Ideas at the House

Peter Fray is the Deputy Editor of The Australian. He was the editor-in-chief and founder of the fact-checking website, PolitiFact Australia and had a long and distinguished career at Fairfax Media, most recently as Editor-in-Chief and publisher of the The Sydney Morning Herald and previously as Editor of The Canberra Times and The Sunday Age.Julia Baird is a journalist, broadcaster and author. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, the Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar. She is a regular commentator on television and radio and is the author of Media Tarts: How the Australian press frames female politicians. She is currently writing a biography of Queen Victoria.Chris Kenny is Associate Editor-National Affairs at The Australian and host of the SkyNews Viewpoint program, as well as a regular commentator on national affairs on television, radio and in print. He brings to the task a broad range of top level experience in media, politics and foreign affairs.John Ricketts is the CEO of Significance Systems, an applied AI platform that finds and analyses the narratives that matter in a crowded digital media world. This has application in a wide range of fields from Capital Markets and Development Aid, to Communications, Strategy and Marketing. He was awarded his PHD in Physics at 24 and lived during the 90s in Tokyo, where he pioneered the first social media. Mark Di Stefano is the Political Editor for BuzzFeedOz, who started out in the media by fetching ABC News host Juanita Philips' tea and doing her autocue. After stints reading the news on Triple J and doing TV journalism for the ABC News in Darwin, Mark got lucky and was hired by BuzzFeed. He loves the Internet, coffee and Kendrick Lamar's latest album. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Frank Brennan SJ AO has a longstanding reputation of advocacy in the areas of law, social justice, refugee protection and Aboriginal reconciliation. He is known for his 1998 involvement in the debate surrounding the Wik peoples’ landmark court case. He is a Jesuit priest, professor of law and writer. Brennan was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1995 for services to Aboriginal Australians, particularly as an advocate in the areas of law, social justice and reconciliation. He is highly thought of in the Indigenous communityMalarndirri McCarthy is a Senior Journalist & Presenter at SBS/NITV News and the 2013 winner of the DEADLYs Inaugural Award in Journalism for her breaking story on two Indigenous brothers in Saudi Arabia and in 2013 received two Walkley nominations for her story about a car company advertisement filmed on the culturally significant site of Wave Rock in WA.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laurie Penny is a feminist, journalist and author. Her books include Unspeakable Things (2014),Cybersexism (2013) and Meat Market (2011). She writes and speaks on social justice, pop culture, gender issues and digital politics for numerous news sources including The Guardian, The New York Times, Vice and Salon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tariq Ali is a British-Pakistani political commentator and a prolific writer, journalist and filmmaker. He has been a leading figure of the international left since the 1960s. His books include The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power, The Obama Syndrome and The Extreme Centre: A Warning.Helen Joyce became international editor of The Economist in January 2014 having previously served as International Education Editor and Sao Paulo bureau chief. Before joining The Economist she worked as editor of Plus, an online magazine about maths published by the University of Cambridge, and was founding editor for The Royal Statistical Society's quarterly magazine, Significance.Michael Wesley is a Professor of National Security at the Australian National University. He is currently the Director of the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Studies in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. He also consults extensively for the Australian government.Greg Sheridan (Chair) is The Australian newspaper's foreign editor and is one of Australia's most respected and influential analysts of foreign affairs. He began his journalistic career 30 years ago with The Bulletin, and his coverage of Vietnamese refugee stories in the period after the Vietnam War sparked a lifelong interest in Asia and regional politics. He joined The Australian in 1984 and worked in Beijing, Washington and Canberra before returning to Sydney as foreign editor in 1992. He is the author of several books on Asia and Australia's role in the region. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AC Grayling is a distinguished philosopher notable for his ability to make philosophy relevant to contemporary readers and audiences. He is Master of the New College of the Humanities, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is associated with the new atheism movement and is sometimes described as the 'Fifth Horseman of New Atheism'. He has written and edited more than 30 books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are The Challenge of Things, Liberty in the Age of Terror, The God Argument and To Set Prometheus Free. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarai Walker received her MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. As a magazine writer, her articles have appeared in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. She served as an editor and writer for Our Bodies, Ourselves, before moving to London and Paris to complete a PhD. Her first novel, Dietland, was published this year, and takes on the beauty industry, gender inequality and our weight loss obsession. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Marc Lewis, a professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, is a cognitive neuroscientist known for his research on the development of emotions and personality in childhood and adolescence. His current work, based on an integrative review of the neuroscience of addiction, shows that addiction is not a pathological state but rather an unfortunate result of a brain doing what it's supposed to do -- in fact overdoing it: pursuing pleasure and avoiding risk. Accordingly, he argues that to understand addiction we need to stop thinking of it as a disease. Lewis's 2012 book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, is an account of his addiction to drugs as a young man, with accompanying explanations of the neurobiological processes underlying various drug experiences as well as the process of addiction itself. His new book is called The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anna Broinowski is a filmmaker and writer. She is known for films including Forbidden Lie$ (about hoax-author Norma Khouri) and Helen’s War (about anti-nuclear crusader Helen Caldicott). Her film Aim High In Creation! pays tribute to the cinematic genius of North Korea’s late Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. Determined to stop a new gas mine near her Sydney home, she traveled to North Korea to learn about propaganda from the masters. She has written about her experiences in her 2015 book, The Director Is the Commander. � � �   Suki Kim is the author of a New York Times bestselling memoir, Without You, There Is No Us, My Time with the Sons of North Korean Elite, which chronicles her undercover investigation during the last six months of Kim Jong Il's reign. Her first novel, The Interpreter, was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize. Since 2002, she has travelled to North Korea as a writer, witnessing both Kim Jong-il’s 60th Birthday celebrations as well as his death at age 69.� Her essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, and an Open Society fellowship. Born and raised in Seoul, she lives in New York.Michael Kirby was Australia’s longest-serving judge when he retired in 2009. Following a distinguished legal career, he served on the High Court of Australia from 1996 to 2009. Among his many contributions to public life in Australia and internationally, he was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to lead an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea, which issued its report in 2014. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tariq Ali is a British-Pakistani political commentator and a prolific writer, journalist and filmmaker. He has been a leading figure of the international left since the 1960s. His books include The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power, The Obama Sydrome and The Extreme Centre: A Warning.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helen Joyce became international editor of The Economist in January 2014 having previously served as International Education Editor and Sao Paulo bureau chief. Before joining The Economist she worked as editor of Plus, an online magazine about maths published by the University of Cambridge, and was founding editor for The Royal Statistical Society's quarterly magazine, Significance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.