I’m a journalism student, and I’m sick of being asked to respond to the notion of a ‘brand’. I even had Fairfax present a curriculum as part of my course which spent a week on “brand building”. I find this insufferable, and I’d like to see how other current practitioners and other students feel about this notion. Obviously, change is inevitable, but to what extent are journalists performers, too?

Elizabeth St in Melbourne is prone to flooding, and beneath the streets runs a creek (Williams creek) which seems to be desperate to reassert itself. Other cities have successfully (re)integrated waterways into their cities, notably Seoul, South Korea. Should Melbourne do the same?

Nauru is in such a parlous state of dysfunction that New Zealand has just announced it is no longer willing to fund its justice system. Staff who report the abuse are sacked and medical staff now confront the threat of a two-year jail sentence for reporting the abuse of women and children. I am worried we have that we have become a country that denies people their basic human rights.

I believe that public institutions should be protected and invested in, and that those in power could use some further incentive to provide for this.

The is a unspoken assumption that questions require the mind to respond. We live in a world where the conceptual answer is no longer enough, rather the experiential or visceral response offers a different perspective .

For Cheryl Strayed. Getting started might be an impulse. From there to the finish requires something else.

Scientists tell us about the big bang and how this world began but I’m not sure about the ending. Do scientists know?

Inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions in Harper’s, and my own wondering if ‘happiness’ is really the best word to describe what we all are/should be looking for.

Because I believe that talking about death can be life-changing and life-affirming.

Because new waves of migrants continue to make healthy, happy new futures in Australia while the Aboriginal people seem to suffer continued low employment and poor health.

Australia has had several significant waves of migration (eg. Greeks, Vietnamese, Africans). Each wave coincides with which group mainstream Australia directs it’s vitriol, fear mongering and racism. But the targeting of Islam has been particularly intense.

This matters to me as a daughter of migrant parents, and a mother of bi-racial kids, who simply wants them to grow up in a world free of racial and religious judgement.

The concept of light years, billions of stars in our galaxy and then billions of galaxies outside of the Milky Way is just too big to get a grip on. Maybe there is another concept of distance in a physical law that we haven’t discovered yet, and that will make more sense of these distances and scale? Maybe the micro-world is as big relatively to the universe, that is, the relative distances between individual components of atoms and molecules is just as vast as the universe is big? How can there be an end to the universe – where is it located if it is confined in some way? We know so much – why don’t we know this?