‘History doesn’t repeat,’ Mark Twain is said to have said, ‘but it often rhymes.’ And there could hardly be a better example of two events rhyming than the recent Canadian and Australian elections. In both countries, the centre-right was flying high in the polls, with leads of up to 20% in Canada and 10% in Australia. Read more

Worries about social cohesion are on the rise. Initiative Chair Roger Partridge aired his concerns in the Herald last month, and this month saw the launch of a report on the subject by the Helen Clark Foundation. Read more

Struggling to think of a good topic for a humorous column this week, I unexpectedly got a major break when my name was – unbelievably – added to a Signal messaging group of top New Zealand government officials. The texts reveal the magnitude of some of the problems that New Zealand politicians have to deal with. Read more

As someone who is fond of a tipple but who is also unhealthily health-conscious, I’ve long tried to keep up with news on the science of alcohol and health. My main response has been mild bemusement, as booze has been declared to be not so good for you, then actually pretty good for you, and – more recently – Very Much Not Good for You At All. Read more

Panic ensued this week after it was revealed that young people have been going to summer music festivals, listening to music – and in some cases even getting drunk. As a report for RNZ revealed, there has been a crackdown on outdoor festivals all through the summer, with four postponed and another four cancelled outright. Read more

A few years ago, when I was still a classics lecturer, I started to notice a disturbing trend. Scholars were being denounced on Twitter (RIP) for wrongthink. Read more

In Hayek’s Bastards, the distinguished historian Dame Anne Salmond takes issue with Act’s Regulatory Standards Bill, which she sees as the attempt of a fringe party to impose its ideologies and which she thinks would “elevate individual rights and private property above all other considerations in law-making” and thus undermine democracy. Salmond presents the bill as a result, not of the normal processes of democracy, but of a global conspiracy of ‘neo-liberal’ think tanks tracing their lineage to 20th-century thinkers such as Friedrich von Hayek. Read more

New Zealand, we love you. We love you Aussies. Read more

Academic freedom is a hot topic at the moment. The coalition agreement required universities to have academic freedom policies to receive government funding. Read more

A few weeks ago, soon after checking into my hotel in Varanasi, I got a knock at my door. It was the manager, asking if I’d noticed that my visa was about to run out in precisely twenty-four hours. Read more