Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Author Liam Hogan

  • What I'm reading: smoky rooms and serious people

    Dan Davies, black boxes and smoky rooms:

    Some Planning Inspectorate reports read curiously like Agatha Christie novels. Chapter by chapter, you get detail of the objections and analysis, and then a concluding section in which the Inspectorate assumes the role of Hercule Poirot and explains which of them were red herrings and which were killers.

    Ned Resnikoff, Serious People:

    As one prominent Sacramento YIMBY put it, “This election separated the wheat (people with sincere views on urban policy reform) from the chaff (people who use urban policy reform as a cudgel against their enemies).” Among those who genuinely care about housing affordability, Mamdani attracted support both from the left and (though not without reservations) from the center. The centrists who loathe the left more than they care about YIMBY policy reform denounced Mamdani, while the leftists who hate shitlibs more than they like winning elections did everything they could to make clear that shitlibs were not welcome in the Mamdani coalition.

    Posted | Author

  • Andropov

    IT'S A WELL KNOWN observation that organisations that prize loyalty over competence tend, in the end, to failure. History is full of examples of failed gerontocracies, and political systems that chose long-running death over renewal: poor old Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko, elderly placemen lacking imagination, all of them causes and symptoms of the USSR's degrading later-20thC crunch. The British car industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Wests Tigers. The list goes on.

    Posted | Author

  • Ugly Ducklings

    PRU GOWARD AS MINISTER in 2017 sold off the public housing that was the last vestige of the working-class presence in The Rocks. Now the housing stock which she saw as too valuable to be wasted on the poor is winning architectural awards:

    Even by the miserable standards of more than a century ago, the Workmen’s Dwellings in Sydney’s The Rocks were considered dark and gloomy.

    Now they’re a popular Instagrammable backdrop often used in wedding photos.

    Posted | Author

  • Pledge

    THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY has an extraordinarily strict code of behaviour relating to membership, and an elaborate mythology relating to its rats throughout history. The great crime is to be elected as a member of the ALP and then, having benefited from the collective efforts of the whole, to go back on your pledge; it's related to the similar---but very different---great taboo that operates amongst trade unionists for people who cross picket lines. The Labor rat is a cultural hate object, and something like the prodigal son, they're generally more famous than the well-behaved. Mal Colston will live on in notoriety, Billy Hughes will always be loathed. Who remembers the loyal?

    Posted | Author

  • Productivity

    NOBODY UNDERSTANDS WHAT PRODUCTIVITY is and nobody cares. Yes, sure, you might think you know the macroeconomic definition, that it's a ratio of economic inputs to outputs, but you, in 2025, would be wrong. You have the notion that measures of economic activity actually lend themselves to interpretations about the real world, but like the characters in Spufford's Red Plenty you are trapped, ideologically, in a fairy-tale past where such conceptions did matter, and now, they don't. Sorry.

    Posted | Author

  • What I'm reading: solitude and lies

    Ned Resnikoff, You'll Never Think Alone Again:

    What I’m really worried about is less an active plot than the terminal erosion of those habits of mind and cultural practices that sustain a mass democracy. We’ve arguably been in real trouble on that front since before Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. We wouldn’t have gotten Donald Trump and the present crisis without televised infotainment’s anti-democratic properties and potentialities. But reality TV and cable news look primitive when compared to devices that promise to fully replace your internal dialogue.

    John Plotz, Public Books, 'Lying in Politics': Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair

    In the face of deliberate deception—engendering self-deception and leading to full-on defactualization—we can still offer appeals to shared human frailty, and a belief in the durability of truth. Arendt reminds us that even would-be authoritarian lies, with their utter disregard of reality, do not last. It is that disregard of truth, that phoniness, that makes them inherently unstable. By describing the ways in which America in the 1970s (as again in 2025) fell into a crisis, she reminds us that the strong fabric of laws and a palpable American commitment to human equality and diversity are still present, albeit muted and obscured beneath the blanket of lies.

    Posted | Author

  • Statues

    THERE IS A BRIEF and fascinating article on a group of people involved in toppling and vandalising statues:

    For a year-and-a-half, this anonymous group from Melbourne has been going after colonial statues – toppling, breaking or defacing them in the night. While there has been more than one group going after these statues, this one is the most active.

    Posted | Author

  • Accomplishments

    THE TEALS HAVE AN accomplishment-based ideology, and each one of them prizes their achievements, of which, to be fair, they have a large number. Monique Ryan was a doctor and hospital administrator. Zoe Daniel was a prominent journalist. Zali Steggall was a barrister and led NGOs, and oh yes, won an Olympic gold medal. That accomplishment-mentality leads them to meritocratic thinking; they work hard, they achieve, they win, and not unexpectedly, they make the logical leap that they win because of their accomplishments and all that hard work; the just reward of effort and aptitude. They contrast themselves against the major Parties (and Greens), who, by contrast, stress collective effort and solidarity, and have a fundamentally different sense of power. The essential truth of meritocratic thinking is that you can't share wins.

    Posted | Author

  • Email

    LIKE MANY CONTEMPORARY INTERNET users I subscribe to the newsletters of people whose writing I enjoy. These drop into the inbox of my email with a satisfying regularity. In a sense each of these fulfils the same niche as blog entries once did, with a bit more formality, each being a self-contained piece of writing by a single author generally on a theme or interest basis. Each invites me to subscribe, like, support. Are they novel?

    Posted | Author

  • What I'm reading: Qualifications Piñata

    Timothy Burke, Dispatches from the AI front:

    The punishing accumulation of bullshit work processes within the academy and the disconnects between them and the core labor of faculty. Visions of austerity slamming into teaching and scholarship while administrative ranks grow seemingly without end. It all has led to many students at large universities feeling as if the university and its curriculum is little more than a credentials pinata to be whacked until it gives up the candy, and GPT is only the best and biggest stick ever provided for that purpose.

    Ferdinand Mount, LRB, The Tongue Is a Fire:

    We need, I think, to get some feel for the pre-modern landscape of public speech to understand the huge distance we have travelled. The pre-moderns were painfully aware of the potency – and the perils – of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary sentiment, ‘the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones,’ is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

    Posted | Author