The Minefield

If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which... more

Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric c... more

Sometimes the language we use every day, often unthinkingly, contains within it traces of ... more

Judging by the way we use the word in everyday speech, we intuitively know what we mean wh... more

One of the most unyielding aspects of life in the modern West is, perhaps, the ultimate va... more

One of the common laments we heard last November, as Australia marked the fiftieth anniver... more

If there is a single adjective that captures the difference, both in tone and in action, b... more

The massacre at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025 — during which two gunmen targeted a group... more

How should we wrestle with the problem of loving the art, but being unsettled by the behav... more

Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of "art" — the kind of performance that re... more

When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price... more

There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences; why they favour one... more

AI is sometimes portrayed in utopian terms as the essential technological innovation. At o... more

It is one of the casualties of democratic politics that citizens rarely remain indifferent... more

In the world of book sales, what “romantasy” is to fiction, autobiography/memoir is to non... more

It feels like, for so much of this year, in one form or another, we’ve been trying to coun... more

Earlier this month, in response to a disturbing rise in youth crime in Melbourne, Victoria... more

Ever since 2023, a class of GPL-1 based drugs — which for two decades were used to treat t... more

The availability of increasingly powerful generative AI tools has radically altered  [the ... more

For the last two years, there has been a steady drumbeat of protests — sometimes weekly, s... more

For the second time this year, millions of people have taken to the streets of cities and ... more

There is no doubt that silence can be a form of cowardice: a refusal to speak up or speak ... more

The politics of immigration has returned in recent months — and returned with a depth of f... more

In a remarkable column from 1944, George Orwell bemoaned the sheer range of social and pol... more

This week is the first ever “Minefield Mailbag”, where Waleed and Scott try to respond to ... more

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Charlie Kirk within the conservative mov... more

In August, Kate Evans and Cassie McCullagh from [The Bookshelf] (https://www.abc.net.au/li... more

Whether it is in geopolitics or in social and personal relationships, the overweening desi... more

There is something undeniably disorienting about the way AI features in public and politic... more

In the middle of August, the Bendigo Writers Festival found itself at the centre of a fire... more