Culture Corner: June 2025

Reading, Watching, Listening, Playing, Doing.

Here’s the best of what I read, watched, and listened to in June.

Reading

Books

The Brilliant Boy: Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Dissent (Gideon Haigh, 2022)

Herbert Vere "Doc" Evatt is a largely forgotten figure in Australian history. People who remember him, usually remember him for his disastrous stint as Labor leader in the 1950s, which included three consecutive election defeats to Robert Menzies’ Liberals. But he was much more than a tragic figure in the history of Australian progressivism – he was one of our finest public intellectuals; the youngest-ever appointee to the High Court, and, as one of the people who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a passionate advocate of Australia’s participation in multilateral institutions.

Gideon Haigh (yes, you probably know him better as a – fantastic – cricket writer) clearly agrees that we shouldn’t forget about Evatt the jurist and humanitarian. So he wrote this biography of Evatt’s early career, refracted through an awful tragedy. In September 1937, workers for Waverley Council (in Sydney) dug a trench and left it virtually unguarded. Rain filled the trench with water and local kids began daring each other to jump over it. Maxie Chester, a seven-year-old child of Polish-Jewish immigrants and himself a “brilliant boy” who shouldered the hopes of his family, fell in and drowned. His body was discovered in the presence of his poor mother. This shocking case, and its unsatisfactory initial resolution, prompted Evatt (and his colleague Abe Landa) to expand the scope of liability law in Australia.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound like the beginning of a compelling story. But Haigh grasps the essence of what makes Evatt a fascinating study. He clearly admires Evatt, and I think he recognises himself in him: a stentorian idealist and patriotic cosmopolitan intellectual slightly out of step with the contemporary world. Brilliant Boy is full of insight into the evolution of High Court jurisprudence between the World Wars – more interesting than it sounds! – and Evatt's role in promoting that evolution. The story has tragic origins. But it traverses fascinating intellectual territory. This review essay is also well worth reading.

Articles/essays

Hard New World: Our Post-American Future (Quarterly Essay #98)

Australia can’t trust the United States in a future regional conflict. The US, especially under Trump but even under Biden, has clearly signalled its intent to shirk the burden of global leadership. It won’t commit significant manpower to a conflict with the potential to turn nuclear. Hugh White, one of Australia’s most eminent foreign policy thinkers, begins with this assertion and unpacks what it really means for our country, our alliance with the US, and the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

If you’re interested in how Australia navigates its way in the world, you really need to read this.

"The Canberra establishment is shocked by any suggestion that we should walk away from the ANZUS commitments. They think we can and must depend on America more than ever in today's hard new world. But that misses the vital point. It is America that is walking away from the commitments it made in very different circumstances seventy-five years ago. That was plain enough under Joe Biden. It is crystal clear today under Trump."

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition (The Garden of Forking Paths, June 2025) [the long em dash, so characteristic of a ChatGPT output, is a nice touch]

I’ve shared a few essays about AI here already. Perhaps they cumulatively gave the impression that I’m an AI booster. The boring truth is that I’m somewhere in the middle: excited about its potential to make new discoveries or automate the tedious stuff, cautious about its likely effect on the labour market (and indifferent about its – overstated – environmental impacts). Lately, with the help of a couple of studies which have received attention on social media, I’ve been thinking a lot about the deleterious impacts of large language models like ChatGPT on our thinking.

In this essay, the author, who’s also an academic, uses his experience marking student essays to lay out what he sees as the biggest problem with AI as it’s currently used: it’s too tempting to use as a substitute for thought. Writing has social value. But it’s also an extremely valuable cognitive process. When you write, you think. That’s not easy to do. So, as Klaas has noticed, many of his students (I’m certain this can be extrapolated beyond that narrow cohort) have succumbed to the temptation to offload the thinking to machines.

“When artificial intelligence is used to diagnose cancer or automate soul-crushing tasks that require vapid toiling, it makes us more human and should be celebrated. But when it sucks out the core process of advanced cognition, cutting-edge tools can become an existential peril. In the formative stages of education, we are now at risk of stripping away the core competency that makes our species thrive: learning not what to think, but how to think.”

How to read and why (Cultural Capital, June 2025)

James Marriott is a columnist for The Times. Before he joined that newspaper, he worked in “the rare books trade”. He has unashamedly highbrow cultural tastes. He also, as the first line of this essay states, loves reading and advice about how to read. I’m fond of those things, too, and as someone in a perpetual state of mild anxiety about how much he’s reading, I gravitate towards pieces like this. Marriott’s advice (get rid of your smartphone, make time to read, read what you want to read, find the brilliant popularising specialist, don’t neglect novels, podcasts are mostly reinforcements for reading, not substitutes) might strike some as either too strict or too banal, but I found they helped me to interrogate my own habits, and how they may or not be conducive to reading more – and reading better.

A shortage of planners for an excess of rules (Planned Chaos, June 2025)

Many people in the growing YIMBY (“yes, in my backyard”) movement don’t think much of planners. Instead, they believe that, by insisting on onerous design standards, planners impede housing construction. Unsurprisingly, the profession disagrees with this assessment. In their telling, it’s a shortage of planners that’s partly to blame for the housing crisis.

The author of this new substack decided to look at the growth in the complexity of planning rules and compare it against the publicly available estimates of how many planners there are in Australia. The findings are… not consistent with the idea that more planners means more housing. We have the highest ratio of planners to population in the anglophone world. NSW has 20 percent more planners than Victoria but built 18 percent less housing between 2019 and 2023. WA has almost three times as many planners as South Australia but only built 40 percent more housing.

“We will never fill the planning shortage because more planning is seen as good always. If we hired 2,000 more planners you would read the same PIA tweets about an urgent planning shortage.”

no one told me about proust (personal canon, June 2025)

An essay about discovering Proust, which also serves as a chronicle of a changing attitude to art, and an injunction to seek out ambitious works. The discovery that In Search of Lost Time is much more beautiful, weirder, and more fun than she’d ever thought it could be – so different to what she’d read before – prompted Celine Nguyen to re-evaluate her relationship to art. She’d “clung onto pop culture for so long” because she thought that challenging books (“and films, and music, and performances”) were less enjoyable. “Reading Proust showed me that this was false”. She was jolted out of her complacent habits of mind into something richer and, ultimately, more satisfying.

I‘ve not read Proust, but I recognise the feeling of astonishment and wonder (and indignation that I’d not done it sooner) when discovering truly exemplary literature. You might not agree with this essay – Nguyen is harsh on her former self – but I can guarantee you’ll find it interesting.

“Before Proust, however, I was not someone who read literature. I was suspicious of it and alienated from the entire project of reading the “classics,” the “canon,” the “great books.” Literature, I assumed, was for people who explicitly pursued distinction, who were proud of their elevated taste. I couldn’t relate to this; I believed it was better to be ordinary, virtuous to be humble. (I might have inherited this from my parents, who—after a childhood in communist Vietnam—preferred to live quietly, dress normally, and behave inconspicuously.)”

Watching

Squid Game, season 3 (2025)

The final “season” (or is it a half-season?) of Squid Game came out late last week. Beyond the aesthetics and the stylised violence, I’ve always been so impressed by how well the show blends the universal and the particular. Squid Game is about big themes – the goodness of humans, how desperation forces us into terrible situations, inequality – but it’s also about issues with special valence in Korea: childhood games, the divide between North and South, the differences between generations, and the permeation of American culture, just to name a few. But most importantly, Squid Game is just damned good TV. The final six episodes don’t disappoint.

The Running Man trailer

I’m a straight millennial man. So naturally, I had a teenage Stephen King phase. Two of my favourite King novellas didn’t originally bear his name – they were published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman, as part of a collection called The Bachman Books. (The history of King’s decision to publish under a pseudonym is interesting – King apparently began fretting that people were only buying his books because of the name on the cover, so he set himself a challenge to see if he could succeed despite anonymity.)

The Bachman stories are different from King’s regular oeuvre; punchier, grittier, and still creepy without being supernatural. The picks of the bunch, The Long Walk and The Running Man, are both set in a dystopian, near-future United States where social order is maintained by bloodsport. Both stories have been adapted into films which are being released this year. The premise of The Running Man is simple: the contestant must survive for 30 days. The catch is that they’re chased by professional killers and, because of the show’s towering popularity, millions of citizens join in the hunt, passing on clues and rumours about the running man’s whereabouts. The Running Man has been adapted into a film before, back in 1987 (Arnold Schwarzenegger starred). That version was actually pretty good. I’m hoping this version stacks up.One Percenters is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Listening

Mind Enterprises – Idol (2019)

Mind Enterprises is the performing name of Turin-based producer Andrea Tirone. He makes a modern form of “Italo Disco”, a subgenre noted for its melodies, its synths, and for being quite cheesy. “Idol” is my favourite of his songs I’ve listened to so far. Listen if you like John Talabot’s song “Destiny” and Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

Lingthusiasm podcast

After enjoying The History of English and the original version of Lexicon Valley (RIP), I’ve finally found another good podcast about language and linguistics. Hosted by Lauren Gawne, a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at La Trobe University, and Gretchen McCulloch, a prolific writer of pop linguistics, Lingthusiasm is a “lively half-hour chat about the hidden linguistic patterns you didn’t realise you were already doing.” Gawne and McCulloch are affable hosts who do a great job balancing depth/rigour with fun. The episodes never feel like they’re overbearing and they succeed at what is surely the ultimate goal of all non-fiction podcasts: giving you interesting morsels to talk about with friends and family.

I highly recommend beginning with Episode 100, where the hosts, with the help of previous guests, present their 100 favourite facts about linguistics. My personal favourite? Probably the bouba/kiki effect.

Playing

Balatro (2024)

For years now, I’ve read about how [Game X] is the true successor to Slay the Spire in terms of offering strategic gameplay, meaningful choices, and meta-progression. Some (like Cobalt Core) have been better than others (Monster Train). But none have scratched the itch. Until Balatro. Notionally, this is a poker game – in that you play recognised combinations of cards to score points. But Balatro evolves well beyond the basic form of that game by allowing you to add, remove, and modify cards from your deck to craft builds that satisfy the basic human need to see the number go up (check Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s on there). There are different game modes and difficulty levels, and lots to unlock. I’m going to Adelaide tonight for a few days, and choosing to leave Balatro behind, for my own benefit.

Shoutout to my wife who, when she looked over my shoulder to see my Switch screen, asked if I was playing Solitaire. The truth is both nerdier and much harder to explain.

Wingspan (2019)

I’d heard good things about this board game, but hadn’t had a chance to play it until some friends who owned a copy came over for the King’s Birthday public holiday. My impression after one game is that Wingspan is strategically satisfying without being intimidating in the way that many “deep strategy board games” can be, beautifully designed, and inherently interesting – it expanded my knowledge of birdlife! If you’re considering it, give it a go.

Doing

Fixing a broken frying pan

I continued my streak of extremely low-stakes practical maintenance (regular readers might remember when I successfully replaced the spool of our line trimmer) when I fixed the broken handle of our nicest frying pan. It didn’t take much – a single screw was loose – but it’s still satisfying. Uncooked food, large spiders, potential home invaders; watch out. Your days are numbered.

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What have you been enjoying, or at least trying to enjoy, lately? Let me know!