting your time on TikTok, you may have noticed a strange new type of AI brain rot taking over for this week at least – “fruit dramas”.

  • An office for economic resilience?

    Sascha-Dominik Dov Bachmann     |      April 4, 2026

    The Iran war should become a turning point for Australia’s approach to Economic Resilience. The creation of a federal Office of National Economic Resilience could safeguard our economic resilience in the future.