Coffin up cats and dogs

Poo is to blame for this. (From the archives.)

Behind the news

One of the curses, or blessings, of being a journalist is that everyone else’s story seems more interesting than your own. It’s great to meet the famous and powerful, and be in that ringside seat to history, but seldom does anyone else care about the reporter who acts as the conduit. JFK, Castro and Nixon […]

The zombie Nazis of North Asia

If it wasn’t so tragic, the Kim dynasty and its regime would present a comic vision to the world By Michael Ruffles Two impressive and creepy railway carriages stand entombed inside an Aladdin’s cave of goodies donated by dictators and despots in a museum nestled in Mount Myohyang. Both date back to the 1950s and […]

Malled by Caitlin Kelly … a review

The best place to read this book is a shopping mall. To be more precise, read it in a coffee shop on a public holiday when they run out of the food you want, be pushy and try to con you into buying overpriced food you don’t want which you don’t end up buying, and […]

The Art of Non-Conformity: an economist’s review*

On one hand, this is a book I should hate. On the other hand, this is a book I should love. Naturally, it ended up being neither.

Proud to be prejudiced

I am not too proud to say I was prejudiced against reading Jane Austen. Oops, sorry. My mistake. I apologise. Let’s start again.

Things that make you go boom

Being a Monday, this should be a leftovers for lunch segment. But there are leftovers in the form of intentions to write some posts, and failing to find time. Settling into a new country is fun, but instead of banging on about that here’s the first of the reviews I promised earlier in the month: […]

Campaign Ruby, a visual review.

On the political analysis scale, Campaign Ruby

What pisses me off most about Jessica Rudd’s book …

What pisses me off most about Jessica Rudd’s book is that I don’t hate it. Not that I love it, either, mind you. Campaign Ruby annoys me in many ways. Mostly because it’s not shit. Okay, bits of it are. (Not that I’m perfect.) But it’s a well-built, if slow to start, model that navigates […]