Miriam Cosic
Miriam Cosic is a journalist and critic, and a former literary editor of the Australian. Born in Melbourne, she now lives in Sydney and is the author of Only Child (1999) and Right to Die: An Examination of the Euthanasia Debate (2003).
All essays by Miriam Cosic
Undue process: In the Company of Cowards by Michael Mori
Two lessons may be learned from American military lawyer Michael Mori’s account of his defence of David Hicks. Neither of the lessons is new, but each requires constant reaffirmation. The first is that power corrupts. Despite its high-flown rhetoric about freedom and the ideals of the Founding Fathers, the United States refuses to join some of the most potentially powerful international instruments of justice, including the International Criminal Court… The second lesson is that in contemporary liberal democracies, things are rarely done because they have intrinsic organisational or ethical merit. Rather, it is strategic usefulness that rules.
Dare to know! The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters
All of this – the contradictions, the about-faces, the progressions and regressions, the many and varied strands of argument and implementation – is the legacy of the Enlightenment. Which makes the title of historian Anthony Pagden’s latest book, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, puzzling. How can it not matter?
Anatomy of difference: Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon… forensically examines families in which children turn out to be not what their parents had fondly expected. The title is a twist on the proverb, ‘The apple never falls far from the tree’. His question is: But what happens when they do?