A heterodox, left-critical commentariat listicle for you

Also feeling you need to escape your silo?

My brother Pete is probably the most original thinker I know. He formulates his ideas in a nigh-naïve vacuum, based on the facts at hand, not The Noise.

An outing with Pete is like wandering the planet with an alien. He observes the humans, then offers a pithy comment that nails the scenario. I remember well before Bondi Hipsters was a thing, he visited me in Sydney and was absorbing what people were wearing as we walked the promenade at Bondi. “It costs a lot to look that poor,” he said. Nail. On. Head.

Pete, serenading me in Scottish brogue wearing a BabyBjorn “kilt” and paint-splattered board shorts in the Snowy Mountains.

He is not on any social media. Never has been. Until quite recently he had a Nokia phone that he never answered. Which is to lend credence to the former point. He dresses like a mad men, based wholly on practicality (with perhaps a small measure of sartorial recalcitrance). He has lived for years on Pacific Islands, because I think the distance and looseness suits him. He shared a group house with another of my brothers at university and grew crop circles of corn in the massive backyard. He spent summer riding around Canberra with cobs occy strapped to his bike rack, handing them out to randoms.

I won’t labour things. I’ll get to the point - his thinking. He challenges it. He consciously chooses inputs that counters his views. He joined the Army Reserves for a year, to learn discipline. He studied women’s studies at university. And for the past few years he has regularly watched, as a practice, right wing SkyNews panel shows, such as The Bolt Report and Paul Murray Live. “I’m not going to read The Guardian and The Saturday Paper,” he told me. “That will just reinforce my opinions. Which is no fun.”

OK, so that’s Pete. I’m not so resilient¹. That said, I am very conscious I need to challenge my left-located thinking; I observe it get rigid and righteous at times. It has been recently. Every sensemaking dialogue expert out there tells us we will only beat bifurcation when we commit to learning more about the other’s side. Every spiritualist, philosopher and relationships coach says the same. Two-time world champion debater Bo Seo and I discuss this in detail here:

I had this conversation with my lovely driveway guest Annaliese the night she made me a vegan poke bowl (see previous post). She was worried her opinions were becoming silo-ed. We should all be. Our opinions are increasingly at the mercy of the algorithimic suckhole; we must be vigilant.

I said I’d send her a few links to thinkers and pods etc that are shaking up my Hot-And-Otherwise Takes, as well as my algorithmic footprint. I figured I’d also share it here with the rest of you and open things up to your input.

An evolving list of heterodox, Left-critical media

I am in no way suggesting this is a complete, balanced list. It’s a few examples from the corner of the thinking web I’m currently exploring.

I should flag the particular nook tends to feature journalists who all worked for the same rota of publications - from the New York Times and Atlantic to Vice and Vox to Reason magazine - before branching out solo. A little like the Bro Podcasters, they tend to reference and feature each other a fair bit on their newsletters and pods. And I’m aware that since consuming their material, I’ve entered something of another silo/echo chamber, this time that of anti-woke, somewhat “centrist”, progressive late millennial to middleaged ex-journalists who froth over free speech and like to out-nuance each other.

I’ll also acknowledge that the recommendations function on Substack has seen me go down this particular rabbit hole. Is this a problem? Well, not so much. I’m not fed the information, as per the algorithms of Meta et al. I’m consciously aware I’m choosing to explore when I click on recommendations. Soon enough I’ll need to shake this popsicle stand, too…

Finally, they are all American and British. I’d sorely love to be recommended some Australian thinkers and writers who might prick a hole in my silo! Please point me in good directions if you are aware of any…

The dudes over at

The Fifth Column (A Podcast)

have a Substack podcast…

….(which you can also access via Apple and Spotify), on which they chat mostly US politics through a somewhat libertarian lens. One of the hosts Matt Welch is an ardent libertarian. Another, Michael Moynihan is a free-speech advocate. I follow him a bit across different media. He seems to move between left and right publications, but holds both sides to account. He breaks stories on plagiarism (Jonah Lehrer’s Jane Goodall’s), criticises left fanatics (Sean Penn's admiration for Hugo Chavez and what he says is media’s uncritical enthusiasm for Julian Assange). I struggle with both libertarianism and blanket free speech advocacy. And I find the dudes very dude-y. But I enjoy the sport of navigating their slants.

Heterodox rants over at

Blocked and Reported

This is another Substack podcast and it covers pop culture, co-hosted by Jesse Singal who hit headlines for his Atlantic on transgender issues titled "When Children Say They're Trans".

Two whip-smart female journalists over at

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em

cover popular culture and politics...

….in a slightly recalcitrant and distinctly woke-critical way.

I also read

The Free Press

set up by Bari Weiss and listen to her podcast Honestly.

Weiss is a fascinating contrarian. She described herself as a "left-leaning centrist" who goes hard on left extremism. She is a Zionist, she was the first to “out” the Intellectual Dark Web movement, and famously wrote a New York Times column titled "We're All Fascists Now" in which she argued that members of the left-wing are increasingly intolerant of alternate views. She waded in controversially on #metoo and notoriously quit her post at the Times, posting in protest of a woke v free speech controversy that spewed forth on Twitter. The Free Press also hosted the dinner-party turning The Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast. Honestly, as per her podcast, it’s hard to plant her on a side of any fence. I have mixed opinions on all her opinions.

I haven’t quite worked out the slant of

Ian Leslie

...

Which is a good thing. His bio line says: IAN LESLIE PICKS OUT THE MOST IMPORTANT, INTERESTING AND BEAUTIFUL SIGNALS FROM THE NOISE. And Helen Lewis over at

The Bluestocking

writes, “Ian Leslie’s writing is a cool bath of sanity in a world of frenzied hot takes.”

I also scan

Andrew Sullivan

's work.

He’s an openly gay, Catholic conservative writer who has written for both The New Republic and New York magazines.

I might include Decoding the Gurus here, too

One of the hosts of the DTG podcast - Matt Browne - is in fact Australian. The conversation, however, tends to challenge both progressive and conservative gurus. As many of you know, I interviewed Matt a short while back on it all:

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OK, over to you. Any media you consume that swings your intellectual pendulum away from its comfortable groove? I’m up for being extended.

Sarah xx

PS Over the next week I’m going to be heavily in transit and a little homeless. I’m going to try to stick to my normal posting schedule…but forgive me if both content and timing shakes up a little.

1. Although I did share an op-ed page in the Herald Sun with Andrew Bolt for three years and was a guest on Murray’s show several times, some years before he swung rabid.