Media misery syndrome
I once found myself in a nondescript hotel at the tail end of breakfast; it was just me and the…
Social daydreaming
A road trip through the outer cities of most Western countries can feel rather dystopian: car yards, big-box factory outlets,…
Broadcasting the war
War traditionally conjures up imagery of a specific type of violence. Inevitably, these images are masculinised: men in fatigues, riding…
Letters from Saigon
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hiep, 54, has been a caretaker at a Cemetery in Saigon for 27 years. Interview by Nhung…
Made in Vietnam
When investigating her book Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking, author Anne Elizabeth Moore remembers one woman’s story in particular. A…
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To live directly
Perhaps it’s something you could document: how much of your life you ‘live directly’. If you were to put a…
The ladder of success
Self-help gurus love goals. “Success is goals, and all else is commentary,” says one guru. Self-help masters proclaim their love…
Womankind starts organic tea called ‘Poet’
Womankind + books + tea. Some news… Womankind has launched its very own ‘literary’ organic tea called ‘poet’, which can…
Why we need more time, and less clothes
Why do we work so much? Why don’t we curate our lives so we can spend joyful hours painting, thinking,…
Quirky habits of happiness
The summer of 2005 was when things started to break. Sleep deprived and exhausted, in the early months with a…
Follow our dreams
Most of us have a subconscious desire to be admired, to be set apart. We wish to be viewed by…
Winners: Photographers’ Award VII ‘vocation’
What a talented bunch of photographers submitted to this quarter’s award! While it’s wonderful to receive so many high-quality submissions,…
The packaged self
Domina, Australia’s first ‘beauty adviser’ was a woman of ingenious thrift. In the early 1900s she cautioned women against buying…
The lost art of leisure
It is rare to meet a person these days who has superior skills in leisure. How often do you hear…
Lost words, the language wars
Languages reveal our cultural diversity – the different ways we explain ourselves, the different ways we categorise our knowledge, the…
Rachel will not be silenced
Why is Rachel Carson important to your life? Because your body is contaminated with the very chemicals she blew the…
The grand act of life
As music hums from the car’s cabin, Andrea Kowch glides down the back roads of Michigan in search of a…
Womankind No News challenge
Want your story published in Womankind magazine? Then take our challenge. Womankind magazine is seeking participants for a week of…
Why do Australians hate thinkers?
Stuart Grant, a well-dressed, bespectacled philosophy academic at Monash University, awoke on a brisk mid-November morning last year to find…
Why we shouldn’t take after the domestic cat
Some cats get so excited about chasing a battery-operated laser pointer, the type that lecturers use on overhead screens, that…
Pleasure spots
Some months ago I cut out of a shiny magazine some paragraphs written by a female journalist and describing the…
The value of boycott
In July 1846, the American writer Henry David Thoreau went to prison for refusing to pay his poll tax. He…
Loving animals and eating meat
Ever wondered why you don’t like eating dog, but don’t mind eating hot dogs? Or why you feel a sense…
The project of being alive
It’s not the first time that a movie has been shown to a vegetative audience but for some reason the…
The lost art of travel
We’re in perpetual motion; we can go anywhere, at any time, and the momentum builds. Before long, we’re planning another…
You are your life, and nothing else
Existentialist philosophers teach us that we alone are responsible for creating a meaningful life in an absurd and unfair world.…
The ladder of true understanding
How well do you understand the world? Do you think you’ve got a good grasp of reality or not? Greek…
The Cartoon Philosopher: 13 questions with Michael Leunig
1. What is the biggest threat to our minds? Our minds. 2. What is freedom? Non-compliance and creativity. 3. What…
The Identity Toolkit
Sum yourself up in a couple of words. Users of social media do it to introduce themselves online. “Surfer, father,…
‘I think therefore I am a man’: philosophy’s woman problem
By Helen Beebee, University of Manchester While just under half of all philosophy undergraduates in the UK are women, women…
Free range ‘debate’ puts the egg before the chicken
By Patrick Stokes, Deakin University The announcement that Woolworths will phase out the selling of cage eggs seems like pretty…
Our Surveillance Society
In the perfect prison, I am bathed in light. I don’t languish in the dark – I am put to…
Bringing thinkers into focus: Steve Pyke
It’s a dismal affair when the faces of people we don’t wish to remember – such as modern-day celebrities –…
Someone’s looking at you: welcome to the surveillance economy
By Martin Hirst, Deakin University Everything that fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden has revealed about America’s global espionage network PRISM should…
The news – why do we subject ourselves to it?
Every night at 6.00 pm, I want you to sit in a room for half an hour. During that time…
It might be a more free world, but few of us would want to live there
By John Daley, Grattan Institute Many are puzzled by the political theory of carbon markets. Why does the Institute for…
On Shadows and Realities in Education (Plato’s Cave)
The Republic, Plato, Book VII AND now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is…
Is an ethic of biodiversity enough?
The environmental crisis has never loomed so large nor been so extensively debated as in the last few years. But…
Socrates Cafe Moderated Discussion
This meeting will be a moderated discussion (with no formal talk at the start). We’ll choose the topic together on…
