The Minefield

It is suitably ironic that one of the most poignant, and pertinent, moments in Homer’s The Odyssey was airbrushed out of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. The first time we meet Odysseus, the endlessly resourceful architect of the fall of Troy, he is indeed weeping on the shores of the nymph Kalypso’s island. But it is not due to the unrelieved guilt he feels from his war crimes; rather, we are told, “his tears never did dry, since the sweetness of life was trickling away / As he grieved for his return home” (Book V.153).
For the immortal goddess had kept the mortal Odysseus for seven years, not in a prison, but in a paradise, an Eden-like cave warmed by fire, lined with fragrant trees, filled with carnal delights.
Each night, Kalypso — unageing and beautiful, whose figure is described as “being in full bloom” — would sleep with Odysseus (“he unwilling, she all too willing”) and promise him at once agelessness and unending pleasure if he would but remain with her in her cave. Depart for Ithaca, “the land of your fathers”, she warns, and not only will he have an inferior wife awaiting him, but he will endure unimaginable hardship on his journey home. Since we are given a god’s-eye tour of Kalypso’s cave before we learn of the choice being put to Odysseus, surely the unequivocal nature of his response is meant to surprise — even though without it, there would be no story!
Given the choice between immortality and solidarity with the hardships and daily joys of the world, Odysseus chooses the world, and death with it. “Such simple greatness is foreign to our minds today”, writes Albert Camus; “we simply lack the pride of the man who is faithful to his limitations — that is, the clairvoyant love of the human condition.”
Increasing numbers of us seem prepared to turn our backs on the world in order to remain in Kalypso’s cave. Sometimes, this takes the form of attempts to so optimise the body that it defies, or indefinitely postpones, ageing and death (Bryan Johnson has become the face of this fanatical project, suspended as it is between ascetic self-discipline and transhumanist experimentation). For others, the more modest gains in longevity and good health into our eighties and nineties have made us more determined to hold onto power (here Rupert Murdoch would be one of any number of octogenarians who refuse “succession”).
For all the ambition and self-importance that both tendencies project, there is something rather small, even petty, about the fear of accepting one’s limits, of ceding one’s power. By denying death and grasping tightly to what we’ve accumulated, we hope to remain significant. It is a human impulse immediately recognisable from Shakespeare’s Lear, and should invite our pity if its consequences for our common life weren’t so dire.
As Samuel Moyn and Lucinda Holdforth have both argued, the refusal of human limits expressed in this determination to extend our lives and our influence comes at the expense of the young. Not only is their disenfranchisement fuelling a certain generational resentment, it may also represent a deformed moral conception of the proper end (telos) of human life. To adopt an old Rabbinical analogy, is our life meant to be a sponge that absorbs as much as possible, or a watering can that progressively pours itself out for the sake of others?
This is no argument to consign the old to a state of “uselessness”, to collectively deem them at a certain age as surplus to requirement. (The monstrous vision of Christopher Buckley’s satirical 2007 novel Boomsday was that government incentives should be given to Baby Boomers to kill themselves once they reach 75.) But perhaps the sense of importance, of usefulness, can be reimagined by learning how to be faithful to our limits, by acquiring Odysseus’s “clairvoyant love of the human condition”.
Guest: Lucinda Holdforth is a former speech writer and adviser to senior leaders across government and business. As an author, her work has increasingly focused on what makes good societies flourish. Her most recent book is Going On and On: Why Our Longevity Threatens the Future — you can read an edited extract on ABC Religion & Ethics.
PLEASE NOTE: This episode of The Minefield contains discussion of death and dying.

It is hard to imagine a series of events more tragic, more unseemly, more emblematic of the performativity and polarisation that dominate our time, than the premature rise, sudden fall and untimely death of Jason Arday.
In 2023, the University of Cambridge announced that it had appointed Arday — a 37-year-old son of Ghanaian immigrants, who grew up in public housing in south London and only “began to read and write in his late teens” due to his autism diagnosis — to the position of Professor of Sociology of Education. Not only was he the youngest black professor in the university’s history, but he was promoted by Cambridge as an individual whose life story epitomises “the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers” in the academy.
Arday was thus held up as a living proof that Cambridge was taking seriously the criticism, frequently voiced during the #BlackLivesMatter ferment, that there was a conspicuous lack of “black professors, and lecturers and senior lecturers and academics and researchers” at the university. He also represented a kind of downpayment on a larger promise to promote “greater inclusivity” among Cambridge’s otherwise exclusive academic community.
Paradoxically, Cambridge even mentioned Arday’s struggle as a young academic to get published as uniquely qualifying him for the role of “helping as many ethnic minority and under-represented people as possible gain access to opportunities within the sector”: “When I started writing academic papers, I had no idea what I was doing … I did not have a mentor and no-one ever showed me how to write. Everything I submitted got violently rejected. The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny, but I treated it as a learning experience and, perversely, began to enjoy it.”
It would become part of the Arday-mystique that he published his first peer-reviewed paper in 2018, after which he secured university posts at Roehampton, Durham, Glasgow and, finally, Cambridge just five years later. By any measure, this was a miraculous ascent to the pinnacle of academic prestige and influence. Before long Arday was fêted as a kind of celebrity in his own right — a philanthropist, an activist, above all, an inspiration in the aftermath of a bruising cultural reckoning with racial injustice.
Within months of his appointment, however, the first allegations of academic misconduct were put to Cambridge: that Arday had failed to properly cite or adequately acknowledge earlier research in his 2018 paper. In 2025, a journalist at Times Higher Education, Jack Grove, undertook an investigation into further allegations of plagiarism in Arday’s PhD thesis and irregularities in his data in the 2018 paper. This then expanded into wider scrutiny of a number of Arday’s claims about his own biography and individual accomplishments.
Grove submitted nearly 100 pages of evidence of academic misconduct to both Cambridge University and Liverpool John Moores University (which had awarded Arday his PhD). But while extensive corrections were made to his 2018 paper, Arday was cleared of plagiarising his PhD thesis and Cambridge reiterated its determination to “take a stand and speak out against the systematic attempts to erase Black scholarship”. Arday went on to file a police complaint against Jack Grove, alleging harassment, while a notorious law firm, Carter-Ruck, threatened Times Higher Education with defamation proceedings on his behalf if they published Grove’s investigation. It never ran.
The issue largely receded from public view until late-July 2026, just weeks before the publication of Jason Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. Having been denied a more legitimate and perhaps measured outlet in Times Higher Education, the full gamut of allegations — fabrications, embellishments, plagiarism, errors in published research and so on — appeared in the Substack post of a former Cambridge researcher who has been described as “a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ”.
This post set off what can reasonably be called a “feeding frenzy”. Some of the coverage bore no evident animus toward Arday himself, but diligently subjected his claims to proper scrutiny (here the work of Lanre Bakare is exemplary); other outlets went after Arday with a barely disguised glee, treating him as “exhibit A” of DEI’s illegitimacy and low standards. Arday’s supporters, meanwhile, did the man no favours by minimising the severity of the allegations of academic misconduct, claiming Arday was guilty of nothing more than the crime of “being successful while Black”.
Over the course of the next three weeks, Cambridge University announced it was conducting an investigation into Arday’s qualifications and appointments, Arday announced his resignation (“the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”) and was subsequently found dead at a residence in south London.
All of a sudden, online persecution became performative mourning. Self-righteousness was countered with fierce recrimination. Jason Arday became a kind of cultural Rorschach test. But not only does the entire tragedy expose the limits of our prevailing political allegiances; it also demonstrates what happens when shared institutions which may be relied upon as impartial arbiters, as custodians of something like a shared reality, are implicated in partisan suspicion.
Now that a coronial inquest has begun into the death of Jason Arday, it is incumbent on us to conduct our own moral reckoning.
Guest: Bernard Baffour is an Associate Professor in the School of Demography and the Associate Dean of Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, the Australian National University.
Suggested reading:
Bernard Baffour, “Could Jason Arday’s legacy ultimately be to make us better humans?” (ABC Religion & Ethics, 17 August 2026)
Lanre Bakare, “Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor” (The Guardian, 1 August 2026)
Jack Grove, “I was reported to police over the Arday case. I was just doing my job” (Time Higher Education, 5 August 2026)
Mara Hvistendahl, Megan Specia, Leo Sands, Ali Watkins and Susan Dominus, “Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring” (The New York Times, 15 August 2026)
Helen Lewis, “The Jason Arday Truthers: The concerted effort to airbrush the late fabulist’s life” (The Atlantic, 26 August 2026)
Tyler Austin Harper, “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday: Systemic, ritualized dishonesty undid the Cambridge professor” (The Atlantic, 15 August 2026)
Daniel Engber, “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge: The Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s unlikely ascent has come to a tragic end” (The Atlantic, 6 August 2026)
If you or someone you know needs help, call:
Police: 000 (Triple Zero) in an emergency
Lifeline: 13 11 14
MensLine Australia: 1300 789 978
Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467
Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636
SANE: 1800 187 263

At a time of profound polarisation, when the fracturing of media ecosystems has been so complete that any agreement on threats to our common life seems impossible, an issue has emerged capable of bringing voters of every political persuasion together.
Over the last year, popular opposition to the construction of the data centres in the United States has risen dramatically. According to a Gallup poll from May 2026, more than seventy per cent of Americans are opposed to the construction of a data centre in their area. In June, a Heatmap poll got the same result, and found that over fifty per cent of respondents said they favoured a ban on new data centres altogether. Meanwhile, fifteen states are considering, have introduced or already passed legislation temporarily banning data centre development.
Something similar is happening in the UK and Australia, where government eagerness to attract vast investment from AI companies has encountered strident opposition from local communities and electorates. The Australian Greens have called for a moratorium on data centres, while Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party is urging stronger government regulation on AI. The South Australian state government has tried to get out ahead of electoral anxieties by announcing a royal commission into AI.
The proximate reasons for this opposition are straightforward enough. They primarily have to do with the effect of data centres on the environment, water and energy usage, utility costs, the amenity of adjacent communities and noise pollution. Lurking behind these concrete concerns is the more visceral alarm over the sheer speed of advances in AI over the last three years, along with the gargantuan sums of money frontier labs have spent in their pursuit of ever more “compute” and sources of data for training their models, as well as the out-sized influence that this new generation of tech oligarchs have had on government decision making.
Behind it all, there are the deep-seated worries about what this will mean for human beings: whether workers will be sacrificed on the altar of the quest for artificial general intelligence; whether human labour will come to play a subordinate role to the efficient operations of machines (which is to say, whether we will be reduced to “reverse centaurs”, as Cory Doctorow puts it); whether work itself will lose its meaning.
But does the way this popular opposition to data centres has coalesced into a broad-based if inchoate movement mark a productive development in modern democratic politics — say, the resurgence of “class” as a potent political force — or is this simply an extension of the pathologies that have eaten away at democratic politics for the better part of the last decade-and-a-half, including: what Pierre Rosanvallon calls the “negative sovereignty” of aggregated disaffection (which can unite around a common “no”, but cannot come together for a shared political project); populist antipathy toward monied and political elites alike; pervasive distrust that veers into unfalsifiable conspiracy theories.
There are plenty of good reasons to be politically and ethically suspicious of AI, about the resources it demands, the benefits it promises and the distorting effects it has on the economy. But perhaps the most pressing question of all is whether opposition to data centres can turn into a way of making AI democratically accountable, and whether the limits erected by popular consultation and consent can translate into a deeper form of political empowerment — an affirmation of the importance of cooperation and deliberation for the flourishing of our communities?
Guest: Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is in Australia to deliver the 2026 Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture on the decline of Western democracy, in Melbourne on 25 August 2026.

The widespread availability of GLP-1 based drugs has been lauded as a “revolution in weight loss” and as inaugurating the “end of obesity”. As we’ve discussed previously, health benefits aside, there are concerns that such weight-loss drugs don’t just leave certain cultural assumptions about beauty and body size unchallenged, but in fact reinforce a kind of cultural aesthetic hierarchy — elevating slimness to the level of a kind of moral demand (with the opprobrium that accompanies failure to live by it).
Those concerns remain. But the uptake of use of GLP-1 drugs in places like the United States — where 11 per cent use drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, according to Gallup — has intersected with a parallel cultural phenomenon in interesting and rather morbid ways. What happens when the demand to be slim encounters the idealisation of body shapes: fuller curves, more defined muscles, plumper lips, tighter skin, sharper cheeks?
Not long after GLP-1 based drugs were made more widely available to the public for the purposes of weight loss, a series of fat-based fillers were made available to certain plastic surgeons who were experienced in working with fat. But unlike the more common procedure of autologous fat grafting — the process whereby the person’s own fat is removed by means of liposuction and injected into another part of the person’s body — these fat-based fillers are harvested from cadavers. The fat is then treated, bottled and injected into target areas in order to achieve the desired look. Though the treatment is expensive, it is becoming increasingly popular due to the “chunkier” and more “natural” look of the filler, and because the procedure doesn’t require either general anaesthesia or an extended recovery time.
Most people will instinctively recoil from the prospect of injecting cadaver fat — parts of human bodies that have been reduced to “biological material” — into one’s own body for the purposes of cosmetic improvement. There is a certain moral intuition (is there not?) that goes deeper than the mere “ick factor” and approaches the sense that this is simply too superficial a use for human bodies to be put. Organ donations and transplant feel different to us — that the “gift” of an organ from a deceased body gives life to another. The harvesting and use of fat in the service of achieving an ideal body shape feels vulgar.
But is this moral intuition fair? There are live questions about whether the family of the deceased know the uses to which the donated bodies of their loved ones are being put. Moreover, given the altruism of the act of donation itself, there is something ethically problematic about companies wanting to profit on the use of those bodies. But leave the question of consent to the side — or assume that consent was given for fat from the dead body to be used in this way — does that alleviate the ethical problems at play? Or does it merely deepen some of the concerns about the darker side of the current obsession with the aesthetics of the body?
Renae Fomiatti examines the ways we are pushing ethical boundaries in our pursuit of aesthetic self-improvement, on ABC Religion and Ethics (12 August 2026).
Leah Dolan reports on the use of cadaver fat to mould bodies that have experienced GLP-1 assisted rapid weight loss, for CNN (13 July 2026). 
Guest: Renae Fomiatti is an Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University.

Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are invariably motivated by a certain ambition (philótimo). Though not problematic in itself, but when combined with avarice (philochrematía) it can give rise to a form of corruption as corrosive as the unconstrained exercise of political power.
For as Aristotle would put it, one who accepts gifts (katadōrodokoúmenos) will also be one who shows favouritism (katacharizómenos). He holds up as an example the council of “elders” (gérontas) in Sparta, who were “well known to have taken bribes and to have been guilty of partiality in public affairs” (Politics II.1271). The fault of the Spartan system, he concluded, the source of its underlying political rot, was a kind of pervasive unaccountability (aneuthúnos), such that citizens no longer had a reasonable expectation of impartial treatment from lawmakers — which is to say, they could no longer expect justice.
The suspicion of hidden influence and the fear of special consideration undermine the faith of citizens in our shared institutions to behave justly. Even when these institutions are conducting themselves equitably and representatives are making decisions on principled grounds, the ubiquity of money in politics breeds mistrust and ensures that suspicion lingers just below the surface of democratic life.
This is why any healthy political order depends on trust and is sustained through rigorous forms of public accountability. For once democratic faith is lost or significantly damaged, it lends credence to the claims of populist entrepreneurs and charlatans that politics per se is corrupt and that anti-democratic means are the only way to fix an untenable status quo.
Concerns around overt political corruption and undue influence being exerted by oligarchs and billionaires over government policy have reached endemic levels in places like the United States, the UK and France over the last decade. And while Australia has been spared the luridness and eyewatering sums of political “donations” now commonplace in US politics, public faith in this country has nonetheless been challenged, to say the least, over the last month by a series of political scandals from across the political spectrum
In each case, the question of money in politics goes deeper than what is legal — it goes to what corrupts public perception of, and faith in, democratic politics itself. Is that criterion best served through aggressive anti-corruption bodies? Or is there a case for something more thoroughgoing: not just caps on donations or a prohibition on donations from certain sectors, but a ban on private donations altogether?
Guest: Yee-Fui Ng is an Associate Professor of Law at Monash University, where she specialises in the areas of public law and political integrity. Her most recent books are Combatting the Code: Regulating Automated Government Decision-Making in Comparative Context and The Rise of Political Advisors in the Westminster System.