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PODCAST

The Minefield

In a world marked by wicked social problems, The Minefield helps you negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictory claims and unacknowledged complicities of modern life.

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

0:54:36

Social cohesion is straining — can citizens’...

The Minefield ·

2026/04/08

There is a thread that’s been left dangling from our show at the end of last year on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth century “Allegory of Good and Bad Government”, painted on the walls of the Sala dei Nova in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.The dominant figure of Justice sits on the left side of the central mural. She has her thumbs on two scales to hold them in balance, with angels on either side meeting out punishment and just recompense. Directly below her sits the figure of Concord

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0:54:38

Why do democracies seem so fragile in the face of...

The Minefield ·

2026/04/01

Within days of the commencement of the war that has enveloped the Middle East — and that continues to severely disrupt global energy supplies — a familiar pattern began to emerge in some of the world’s most prosperous democracies. Much as they did at the outset of the pandemic, people began stockpiling. Then, it was toilet paper and food; this time, it’s fuel. In cities across Australia, long lines formed outside petrol stations and tensions flared as motorists seized their

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0:53:47

Why Autocracy Needs Spectacle — with M Gessen

The Minefield ·

2026/03/27

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we

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0:54:36

Can illegal wars still be legitimate wars?

The Minefield ·

2026/03/18

It’s like déjà vu all over again. After launching a devastating but limited series of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and against the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists in June last year, the United States and Israel recommenced hostilities against Iran at the end of February.The objectives of this ‘war’ are similar — to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and remove the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic regime — but its implementation is more

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0:54:36

Ramadan: Politics Straight from the Heart — with...

The Minefield ·

2026/03/11

If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which is to say, attempts to exploit unreflective prejudices and reactive emotions — then it is also true that a form of politics that is unresponsive to heart-felt appeals to a common humanity, to compassion, to decency, is dangerous.How can we maintain the precarious balance between a politics that trades cheaply on emotion, and one that both comes from and appeals to the heart?Guest: Christos

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0:54:46

Ramadan: ‘Do Not Harden Your Heart’ — with Avril Alba

The Minefield ·

2026/03/05

Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric conception of the moral life. The notion of the primacy of the heart goes back three millennia: it finds expression in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and in the philosophy of Aristotle; it pervades the pages of the sacred texts and subsequent traditions of Judaism and Islam — and even now, its remnants persist in our everyday speech, as if to remind us of an older

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0:54:36

Ramadan: Having a ‘Change of Heart’ — with Claire Zorn

The Minefield ·

2026/02/25

Sometimes the language we use every day, often unthinkingly, contains within it traces of a much older wisdom. Consider the phrases “I’ve changed my mind” and “I’ve had a change of heart”.The first thing to notice is activity described by the verbs: one is something that we do — as the result of learning new information, or having experiences that alter our values or view of the world; the other is something we undergo, something that happens to us — we see something we couldn’t

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0:54:32

Ramadan: The Heart and the Moral Life — with Stephen...

The Minefield ·

2026/02/18

Judging by the way we use the word in everyday speech, we intuitively know what we mean when we refer to “the heart”. We are most often gesturing toward the essence of a thing, its core, what you reach once you strip everything non-essential away.That idea is very much in keeping with what we do each year during the month of Ramadan: we try to put wider concerns and contentious debates in politics, society and culture to the side in order to focus on some of the more fundamental

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0:54:36

What can headcoverings teach us about individuality,...

The Minefield ·

2026/02/12

One of the most unyielding aspects of life in the modern West is, perhaps, the ultimate value that we’ve come to accord to appearance. It is as though our essence, all that matters most about us as human beings, lies on the surface: our soul resides in our skin; how we look reveals who we truly are.Over the last three decades, this has become especially pronounced through our various forms, not so much of self-expression as self-creation — from hair removal (or recovery) to body

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0:54:23

Can political moderation survive in an age of grievance?

The Minefield ·

2026/02/04

One of the common laments we heard last November, as Australia marked the fiftieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, was that Australian politics has lost its ambition — that the Labor Party, in particular, no longer had the stomach to take big risks and pursue sweeping reforms. The very act of celebrating the audacity of Gough Whitlam, it seemed, was designed to deliver a stinging rebuke to the moderation of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.There is, of

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1:02:50

From Venezuela to Greenland — how to respond to...

The Minefield ·

2026/01/29

If there is a single adjective that captures the difference, both in tone and in action, between Donald Trump’s first presidential term and his second, it’s “unconstrained”.Whatever limits might have been placed on his conduct, his designs, his instincts during his first administration — legal, congressional, electoral, conventional — now seem to have fallen away, leaving Trump emboldened to pursue a series of ambitions that he’s long harboured.Mass deportations by militarised

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0:54:03

What does hate speech do — and why is it so hard to...

The Minefield ·

2026/01/22

The massacre at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025 — during which two gunmen targeted a group of Jewish Australians who had gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah, killing 15 people — violently punctuated two years of escalating antisemitic incidents.Bondi was an act of terror that realised the worst fears of many Australian Jews, who had seen their synagogues and restaurants torched, their houses, schools and electorate offices vandalised, and members of their community

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0:54:36

Anna Funder on the ethical and aesthetic problem of...

The Minefield ·

2026/01/14

How should we wrestle with the problem of loving the art, but being unsettled by the behaviour or the beliefs of the artist who created it? It would be a mistake to see it as just an ethical problem. It is also an aesthetic problem. Because knowing what we know causes us to see the work differently.

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0:54:36

"There's a horse loose in a hospital": Is John...

The Minefield ·

2026/01/07

Could a stand-up routine ever rise to the level of "art" — the kind of performance that rewards multiple viewings, whose humour grows and deepens, which contains subtleties waiting to be discovered? Enter US comedian John Mulaney with a 2017 comedy sketch. There is something undeniably enduring, timeless even about Mulaney's act.

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0:54:36

The importance of letting someone 'save face'

The Minefield ·

2025/12/31

When saving face is paramount to all other considerations, others invariably pay the price in order for the untrammeled supremacy of the ego to persist. But by permitting someone to "save face", are we not providing a constructive way of keeping them within a moral community?

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0:54:23

How do recommendation algorithms affect our sense of...

The Minefield ·

2025/12/24

There are few things more peculiar to a person than their preferences; why they favour one genre of music or one style of writing over another. And in our world of endless digital reproduction, we increasingly rely on recommendation algorithms to curate or triage our encounters with culture. But algorithms tend toward massification; they rule out the possibilities of both aesthetic achievement and sheer surprise.

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0:54:45

AI and the cost to human life — with Karen Hao

The Minefield ·

2025/12/17

AI is sometimes portrayed in utopian terms as the essential technological innovation. At other times, it's described as representing an existential threat to human life, a technological creation that will inevitably lay waste to its creator. Regardless of how we view it, could the cost of AI extend far beyond economics?

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0:54:36

What can we learn about politics from Ambrogio...

The Minefield ·

2025/12/10

It is one of the casualties of democratic politics that citizens rarely remain indifferent about the governments they elect. By investing politicians with their hopes or fears, their aspirations and anxieties, voters ensure that they will take the performance of a government personally. This is why politics cannot be emptied of emotion: electors and the elected are bound together by filaments of expectation and accountability, and the conditions of their common life depend on the

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0:54:37

The ethics of life-writing: Memoirs may be popular,...

The Minefield ·

2025/12/03

In the world of book sales, what “romantasy” is to fiction, autobiography/memoir is to non-fiction. There is an undeniable appetite for the purportedly true stories of famous or otherwise public figures whose lives are shrouded in PR or private interests.Moreover, autobiographies have a kind of inherent meaning or telos — disparate elements come together to form a narrative which always will have been meaningful. Part of our desire to read such memoirs is certainly prurient, a wish

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0:54:46

What will we lose if translation becomes wholly...

The Minefield ·

2025/11/26

It feels like, for so much of this year, in one form or another, we’ve been trying to count the costs that technological innovations are exacting on our humanity — how AI, in particular, is altering (perhaps irrevocably) our relationship to words, to writing, to beauty, to creativity, to taste, to work, to the natural world, to our interior life.From the very beginning, our concern has been that the allure of convenience — or, better, of frictionlessness — is making us overlook or

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