Posts by Paul Monk
31
Aug
At the ALP national conference earlier this month, Pat Conroy, Minister for Defence Industry and Minister for International Development...
14
Aug
Reflections on the erasure of Hellenistic science
This article is part of our ‘Celebrate Science’ feature series to mark National Science Week. It was originally published in the...
18
Apr
Greg Sheridan’s uncritical supernaturalism
On Easter Saturday, The Australian was to run a 1200-word piece of mine about Mathias Cormann being a safe pair of hands at the OECD, i...
03
Feb
Beethoven, music and human progress
One morning a few days ago, a sublimely mild and sunny summer day, I was walking the several kilometres into Melbourne’s central busine...
20
Jan
The finest kind of democratic leader
Word has spread. After five and a half years as Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern is stepping down by 7 February.
She ha...
05
Jan
Expert knowledge and scientific thinking under siege
This article is part of our ‘From the vault’ series of summer reading. It was originally published in the Winter 2017 edition of Austra...
22
Sep
Salman Rushdie and freedom of speech
Salman Rushdie was assailed by 24-year-old Muslim fanatic Hadi Matar on 12 August as he was about to give a public lecture in New York....
07
Jul
Reason and unreason in the critique of Western civilisation
Douglas Murray is a wonderfully free spirit who lucidly tackles the manias of political correctness with erudition, panache and limpid ...
11
Apr
Je Suis Mill
This is an edited extract from a dinner speech to the Liberal Club of the University of Melbourne, delivered on 10 December 2021
Abo...
15
Mar
Are we a failed species?
A very old friend and longtime mentor of mine, now 85 years of age, recently expressed the gloomy opinion that Homo sapiens is ‘a faile...
01
Mar
Ukraine crisis: The Russian leader’s vision of the past
The day that Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine, President Biden spoke publicly about the sheer mendacity of Putin’s propa...
28
Jan
Suicide as catastrophe and as calculation
The August 2021 issue of Harper’s magazine has a cover story headed ‘What are the odds? The Troubled Quest to Predict Suicide’. The ess...