Pen Hanley

  • Our broken society and how we can fix it

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    The Asset Class: How private equity turned capitalism against itself. Hettie O’Brien (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2026) How to fix our ruined world This fabulous book should go with Enshittification – see my last blog post from 10 June – as a guide to how everything in our world went wrong and how to fix it all. O’Brien tells the story of how the massive proliferation of private equity firms has led to our broken society. We’ve all observed and endured the detrimental effects of privatising everything that was previously done by governments, local, state or federal, leading inevitably to a…

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  • A new Kick-Start course to encourage you to dive into your creative writing

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    I’m holding a new creative writing series of workshops soon. See the poster for details and booking. It’s for the usual eight weeks but this time I’m experimenting with a new afternoon time slot of 2.00-4.00 because some people asked for that alternative to the evening one. I’ve been reading some books on writing and some books on art. I’ve been painting papers, doing basic print-making and making collages, preparing for a couple of group exhibitions this year, one the first week in July, the other not finalised. The book that really stands out for me is Belle Burden’sStrangers (Penguin,…

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  • The secret to thriving in a noisy world

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    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 and outlines a feasible strategy with clear steps to follow if we want to reclaim (as Freedom app calculated) an extra 2.5 hours of productive time per day. The evidence of the detrimental effects of social media have been accumulating steadily for years and Newport…

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  • Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley by Jacob Silverman (Bloomsbury, 2025)

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    Shallow men and deep joy I’m listening to Gilded Rage while painting countless tiny green leaves and red roses inside the Gypsy van. It’s good to be doing something peaceful and constructive amidst Jacob Silverman’s meticulous record of all this nihilistic illegality in contemporary US. My life is so rich – with things that money can’t buy. I can’t imagine the mental and emotional impoverishment of a life like Donald Trump’s, whose powerful position enables the unlimited scope these Silicon Valley tech fascists (I’d rather call them that than the tech bros, which makes this back-stabbing bunch of sociopaths sound…

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  • Taxtopia by The Rebel Accountant

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    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 in front of them for ages and said that my sense of colour was ‘superb’ (but he still didn’t buy one). Ha. Plus I have to spend time on knee exercises (El Paso clinic’s online ones – https://epmpt.mykajabi.com/knee-arthritis-recovery-program – are fantastic and also the Daily…

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  • Letter to the A.N.U.

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    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 education, appointing people in key positions who were actively hostile to academia. It’s been horrible to watch this process unfolding and tragic for our country. Vice Chancellor Professor Genevieve Bell et al Subject: Proposal Document of 3 July 2025 Dear Professor Bell, Prof. Parry et…

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  • The TBR (To be read) pile – a personal history and a solution

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    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 perspective from the one pictured! That’s me a few years back, posing with an jokily exaggerated pile of TBRs (to be reads). First, some history about my problem. Acclaimed Turkish writer Elif Shafak describes her Substack offerings https://elifshafak.substack.com/ as ‘vignettes from a bookish life’. That…

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  • How creativity can save us

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    ‘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 name Leon but were dyslexic. Apologies to anyone to whom I caused offence with that bit of facetious frivolity.) Where we are now (for instance, did you know that the average American child, by eighteen years old, has watched 16,000 murders?) is the ultimate result…

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  • Driving Ourselves to Hell

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    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 the evidence, and second, the noise-pollution, air-pollution and visual-pollution made by these over-engineered juggernauts is antithetical to everyone’s creative needs and creative pursuits, as well being antithetical to our physical and mental health. I haven’t written a blog in a while and it’s been because…

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