THE BLOODY CROSSROADS

A review of Kate Holden’s The Ruin of Magic (The Saturday Paper)

Richard K — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:29:27 +0000

The best essayists always show their working. From Michel de Montaigne, who originated the form, to William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf and Joan Didion, their aim is not to storm the citadels of absolute truth with razor-sharp logic but rather to send their full humanity out into the world in the hope of new insights – to assay a topic, not to conquer it. (Both “essay” and “assay” derive from essai, a Middle French word meaning “attempt” or “try”.) Yes, there are essayists who dress for war, who wear their learning like a suit of armour. But the finest practitioners favour lighter garb, the better to perform a sharp turn when the mood takes them – to disappear down a muddy track, to explore that wood or inspect that castle. They are omnivorous, distractable, determinedly amateurish. They are curious about curiosity. [More here.]

Recent publicity for Brave New Wild

Richard K — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:18:50 +0000

A recording of a recent panel at WOMADelaide/The Planet Talks: “Brave New Futures”, with Claire Marshall, Grace Vegesana and myself. Compered by Lee Constable.

A review of BNW in Overland by Ben Brookner (with a response from your dutiful servant)

Plus The Bloody Crossroads is now on Instagram: find me at bloody_x_crossroads

Cleansing Fire: The Passion of Paul Kingsnorth (Eureka Street, paywalled)

Richard K — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:05:02 +0000

Towards the end of 2009, in a testy exchange of letters in The Guardian, the British authors Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot set out two very different approaches to climate change and its attendant crises. For Kingsnorth, who initiated the correspondence, the only sane approach to those crises was to reject the civilisation that had caused them, and that had failed, and would continue to fail, to reverse them. For Monbiot, however, such an attitude was tantamount to nihilism. As he put it in his initial reply to Kingsnorth: “I detect in your writings … an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this [environmental] apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society.” [More here.]

Gutenberg Babble: On the Perils of Techno-determinism (Griffith Review)

Richard K — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 01:33:35 +0000

THERE WAS A popular gotcha back in the day for which tech utopians showed a special fondness. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, with conservative critics still noisily alarmed at the internet and social media, proselytisers for the new technology would dip back into history and unearth some comparable commentator whose own example was comically self-defeating. [More here.]

Midnight Mass Delusion (The Monthly)

Richard K — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:13:15 +0000

The Doomsday Clock was effective Cold War theatre, but does it fail to convey the threat of today’s slowly unfolding existential crises? [More here.]

Faced with the prospect of an environmental ‘technofix’, it’s time to change the ethical climate (ABC)

Richard K — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:10:16 +0000

The tendency to think of climate change as something in humanity’s future, as opposed to something that is unfolding now, in real time and with lethal consequences, has retreated a little in recent months. The devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa which ripped through the Caribbean in late October, followed by the freakishly high temperatures in Australia’s eastern states, are dramatic evidence that climate change is rapidly transforming the planet’s systems. [More here.]

Political Flak: A War Reporter’s War on Woke (Australian Book Review: paywalled)

Richard K — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:04:54 +0000

Superficially, at least, David Rieff seems well placed to write a book about woke culture. For one thing, cultural criticism runs in the family: his parents were Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff – both intellectuals with a keen understanding of how subjectivities are shaped by social change. For another, his own work has often displayed an astute grasp of the fraught relationship between the historical, the political and the psychological. [More here.]

The Limits of Social Cohesion (Arena)

Richard K — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:59:02 +0000

My sense is that political cartoonists are finding it pretty difficult to encapsulate the events of the last two weeks in our sunburnt country girt by sea. Not because they are so depressing: a good cartoonist can always wring dark humour from a tragedy. But because they are so clearly self-satirising. Having identified a lack of ‘social cohesion’ as the deep cause of the Bondi massacre, and formalised that stance in a Royal Commission whose terms appear to beg the question, the political class has attempted to manage (or manipulate) the mourning process in a way that runs roughshod over the rights and convictions of other sections of the community. If more social cohesion was the aim, it has backfired spectacularly. [More here.]

Response to Alessandra Panizza (Australian Book Review)

Richard K — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:55:26 +0000

I thank Alessandra Panizza for taking the time to review Brave New Wild (Jan-Feb), and for her forthright defence of an alternative model of social and scientific development, but her review contains a number of claims (or implications) that misconstrue my argument.

More here …

How Progress Ends (The Saturday Paper)

Richard K — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:48:58 +0000

Unassuming as he is, in person and in prose, Carl Benedikt Frey will forever be associated with the great efflorescence of ‘crisis writing’ that emerged in the mid-2010s, in the long wake of the GFC. Though no proselytiser for radical change in the mould of Wolfgang Streeck or David Harvey, his 2013 paper ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, authored with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborne, became part of the mood music of ‘the long interregnum’ – the sense that capitalism was either breaking down completely or approaching an inflection point whose navigation would mean untold disruption. Its suggestion that 47% of jobs were at risk of automation over the next two decades popped up in all manner of interventions, from calls for a universal basic income to the ‘fully automated luxury communism’ of a new generation of radicals. Try as he might to qualify his findings, or the picture of them painted by both optimists and pessimists, Frey became the prophet of the ‘jobocalypse’. [More here]