Culture Corner: April 2025
Reading, Watching, Listening, Playing, Doing.
Wherein I peel back another layer of the onion skin, tell you what I’ve been enjoying lately (that isn’t footy), and encourage you to share the same.
Reading
Books
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and the Origins of Trumpism (John Ganz, 2024) – Whenever I fall into a reading slump (a common occurrence at the beginning of footy season and the onset of winter), I look for relief from familiar sources: science fiction, spy/espionage novels, and books about US politics. I’d had my eye on When the Clock Broke for some time. The author, John Ganz, is a self-taught historian with a great Substack (this column is more-or-less a rip-off of a similar column he publishes for paid subscribers every month), the popularity of which helped to win him a book contract.
The book is a series of profiles of ideologically influential figures in late-20th century American right-wing thought and how they paved the way for Donald Trump, politician. Ganz convincingly argues that the likes of David Duke, Samuel Francis, Murray Rothbard, Rush Limbaugh, Ross Perot, and even John Gotti (yes, the Mafioso – the chapter about him is the best of the whole book) transformed mainstream elite American conservatism, which largely concerned itself with the conduct of foreign affairs, into something altogether darker and more feral. Of course, the populist style, with its preoccupations about race and trade, encapsulated in Trump, has now gone mainstream. “Never Trump” conservatism is a lonely island.
Pairs excellently with Dominic Kelly’s Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics, which examines how four obscure Australian think tanks influenced right-wing thinking on industrial relations, Indigenous affairs, climate change and the Constitution.
And Time Was No More: Essential Stories and Memories (Teffi, 2024) – Russian literature, or at least its perception among most Western readers, is dominated by two strands: the long, portentous works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, et al, and the subversive works banned by the Soviet censors (e.g. Bulgakov). Teffi (actual name Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya) was something else entirely: wry, satirical, nostalgic, and political only insofar as she proved that Russian literature could be liberal and light-hearted, and that women could be funny (a discovery for many men of her era).
Teffi’s life story was the story of the Russian bourgeoisie of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – she was born into an elite St. Petersburg family and, having rapidly become disenchanted with the Bolsheviks, settled in Paris, where she lived out the rest of her days, taking lovers, publishing stories, and generally causing a stir.
A contemporary critic compared Teffi's stories, which she said were "highly benevolent in their elegiac tone and profoundly humanitarian in their attitudes", to the best stories by Anton Chekhov. A fitting tribute, and my favourite literary discovery of the last couple of years.
Essays/blogs
Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter… (Intrinsic Perspective, April 2025) – I know that we’ve been distracted by the beginning of the footy season, the upcoming election, and [gestures at state of world], but it does rather feel as though the revelation that the atmosphere of a nearby exoplanet contains a chemical (dimethyl sulfide) which, as far as we know, can only be produced in meaningful quantities by biological lifeforms, has gone a bit under the radar.
This piece is both a great primer on K2-18b (the exoplanet in question, discovered in 2015), exoplanets and interstellar objects more broadly (remember ‘Oumuamua?), and an attempt to explain why the news wasn’t received with quite the “ontological shock” that it possibly deserves – especially given we’re only a few months removed from all that weird UFO/drone hysteria. Hoel concludes that we’re suffering from “alien agnosticism” – “as our world ever more resembles science fiction, we become collectively more uncertain, not less”. There is settled science, with capital-T truth, but the unexplored frontiers ahead of us are dense and confusing. I don’t know if I fully agree with the hypothesis, but at the very least, this is a concise, thought-provoking rumination on the current state of the search for extraplanetary life.
(NB: the findings might have just been noise.)
A cheat sheet for why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment (The Weird Turn Pro, April 2025) – Climate change is real. The need to mitigate or, at the very least, respond to it, is real. But you know what isn’t real? The false belief propagated by people (who are otherwise sincerely motivated to respond to climate change) that use of AI – especially in the form of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT – is meaningfully bad for the environment.
Andy Masley clearly thought so too, because he wrote this “cheat sheet” (a “concise” follow-up to an even longer post from January) to help people respond to this mildly pernicious and moderately obnoxious talking point. As he writes, the beneficial climate impact of being vegan is worth approximately 400,000 ChatGPT prompts a year.
You can have reasonable objections to AI – the slop that diminishes the authentic work of humans, the occasional hallucinations, the massive implications for the future – but I don’t think (erroneously) scolding people for the emissions caused by asking ChatGPT something is a reasonable one. Read if you enjoy being right about things, and don’t mind being a bit smug about it.
Watching
Conclave (2024) – Even I couldn’t summon any interest in the Sunday twilight game. So instead, I watched Conclave with my wife. It’s a curious movie: part intrigue drama/thriller, part farce, part meditation on faith and the ideological debates roiling the modern Catholic Church. Thomas Lawrence (played by Ralph Fiennes) is tasked with running the process the Church uses to elect a new pope after the incumbent kicks the bucket. Initially resistant, he soon finds himself an active participant in the intrigue.
The film’s strengths are how convincingly it persuades the viewer that these serious men of the cloth are just as prone to gossip and plotting as the rest of us, and how it invites us to consider the dilemma of maintaining faith in God while losing faith in the Church. The cardinals competing for the papacy can feel more like vessels for the filmmakers to explain different ideological perspectives than fully formed characters, and I thought the twist ending didn’t quite land. It’s fair to say that impressions among Catholic critics were mixed: one wrote that Conclave is "a film about the Catholic Church that could have been written by the editorial board of The New York Times". I think it’s better, and probably deeper, than that. I also think you should watch it and decide for yourself.
Listening
Surprise Chef – Does the world need another instrumental funk/jazz combo? Look, probably not. But I’m glad this one exists. Hailing from Coburg, Surprise Chef’s music borrows from vintage funk, dusty jazz, and old film scores to create something that’s unique and interesting enough to escape the dreaded muzak/lo-fi beats vortex.
This isn’t an endorsement of a specific song or album, but they do happen to have a new album coming out on May 16th. This live performance on the KEXP radio station (a channel I highly recommend subscribing to) is one of my favourites.
Playing
Axyz (March 2025) – One of the many reasons I had a happy childhood was that my father cleverly and generously fitted my PlayStation with a mod chip, which allowed him – still a more technologically savvy man than I am – to burn to CD any rental games I enjoyed (thank goodness for the lax digital rights management protocols of the ‘90s). The ease of acquiring games meant I ended up playing some odd ones: titles like Battle Arena Toshinden (a Tekken clone), Gex: Enter the Gecko (James Bond, but you’re a wise-cracking lizard) G-Police, and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos may ring a nostalgic bell in your head.
One of my obscure favourites was Kula World, a puzzle game which saw you play as a beach ball and roll, bounce and drop your way through three-dimensional levels filled with hazards, weird gravity effects, and collectibles. Funnily enough, I found myself thinking of Kula World again in recent months – to the point that I searched to see if it was still playable in some form. That was a cosmic coincidence, because just a few days ago, Steam decided to drop Azyx into my Discovery Queue. It’s the same Kula World game loop – you’re still a beach ball trying to navigate increasingly complex levels – but updated for 2025 and with a vapourwave aesthetic added. Saturated colours have been replaced with muted pastels, the music is all pulsing synths, and you collect tapes. It’s a very fun way to pass 20 minutes at a time.
Doing
Visiting Canberra
My day job took me to the nation’s capital for the first three days of this week (that’s why there was no Roundabout this week – apologies!). My first visit for a couple of years reinforced my impression that Canberra really is nice: small enough to remind me of Adelaide, professional enough to have an adequate number of nice places to eat and drink, and naturally quite beautiful. Plus, it thrums with the quiet confidence of a place whose residents know they run the country – especially in election week. I can get even get around the weather. The biggest downside is no footy team. But aside from that, consider this a warm endorsement of the Canberra bubble.
What have you been enjoying, or at least trying to enjoy, lately? Let me know!
Funny you mentioned Croc, reminded me the remaster dropped last month.