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AIDS 30 Years on

A Quiet Anniversary

By Gail Bell
The taming of HIV/AIDS is Australia’s good news story. Our swift, egalitarian response – the so-called ‘Australian model’ – made us unique in the world and drew plaudits from the United Nations. Central to the success was the willingness of marginalised high-risk groups (intravenous drug users, gay men and sex workers) to collaborate with politicians, doctors and strategists to spre

Comment: Palin Politics and the Tea Party

By Don Watson
The fact of the automobile for instance; and Big Oil, which fuelled it; and the strip malls, which made the car indispensable to commerce, including commerce in food; and agribusiness, which made the greater part of United States farming a state-subsidised vertically integrated corporate industry and an alarmingly large number of American citizens obese. Those lines etched in the ice were the
Meeting Lally Katz

Out of the Box

By Peter Robb
I’m very ambitious!” Lally Katz said, or rather shouted, confidentially, lowering her eyes toward her glass of Aglianico. She looked like a volunteer librarian being tempted to her very first drink by an ageing sleazeball. Then she looked up. “And I’m also quite good at getting what I want from people!” She contemplated the beautiful and ever so faintly amber liquid in the glass and paused. “Without them knowing!” she adde

Duty of Care

By Margaret Simons
Pluck an episode from the midstream of human life and it can be hard to glean meaning. Sometimes there is just senselessness and mess. If there is a theme to the events that have interrupted these women’s lives, however, it is surely care, and its opposite, carelessness. The principal actor is the 60-year-old anaesthetist Dr James Latham Peters, who, the e
Influenza

Known Unknowns

By Malcolm Knox
Although it is an everyday virus, there is something about influenza that inspires awe. This microscopic hard-shelled parcel of genetic matter lives in aquatic birds, which have been flying it around in first-class comfort for generations. It is coughed into t

Bad Hotel

By Anna Funder
At dusk the bats fly silently over our house in inner Sydney. Unlike birds, which coast through the air without apparent thought or work, the bat’s effort to stay aloft, with each wing-beat going from out wide to almost touching under its heavy body, is visi

600 Million Rabbits & Myxomatosis

By Shane Maloney
Rabbits are poor conservers of energy. They can’t adapt to drought. Their diet is not diverse. All in all, they are not well suited to the Australian environment. But when it comes to reproduction they can’t be bettered. Mating takes 30 seconds, courtship included.
Sceptical Thinking

Copenhagen and Beyond

By Peter Doherty
The scope of what science can do is constantly being enhanced by technology. While microbiology is benefiting from new, ultra-high-speed gene and protein sequencers, climatology is being informed by next-generation satellites that can measure the depth and are

Endnotes

By Gail Bell
I came to know Eddie at second hand, through my husband. There was much to love about Eddie, and much to wonder about. I knew he had a liver disease aggravated by decades of drinking and yet persisted with his haphazard lifestyle. He still smoked tobacco, still liked a
Bong Joon-ho’s 'The Host'

The Host with the Most

By Adrian Martin
Bae Doo-na, with her large nose that would never be allowed past Hollywood's cosmeticians, her crazy eyes and her general physique - seemingly stalled between gawky adolescence and alluringly troubled adulthood - is a cult star in her home country of Korea, an
After years of struggle Vietnam’s economy is finally improving. But will the lights stay on?

Crouching Tiger

By John Button

Comment

By John Clarke