Year: 2025
-
The secret to thriving in a noisy world
Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism The key to thriving in our high-tech world is to spend much less time on social media. This is Cal Newport’s persuasive message in his Digital Minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world (Penguin Business, 2019). Newport is a succinct, logical writer who presents irrefutable evidence for his argument…
-
Taxtopia by The Rebel Accountant
Why haven’t I written a blog for so long? It’s because I’ve been teaching another creative writing course and because I’ve contributed my collages to two more exhibitions (the one still on till the end of the month is in Dojo’s bread shop, main street of Braidwood) and I was cheered when one man stood…
-
Letter to the A.N.U.
No doubt this letter below that I wrote last month will fall on deaf ears at the Australian National University but I had to say something. The corporatisation of ANU has been going on for 26 years. Labor’s John Dawkins started it and when John Howard got in he radically intensified the destruction of higher…
-
The TBR (To be read) pile – a personal history and a solution
Oliver Burkeman’s new book Meditations for Mortals and the answer to not enough time Like many of you, I feel the lack of time to read as many books as I want to. Oliver Burkeman, in his new book Meditations for Mortals, presents a way to resolve that constant tension. It just takes a different…
-
How creativity can save us
‘The world is our house. Keep it clean.’ That’s a Chinese proverb. The world is sliding into the mud of 1930s fascism, sleep-walking into Dystopia on a burning planet and Trump the puppet of various people even more malevolent than he is, with Elon controlling everything. (And that name? I imagine his parents liked the…
-
Driving Ourselves to Hell
My blog, this past decade and a half, has been focused on writing and creativity. An argument about the monster trucks that are taking over our towns and cities in Australia might seem a departure from this theme. But no. First, my article is an example of creative self-expression, albeit non-fiction and based rigorously on…