As Featured In: Michael West Media

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My piece on Apple’s planned obsolescence racket — the battery-gate throttling scandal, the Federal Court’s $9m fine over Error 53, and the twelve-day wait for a forty-minute repair — is out today with Michael West Media, one of the country’s sharpest independent outlets, reaching readers well into the millions.

Full piece here: https://michaelwest.com.au/it-just-works-until-it-doesnt-inside-apples-planned-obsolescence/

Editorial illustration of an empty corporate foyer. A wall poster reads "It's okay not to be okay. Reach out." Below it sit a bowl of browning bananas, an empty chair and a cardboard box of belongings.

Reaching Out

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The Chief Wellbeing Officer of Bastards Incorporated joins Bryan Dawe to discuss six hundred and one redundancies, Wellness Wednesday, and why resilient employees rarely escalate. A tribute to John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, the finest political satire this country has produced.

A Housing Commission kitchen table with black rosary beads, a window behind showing two worlds: a modest 1960s Sydney housing estate on one side and a clifftop home with ocean views on the other.
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Anthony Norman Albanese crossed Parramatta Road the way other people cross a street: with the calm and conviction of someone who has rehearsed the gesture for television. He came from a housing commission island ringed by depots and the click-clack of Catholic rosary beads, black as anthracite and polished to a gloss by the unrelenting petitions of the poor but faithful. He was, as the campaign line put it, a son of a single mum. It was also an opening line with longer ambitions.

A Victorian workshop scene with machinist’s tools on a worn bench, an empty ceremonial chair bearing a knight’s sash, and a faded Labour banner reading “The Moral Case For Socialism” on the wall behind.

Sons of Toil, Part I: The Toolmaker’s Bequest

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Keir Rodney Starmer came into the world named after the great Scottish agitator who opposed a popular war and was expelled from Parliament for it. The naming was the most radical act the Starmer family would perform for the next six decades. After that, everything moved in precisely the opposite direction.

Engraving-style illustration of an empty Bedlam-era asylum gallery with a crowd of identical white-coated doctors applauding around a single hospital bed beneath a giant certificate.

Catch 22

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Heller’s Catch-22 was the trap no rational mind could escape. Trump has built it in reverse, proving his unfitness 122 doctors at a time.

Satirical illustration of men in business suits kneeling barefoot in snow before golden gates, with the White House and a brightly lit cage-fighting octagon visible on the lawn beyond, bunting on the fence and banknotes drifting down like snowflakes.

Canossa on the South Lawn

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In 1077 a king knelt three days in the snow at Canossa, and it worked. Nine and a half centuries on, the pope-king turns eighty behind a cage on the South Lawn while the pretenders queue: a trillionaire, a Crown Prince, and a deputy sheriff paying by direct debit. Urban Wronski on the new Investiture Controversy.