Inside Story

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning hovers uneasily between warning and reassurance as he returns to the organisation at the centre of The Social Network, the Facebook-origin story he wrote and David Fincher directed in 2010. Fincher’s film, aided by Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was a heady engagement with obsession and its manifestations. A decade and a half later, as writer and director of The Social Reckoning, Sorkin has more restrained intentions.

On the fiftieth anniversary last year of the Whitlam government’s dismissal, neither of the main characters had much evolved in the popular consciousness. Gough Whitlam was revered, at least on the left, as a progressive warrior and constitutional martyr. In a major speech marking the anniversary, prime minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to the “stature and significance” of Whitlam’s government.

In everyday life, “great” does not have to be all that great. A friend confirms a time and place for coffee. “Great!,” we reply. “See you there.” A motor vehicle has been serviced and is ready for collection. “Great, I’ll be over in an hour.” In sport, there may be three levels: great players (many), greats (few), and greatness (statues at the MCG). Tennis, surely, makes measurement easy. Each year, it organises four major tournaments that stand above all the others.

For the modern reader, the suggestion that a special sympathy exists between Catholic religious teaching and Labor’s values and outlook might seem implausible, observes Irish Studies professor Jeff Kildea. His impressive new book, Iron Law No More, deals with the era — much of the twentieth century, in fact — when such a relationship was commonly assumed. According to the “iron law,” only through the Labor Party could a Catholic participate and succeed in public life.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” — United States Constitution, First Amendment When the framers of the US constitution set out to codify American rights and freedoms they put “the press” in the first rank, where it has not only remained but become a...

With just four weeks to go until the US midterm elections a “blue wave” — or what Australians would call a Democratic landslide — seems likely. The Democrats are eight points ahead in national polls and have a lead in key Senate races like Texas and Ohio. Some real long-shots have moved from highly implausible to conceivable. A couple of polls show them ahead in Kansas, a state that has not returned a Democratic senator since 1932. Election analysts like Nate Silver and G.

In Magnum Streetwise, Stephen McLaren distils and celebrates what many would regard as the most significant movement in postwar documentary photography. He brings together examples of the work of Magnum Photos, a self-governing collective of men and women best known for recording the mid-century urban landscape, whether they were capturing the remote and the unfamiliar or inventively re-interpreting the close to hand.

Rate this Book is a lively read, and an important one, the punch coming in its subtitle: How star ratings took over the world. The stars are a language of evaluation we can all understand. Indeed, public assessment has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of modern consumerism. The world has quietly given itself over, probably unthinkingly, to an abstract, unregulated scheme of measurement that is now as universal as hours, minutes, seconds.

“Victoria November 2026: an election of dread” When Victorians head to the polls on the last Saturday of next month, all the indications are that they will usher in that relatively rare thing — a change of state government. The twelve-year-old Labor administration, led by the recently installed Ben Carroll, is widely predicted to be unsentimentally flung from office. That expectation might typically engender anticipation of a fresh beginning and reinvigoration.

In the early 1960s, contentious talk about the injustices of the British class system was part of the stock-in-trade of Manchester pubs.