Diane Stubbings

Diane Stubbings reviews 'An Insider’s Plague Year' by Peter Doherty

September 2021, no. 435 • 19 August 2021

The collective dislocation that followed the advent of Covid-19 generated (and continues to generate) a slew of books intended to make sense of the turmoil. Encompassing Slavoj Žižek’s anti-capitalist treatise Pandemic! (2020) and books for children such as Eoin McLaughlin and Polly Dunbar’s While We Can’t Hug (2020), the responses have ranged from considered attempts to apprehend the pand ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'A Trip to the Dominions: The scientific event that changed Australia' edited by Lynette Russell

April 2021, no. 430 • 23 March 2021

Founded in 1831, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) sought to redress impediments to scientific progress that arose in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, determining that the BAAS would ‘give a stronger impulse and more systematic direction to scientific inquiry … [and] promote the intercourse of cultivators of science’. ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness' by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

March 2021, no. 429 • 22 February 2021

In a recent interview, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli confessed that the book he would most like to be remembered for is The Order of Time (2018), a work in which time, as it is commonly understood, ‘melts [like a snowflake] between your fingers and vanishes’. The Order of Time, Rovelli admits, only pretends to be about physics. Ultimately, it’s a book about the meaning of life and the comp ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness' by Peter Godfrey-Smith

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

One of the blessings of Covid-19 lockdown was discovering the wildlife cameras streaming on the internet in real time. With a click it became possible to observe brown bears catching salmon in Alaska, sea lions clambering on and off a rocky beach in British Columbia, and white-bellied sea eagles nesting in an eyrie high in bushland on Sydney’s fringes. Watching newly fledged eaglets literally st ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'The Genes That Make Us: Human stories from a revolution in medicine' by Edwin Kirk

October 2020, no. 425 • 24 September 2020

The announcement in June 2000 that a first draft of the human genome had been completed was rightly recognised as a landmark in scientific endeavour. Predictions were that the sequencing of the genome would allow for the pinpointing of genes responsible for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease, and lead to finely targeted, even personalised, treatments for a range of disorders. That ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'Nerve: A personal journey through the science of fear' by Eva Holland

September 2020, no. 424 • 24 August 2020

While climbing in British Columbia, Canadian writer and journalist Eva Holland becomes paralysed by fear. She has long been troubled by exposed heights, but this is different. What she experiences is an ‘irrational force’ that prevents her from moving. It is only the dogged encouragement of friends that allows her to make her tentative way back down the mountain. The terror Holland confronts ... (read more)

Diane Stubbings reviews 'Why Trust Science?' by Naomi Oreskes

May 2020, no. 421 • 27 April 2020

In lectures delivered at Princeton University in November 2016, science historian Naomi Oreskes asked why, at a time when the epistemological and cultural relevance of science is subject to increasing doubt, we should still have confidence in science as our primary source of knowledge about the physical world. Why Trust Science? is the culmination of those lectures, and includes not only Oreskes ... (read more)

Emerald City (Melbourne Theatre Company)

ABR Arts • 13 March 2020

In the last decade there has been a welcome shift in our theatre ecology, with more main-stage companies keen to revisit classic Australian plays. Where once a new work by a local writer would have its run and then, no matter how acclaimed, disappear, rarely to be seen again outside of school and amateur productions, we are now being given another chance to experience some of these seminal plays, ... (read more)

'Home, I'm Darling' (MTC)

ABR Arts • 28 January 2020

Judy and Johnny live a blissful 1950s life. While he readies himself for a day at the office, she twirls around the kitchen preparing his breakfast. They are, they declare, ‘sickeningly happy … utterly content’. The twist that comes at the end of the first scene of Home, I’m Darling has been heavily signposted in pre-publicity, so it’s not giving anything away to say that we are not in t ... (read more)