My review in today’s The Saturday Paper newspaper about Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelgänger: We all know people who have vanished into a world of conspiracy and disinformation. This is more extreme than believing, for example, that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was faked or that the 9/11 terror attacks in New York and…
Category General
The AI “revolution” is piracy for authors
I recently discovered that some of my books are being used illegally to “train” AI models: This story in Books + Publishing explains what’s at stake: The Australian Society of Authors (ASA) has responded to the large-scale unauthorised use of books by Australian authors in a dataset used to train generative artificial intelligence. The training…
Investigating Murdoch media and its impact on climate change policy
A few months I was asked by the major German magazine, Stern, to investigate the role of the Murdoch press in Australia and its impact on climate change policies. It was a global story with other journalists digging into the same question in the UK and US. This week the four-page feature was published and…
Drug reform in New Zealand moves at snail pace
The response to my 2019 book on the global drug war, Pills, Powder and Smoke, continues. The New Zealander activist John Minto, a host on my recent, hugely successful book tour for The Palestine Laboratory (where it became a best-seller), recently bought a copy of my drug war book and wrote about in the NZ…
On not ignoring the struggles of Africa
My essay/book review in the US outlet The Markaz Review is on a new book by the great writer, Anjan Sundaram, Break-Up: A Reporter’s Marriage Amid a Central African War: The Central African Republic (CAR) is mostly ignored in the mainstream media, but in sparse depictions it’s often portrayed as a faraway nation bedeviled by…
Discussing Lachlan Murdoch with Paddy Manning
Journalist Paddy Manning has written a fascinating book on Lachlan Murdoch, the heir apparent of the global media empire, called The Successor. I interviewed him about the book and his methods behind it at this year’s Newcastle Writer’s Festival:
Discussing the Afghan war with Andrew Quilty
Photojournalist Andrew Quilty spent years reporting in Afghanistan and published a book about his experiences, August in Kabul. I reviewed it for the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age in August 2022. My interview with Quilty, conduced at the Newcastle Writer’s Festival late March 2023, covers the war itself, the return of the Taliban and…
TRT World interview on Assange and prospects of freedom
Talking on global broadcaster TRT World’s The Newsmakers program on the case of Wikileaks Julian Assange, the prospects of his freedom and the vital role of Declassified Australia’s contributor writer, Kellie Tranter, and her FOI work around the case.
Sky News Australia interview on PNG independence at risk under US security deal
PNG is set to sign a so-called security pact with the US though there are serious questions about the lack of sovereignty for the small nation. I was interviewed about it on Sky News Australia, speaking as the co-founder and co-editor of Declassified Australia.
Our reliance on cobalt is ruining lives
My book review in The Saturday Paper on the new book by Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives: We’re all complicit. Anybody who uses a laptop, mobile phone, electric vehicle (EV) or tablet has purchased a product that contains cobalt, a rare-earth element. It’s largely unknown to the…