As part of the small Australian contingent here at OS - and one who has been quiet lately - I thought I'd give an update on our dreadful bushfire situation down here. I know others have done so as well.

I live in the foothills of the Dandenongs, quite close… Read full post »

I lived and breathed John Updike for a year,when I chose his Rabbit novels as the subjects of my undergraduate Honours thesis. I think it must have been around 1994, when I was 22. Uncertain about whether I really wanted to be a lawyer, I deferred my law studies to spend… Read full post »

Dividing our children into cohorts based on their age is fairly new to human civilisation. I mean, of course kids of similar age have most likely always enjoyed playing together, but today it’s an industrial-strength phenomenon: after seven or eight years of school-year stratification, any kid… Read full post »

The Republican party has a problem, and it’s a big one. It was evident during the recent Presidential race, but was obscured by some of that race’s minutiae. And it may well continue to be masked over the next three years or so, because local races can still be won even… Read full post »

Those on the left and those on the right disagree about a hell of a lot of things. You name it - guns, taxes, abortion, capital punishment (or any other form of punishment really), drug laws - and positions that appear to be completely incompatible abound. I would like to suggest,… Read full post »

Recent polling consistently suggests that McCain is only around 7 points down in Michigan, but is trailing by some 15 points in Pennsylvania. For those who went through a modern western education system, that makes Michigan 8 points more pro-McCain than Pennsylvania is. Surprising, then, that the McC… Read full post »

There is no longer any real doubt that Barack Obama will win the impending presidential election. Nor is there any doubt that he will win by a substantial margin. John McCain may have made a good stab at shoring up that part of the Republican base that offered him only minimal… Read full post »

The Economist recently reported that a narrow majority of Americans now believe religious leaders should keep out of politics - a big change in Republican (though not Democrat) sentiment since 2004, and a dramatic change across the political spectrum since the 1990s.

Most of us who live in… Read full post »