Meaghan Wilson Anastasios's Blog

From the Gutenberg press to TikTok, a historian’s take on declining literacy, shrinking attention spans, and what we stand to lose

In the latest Atlantic, Rose Horowitch has called it. She’s just declared that “The Age of Reading Is Over.”

Well, that’s a little fucking depressing.

I wish I could say that it was the first I’ve heard of it. But a few months ago, I had lunch with a friend who also happens to be one of Australia’s publishing world superstars. I asked her how business was.

Her blunt assessment? Books are cooked. People aren’t reading anymore.

Soon after, I asked the same question of another friend who has also been in publishing for decades. She said the same thing, only with more swears.

As an author who hopes to be writing until the day they pull the pen out of my cold, dead hand, it’s an awful thought.

As a booklover with an unhealthy obsession with all things printed on paper, it’s mystifying.

But as a historian, archaeologist, and student of all things human, it’s utterly terrifying.

What does this mean for us as a species?

Are books the canary in the coal mine?

For Horowitch, we’re entering what she calls our “postliterate era.”

She’s been sounding the alarm for a bit now. She wrote another article in 2024 where she looked at the students arriving at elite colleges in the US who have never read a book, cover-to-cover.

“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” she wrote. “It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”

And that’s a big problem. Because unless you’re raised in a household where reading is a thing, it’s not something you’re likely to just stumble upon.

When you think about it, it’s a rather odd thing to do. Settle yourself down, open a bound volume of sheets of flattened wood pulp printed with abstract shapes, and find yourself transported to… well, anywhere.

But it takes focus, and it takes time.

Living as we do in an era where spare time is at a premium and competition for our attention is fiercer than ever, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that fewer of us are spending our days buried between the pages of a book.

Reading takes us places

But there was a time when books transformed lives.

Take George Smith.

He would have made quite a sight.

November 1872. London. The British Museum. And an unkempt man with wild hair who looks like he’s been dragged backwards through a hedge is running around a second-floor room, tearing off his clothes.

He’s excited. Clearly.

“I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion,” he cries.

Because George has just unearthed one of the most sensational archaeological finds of all time. What he has discovered is a version of the world’s oldest written story.

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To read, or not to read? That is the question.

Most people forget that the “Age of Reading” is a short-lived affair.

Writing itself is new tech, relatively speaking. The first marks in clay that can be described as “writing” date back just 9,000 years or so. But those first cuneiform tablets were run-of-the-mill things… the ancient equivalent of Excel spreadsheets… keeping track of taxes, and recording the exchange of sheep and goats.

Real literature in written form didn’t appear until the story George Smith translated that cold, winter’s day in the British Museum.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, as it came to be known, had arrived on the scene four thousand or so years ago in what was Mesopotamia—today’s Iraq and Syria.

But there was another reason Smith was excited as all fuck.

He had discovered the archaeological mother lode. The proof, for those who believed such things, that God’s word as preserved in the Bible was the literal truth.

The passages from the Epic of Gilgamesh Smith discovered got Victorian England all hot under its collective collar, because it included an account of the immortal man, Utnapishtim, who survived a flood that killed all other human beings after building himself a boat from plans handed down to him by the gods. Oh, he loaded the boat with animals as well… and sent birds to check whether the waters had receded, then beached his boat on a mountaintop.

Sound familiar?

For people who believe the Bible is less sky-fairy cautionary tale to keep believers on the straight and narrow than it is a factual account of historical fact, Gilgamesh is Noah.

Gilgamesh got there first, though, because the Genesis bit of the Old Testament was most likely penned around 900 BCE. But it’s all same-same as far as true believers are concerned, and most biblical scholars agree that the story of Noah and his ark was drawn from the Mesopotamian flood story.

It’s not an exact transcription, mind you. My favourite way Gilgamesh differs from the biblical tale is that the Mesopotamian gods, like the Greek and Roman deities, were a petty and vengeful bunch.

They sent an apocalyptic flood because humans were being too rowdy and the gods couldn’t get to sleep. The flood was their version of calling the cops at 2am when someone at the house party next door puts Achy Breaky Heart on repeat.

The eternal story

The account of the great flood is taken by those who believe such things as evidence of Noah’s flood. For those of us who do not, it’s regarded as evidence of the endurance of storytelling and the transmission of tales from one group to another.

Because the flood story didn’t stop there.

The Ancient Greeks told of Deucalion, who had an inside track with Zeus and was told to build an ark for himself and his wife to escape the flood he was sending because he was pissed off with humankind.

Then there was the Hindu story of Manu, who was told by Lord Vishnu, who visited him in the form of a great fish, to build a boat to survive the great flood.

The world’s oldest story?

Stories have served a function for human beings for many thousands of years.

How do we know this? Well, for a start, the creation stories still told by Australia’s Aboriginal people, who are custodians of the world’s oldest continuing culture, have been around for at least 60,000 years.

They also tell a tale that is thought to be the oldest unwritten human story still circulating. And the way that was discovered is truly mind-blowing.

It starts with the so-called Seven Sisters; a constellation of stars known as the Pleiades. Thing is, if you look up into the night sky today, you’ll see six stars. Not seven.

Geographically remote indigenous cultures across the globe—from Africa to Australia, to Asia and the Americas—all recount a tale of seven sisters who were transformed into stars to escape the amorous attentions of a hunter.

But then the stories diverge. In Ancient Greece, the seventh sister went into hiding because she fell in love with a mortal, which is why only six stars are visible.

Aboriginal Australian stories have several explanations for the missing sister. She died, or is in hiding, or has been abducted.

The same is true for all other versions of the Seven Sisters story. They start the same, but have different explanations for the sister we can’t see.

Here’s where it gets bonkers.

Stars move over time. So, astronomers wound back the cosmic clock, and found that 100,000 years or so ago, the “missing” seventh star, Pleione, would have been visible to the naked eye. Today, it has moved close enough to the star Atlas that the two appear to be one.

Know what else happened 100,000 years ago?

We began our great migration out of Africa.

From there, we spread across the globe in different tribes. We carried with us the foundation story of the Seven Sisters. And when we noticed that Pleione had disappeared, we came up with an explanation.

But those explanations were all different.

The story of the Seven Sisters is proof that, once upon a time, we were all one.

And, once upon a time, we all shared the same stories.

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Stories that last

Stories like the Seven Sisters survived and were circulated through the oral tradition. They weren’t recorded in permanent, printed form. They were memorised and recited aloud.

It was the audiobook Mk I, if you like.

And for much of human history, that’s how we’ve done it. Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were preserved through memory and shared as spoken word long before they were written down.

Books as we know them today are a very recent invention.

Even after printing on paper became a thing—the 1400s in Europe, and about 800 AD in China—books were inaccessible to most people. And not just because they were expensive. They were worthless to most people because very few people outside the nobility and clergy could read.

Knowledge was a commodity hoarded by the wealthy and powerful

Human knowledge, as preserved and studied in monasteries and regal libraries, was a commodity stockpiled by the wealthy and powerful.

But things did begin to change as the era of social revolution swept across Europe. In 1686, Sweden’s Reformation brought about a law that required every Swede, regardless of age or sex, to read the Bible. By the early 1700s, eighty per cent of the population was literate.

In England, it took the Elementary Education Act of 1870—just 150 years ago—to push literacy up to 97 per cent. It was the beginning of a state-mandated education system funded by taxpayers and run by elected school boards.

Across Western Europe and America, similar policies were rolled out.

There was, of course, an agenda at play. As the Industrial Revolution picked up pace, increasingly complex technology required educated workers.

Libraries and the Enlightenment

This all happened against the backdrop of social upheaval that saw the ousting of monarchs, and the rise of systems of democratic government across the Western world.

As commoners took the reins of power, they threw open the doors of the vast collections of knowledge their kings and churches had been hoarding.

After the French Revolution, the royal collection became the foundation of the Louvre Museum; its national treasures passed to the French citizens.

The public libraries and museums first established in the 1700s were instruments to educate the population. They were promoted as “people’s universities.” Enlightenment ideals meant knowledge was democratised.

The idea was simple. A democracy is only as healthy as the people casting their votes. An ill-educated and ill-informed population meant poor choices.

Given what’s going on in America at the moment, you’ll get no fucking argument about that from me.

In London, the British Museum was established in 1753 with the mission to advance universal scientific and historical understanding.

Like the first free public libraries, the BM was imagined not as a repository of treasures, but as a tool to combat illiteracy, and offer people the chance to educate themselves, regardless of class or cash.

End of storytelling?

So does the end of books mean the end of storytelling?

In a word, no. Because human beings have been telling stories for as long as we’ve been stringing abstract thoughts together.

Even more than that, a story’s superpower is its ability to transport us to imaginary places and transcend the preoccupations and dangers of daily life.

Storytelling offers us companionship and comfort. It’s why parents read aloud to their children at bedtime. And our ancient ancestors did the same, as they huddled, wide-eyed, around the fire and listened as elders recalled tales of gods, ancestors, and great deeds.

We will continue to tell stories. And we will continue to consume them.

Ways we consume stories are changing

What’s changing is the way we’re consuming them.

In 2015, there were two billion users across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Today, with the addition of TikTok and Twitter, we have 8.5 billion on social media. It’s the equivalent of the entire human population. Yes, that figure includes those of us who have profiles on multiple platforms. But still.

Next time you’re on public transport… or anywhere, come to think of it… look around and see how many people have their noses buried in their phones, where once it would have been a book.

And then there’s the time we spend watching TV. Just using Netflix as an example, in 2015, it had seventy million subscribers. In 2025, it reached 325 million.

But does it really matter? Does it make a difference whether we’re consuming our stories in thirty-second grabs on TikTok, binging series on Amazon Prime, or finding them between the covers of a book?

The short answer is yes. Absofuckinglutely.

Reading leads to deep thinking and sparks corners of our imagination that watching a fully resolved story on a screen does not.

Watching something is a passive activity.

Reading something—whether that’s on a screen or narrated in an audiobook—is the neurological equivalent of running a marathon.

When you read, your brain is translating shapes on a page in an instant and transforming them into an imagined world. As the story progresses, you manage to hold onto complex narrative threads and tap into emotions that belong to fictional characters.

A study at Emory University tracked what happens to the brain after someone reads a novel before bed each night.

For a start, the areas linked to language and cognition spark up. No surprises there.

What researchers weren’t expecting was the discovery that the changes persisted the next day. They described it as “muscle memory”; even hours after the readers put their books on the bedside table, their brains were still chewing over the narrative. They were still echoing the characters’ experiences, long after they closed the covers.

MRI scans have shown that reading sparks increased neurodevelopment in early teens that compares with well-established patterns influenced by parental income and education.

Screen time, by comparison, has what scientists describe as “opposing and spatially different effects on functional connectivity patterns in the brain.”

Everything is served up ready-made for your brain.

It’s consuming, not creating.

Screen use stunts the parts of the brain that control language skills, while reading improves cognitive development, emotional balance, and language skills.

And this holds true whether you’re reading a story or listening to it. Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that the same parts of our brain are activated whether we’re reading a story or listening to it.

In short?

Most screen-based stories are the equivalent of pulling up in the drive-through for a burger on the road when you’re feeling peckish.

Books are buying a packet of tomato seeds, then planting, growing and harvesting them to make yourself a pot of soup.

The way you build—and learn—things in the neurologically DIY world of books is a uniquely human experience.

Movies: Ruining Books Since 1895

It’s why screen adaptations of books are so often a bitter disappointment.

Like me, I’m sure you’ve got a film version of a favourite book that is an assault on your senses and an affront to decency.

Once upon a time, I had a t-shirt printed up for my husband that read: “Movies: Ruining books since 1895.”

It’s why the prospect of The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan, a director whose work I admire enormously, is terrifying to me. Homer’s epic poem, as translated by the great Richmond Lattimore in 1967, is one of my favourite pieces of writing.

The thought of Matt Damon as the Greek king, with Anne Hathaway as his long-suffering queen, makes my hair stand on end.

I have a theory on that. Two people will read the same book, and picture the people, places, and events on the page completely differently. My “tall, dark, and handsome” will not be your “tall, dark, and handsome.”

But on screen, all the work is done for you through the alchemical art that is film or TV-making. The “tall, dark, and handsome” of a favourite character in a book becomes Timothée Chalamet. Or Javier Bardem… Or Matt Damon.

What is produced on screen can never resemble the world you created in your mind. That doesn’t mean it’s always shit. It’s just not what you pictured. So, you’re almost invariably going to be disappointed.

I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? You’ve got at least one of those films, right?

An intimate affair

But it’s more than that.

Books, for me, are an intimate affair. We holiday together. Share a bed. Stay up together until the wee small hours. Chat over a glass or two of exceptionally nice wine, or a well-brewed cup of tea.

And with so many competing demands on my time, my relationship with whatever book I’m reading is usually an extended one, played out in fifteen or twenty-minute grabs over several weeks. It gives the characters time to settle down into my head… and heart.

There’s something about the fast-food-style rapid consumption of culture that leaves me feeling empty, even after “binge eating” an entire TV series.

Books, and reading, have the opposite effect.

They leave me sated.

Accidental learning

But books are much more than entertainment.

I always think back to my time at university in the dark ages when “online” would have meant something to do with a train or a telephone that plugged into a wall. Yes, kids. Such things did once exist.

Reading lists for classes involved trekking down into the bowels of the university library to hunt down dusty tomes that, more often than not, were missing from the shelf, either because some diligent student had made it there first, or because a dyslexic librarian had got his Dewey system scrambled.

Many curses and swears later, I’d be searching along the stacks of books for the missing volume. But as I did, I stumbled across countless gems I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

What was supposed to be destination reading became an exploration. An adventure.

Then, when I became a university lecturer, I was expected to collate a “reader” of articles copied, printed and bound together for my students.

Today, students are given lists of links to online articles.

Everything is prescribed. Nothing is random.

And, yet, accident is the mother of human innovation.

Accident, repetition, curiosity, and persistence.

That’s what concerns me the most about the long-term impact of AI use on the human brain. We’re outsourcing all those things in the name of efficiency.

But what does it do to us when we stop digesting and processing knowledge ourselves?

Pattern recognition—one of the key markers of human intelligence—only becomes possible when you’ve had the opportunity to observe enough things to notice patterns.

Innovation occurs when we draw connections between otherwise disconnected events and parallels between things that, superficially, don’t appear to be the same.

Sure, AI knocks innovation out of the park. It speeds things up like nobody’s business.

And all it needs are banks of processors stored in blank-faced buildings with plenty of water and power to keep going.

AI has no need for, or real connection to, our world.

It lives in bundles of wires and chips. Its only experience of what it means to be human and exist in the mad, chaotic splendour of the planet we are blessed to call home is the glimpse it has through the words and images it scrapes from the internet.

We are at risk of delegating the human narrative to a mechanical system that has no need of stories or real understanding of why they are so important to us.

We outsource that at our peril.

Because what we will lose is our sense of wonder.

That sense of wonder and the spirit of exploration and innovation it inspires are amongst the most important things that define us as a species.

Until very recently, books have played a key role in that, because they have been the great equaliser.

If you can read, the world is your oyster.

Need further proof?

Let’s take it back to George Smith and his remarkable discovery in the BM.

He is the Enlightenment era pin-up boy.

Because George Smith was not born to wealth or privilege.

He had a hard-bitten and impoverished upbringing in Victorian England.

Despite the fact he displayed a precocious intellect, once he turned fourteen, George was expected to leave school and earn his keep.

He was apprenticed to a publishing house to learn how to engrave banknotes. But George was obsessed with the ancient Assyrian culture. So, every lunch break, he trotted off to the BM to hit the public library and learn all there was to know about the cuneiform tablets unearthed by archaeological expeditions near Mosul in the mid-1800s.

(And, yes. I know. Don’t get me started on the horrific strip-mining of culture from colonial possessions during the 18th and 19th centuries to build the vast public museum collections of Europe and America. I created and wrote an entire TV series about exactly that a few years ago. That’s a story for another day.)

Smith’s interest caught the attention of the staff at the museum, and by the age of nineteen, he was spending his evenings after work sorting and cleaning mountains of cuneiform cylinders and tablets in the BM’s storage rooms.

By the time he was thirty, renowned Assyriologist, Sir Henry Rawlinson, appointed George Senior Assistant in the Assyriology Department.

It was there that the boy born in poverty who left school at fourteen discovered the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

George Smith died at the age of 36 on his third expedition to what is now Syria, where he travelled searching for more remnants of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

He had found his life’s work. His quest. And he was inspired to go way beyond his comfort zone to fulfill it.

George Smith got there, because of books.

I fear that the end of the Age of Reading will mean the things that make us so remarkable as human beings will wither and die.

Not with a roar.

With a whimper.

Still reading? Cool. Me too.

So, read on.

Let’s make it our act of rebellion.

Are you with me?

Thanks so much for subscribing, reading, commenting and sharing.

I love writing. But by reading my words, you give them meaning.

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The post Is the Age of Reading Really Over? What History Says About the Future of Books first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

As the FIFA World Cup captivates the world, a look at how rulers from Roman emperors to Donald Trump have used sporting spectacle to project power, distract the masses, and silence dissent.Photo by Dim 7 on Unsplash

As the world burns, we look to sport for a distraction.

With the FIFA World Cup in full swing, the greatest show on earth might be just the tonic we need.

But, like the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, the 2026 tournament is set against a backdrop in the host country of internal political and social strife fuelled by racial division.

With fans, officials, and even an umpire refused entry to the United States, the World Cup’s reputation as an event that unites the world didn’t kick off too well.

It didn’t help that it came off the back of a sporting spectacle that reinforced all the concerns the world has about the direction the good old US of A has taken of late.

And yet, no less than Nelson Mandela had this to say: “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”

All this got me thinking, as is my way.

At this moment in time, might sport be our saviour? And looking back through history, how did we get to a point where playing games became such a deadly serious thing?

It’s just a game, after all… right?

Wrong.

Cage fight to the death

This is a story told in two parts.

First, the mess.

The cage fight.

On the lawn of a White Trash House that’s half in ruins and now only missing three cars up on blocks to complete the picture, a punch-on under lights became a fitting metaphor for all that has gone off the rails in the dis-United States of America.

It did seem fitting that the most despised octogenarian on the planet chose to celebrate his birthday with a cage fight. The UFC Freedom 250 event on 14 June was attended by 4,300 invited guests, with reportedly 115,000 more watching on screens set up on the Ellipse.

I’ll never understand why Donald Trump insists on being seen fawning over eye-poppingly well-built athletes. Built as he is like an overstuffed ziplock bag of fermenting tofu jammed into an ill-fitting suit and spray-painted tequila-sunrise tangerine, the comparison is stark.

Why put himself through it when it can only make him look even worse than he already does?

Because he clearly believes, as many do, that proximity to strength brings reflected glory. They look good, so he looks good.

That’s why Trump stuffed the audience for his real-life birthday bash with members of the military who only satisfied strict physical standards.

For that, read “no fatties.” Ironic, much?

It’s all about projecting power.

Donald Trump was attempting to legitimise his punch-on by using America’s armed forces as props.

Sport as propaganda

The UFC event was sport dressed up a propaganda.

And it was ugly.

The men who swaggered onto the stage beneath the so-called ‘Claw’ to pound each other to a pulp at the whim of the American emperor-with-no-clothes are part of a long, and very bloody, tradition.

George Orwell described sport like this as “war minus the shooting.”

If you asked the Ancient Romans, they would have agreed. Well, other than the “shooting” part, what with the whole guns-hadn’t-been-invented-yet thing.

Rome’s Colosseum opened in 80AD with a hundred continuous days of games. It was a colossal public relations exercise by an unpopular new emperor, Titus, funded by war booty seized from Jerusalem, including the treasures from the Temple of Solomon.

The “games” were as gut-wrenchingly awful as you can imagine. Most likely, much worse.

Amongst the thousands of events, condemned criminals were put to death in ghastly reenactments of mythological stories. A woman accused of adultery brought the myth of Pasiphaë to life. Just as the Cretan queen had seduced a bull, the poor condemned woman was raped to death in the stadium… by a bull.

Academics have estimated that as many as half a billion people were killed for entertainment (if that’s what you can call it) during the 400 years gladiatorial games were a thing in Ancient Rome. Half a million of those died in the Colosseum alone. And, yes, you read those figures correctly.

As for the exotic animals, dragged into the centre of Rome from the furthest reaches of the Empire to prove to the populace the reach of their emperor, as many as a million were slaughtered for “sport” in the Colosseum over the same period.

Entire species were pushed to the brink of extinction. The hippopotamus disappeared from the Nile, and the lions that once roamed Mesopotamian plains were gone forever.

Sport in the ancient world wasn’t a game

It was deadly serious.

In part, that was because competitive physical exercises were seen as the best way to prepare warriors for battle.

The Romans favoured javelin throwing, boxing, wrestling, and sword play. Archery was also a big thing, as it was across most of the world’s continents.

In Mughal India, artworks show aristocrats using bows and arrows for archery contests.

They also depict the origins of the game we now call polo.

The Mughals inherited the sport from Persian armies, who entertained themselves from the 6th century BCE onwards by decapitating their enemies and whacking them around a field with mallets. It was messy, sure. But apparently navigating a horse while wielding a mallet was a fast-track way to learn how to disembowel opponents on horseback. Winning.

The sport found its way to the Byzantine Empire, and ended up in India, where the British Raj adopted it and claimed it as their own. Without the heads.

Good Sir Knights

Today’s cavalry units wouldn’t know one end of a horse from another. And although we’re at a place where armchair warriors pressing buttons and writing code will be the future of warfare, demonstrations of physical prowess are still seen as the mark of military superiority.

It’s why autocratic rulers like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un like nothing more than a precision athletic display, preferably in honour of a birthday or national holiday.

I’ve no doubt that was what Donald Trump was imagining when he pictured his rumble on front lawn of the People’s House. The men stepping into the cage were, to all intents and purpose, his “champions.”

Back in the Middle Ages, knights fought for noblemen. They also competed for their lords’ favour in jousting and archery tournaments. They were granted lands and gifts in exchange for their service. The fighters in the American president’s cage were gifted Trump crypto coins.

I mean, same same.

But back to the Middle Ages, when sport stopped being a training ground for warriors because the face of warfare transformed into something else altogether.

Gunpowder changes everything

The nature of physical combat, and with it sport, changed forever once firearms became commonplace in the 15th century. Because when you can pull a gun on someone, unarmed combat is less of a thing.

Then along came Renaissance humanism which—in a nutshell—modelled human beings as God’s most favoured creation.

Inspired by Ancient Greek, rather than Roman, philosophy, early modern thinkers began to view sport as an art form and means of personal improvement, rather than a way of bashing the shit out each other.

Even the language around combat sports changed. Just as one example, in Japan, what was known as kenjutsu (techniques of the sword) became kendo (the way of the sword).

It was the beginning of the transition from sport as warfare, to sport as we know it today.

The 19th century Industrial Revolution brought technical sporting equipment that improved performance.

With improved equipment, athletes began to learn what their bodies were capable of and formulated training programs to maximise their performance.

New games like basketball (invented 1891), volleyball (1895), and handball (1917), were invented to capitalise on the new technology.

And the word “measure,” until then used to denote balance and proportion, began to be used almost exclusively to refer to numerical measurements.

Excellence could be measured.

Sporting prowess could be quantified.

Sound mind, sound body

It’s no coincidence that this period also saw the rebirth of the Greek Olympiad in 1896.

Sport had attained a cultural significance in Ancient Greece unequalled until the rise of modern sports.

Although the saying, mens sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body” comes from the Roman satirist, Juvenal, the Greeks were the ones devoted to secular sports and sacred games.

No city-state was considered a true community unless it was kitted out with a gymnasium, where male athletes trained and competed… naked, of course.

And it was Greece that gave us the Olympics in 776 BCE.

Although martial sports like chariot racing and the javelin throw were part of the story, it was much bigger than that.

It wasn’t just about smashing your opponent. In Ancient Greece, it was about being the best human being you could be.

The great equaliser

This takes us to the second part of this story.

Because it’s been a long time since wars were won by arrows and javelins, or piffing your vanquished enemy’s head over a line. Sport has changed immeasurably.

But one thing remains the same. And it’s the thing the Ancient Greeks knew better than most.

True sporting talent can’t be faked. There’s no bullying, buying, or blackmailing your way into a spot on the podium.

You may own the team, but you’ll never take to the field with them.

Just ask the self-appointed king of the manosphere, Andrew Tate, who was handed his balls on a plate in a much pilloried MMA fight.

Or the Roman Emperor Caligula (yes, him again) who was totally obsessed with chariot racing despite being a famously terrible driver.

Despite having the authority to fix races or simply kill his rivals, Caligula’s erratic driving style meant he regularly caused the Roman equivalent of a Formula One five-car pile-up on the turn, to the utter fury of the audience.

He was, in short, hopeless.

He was the equivalent of Donald Trump when he declares himself the winner of a vanity tournament held at his one of his own golf clubs.

It’s the same reason the Egyptian pharaoh, Amenhotep II, was never defeated in archery tournaments. He never had any competition.

Bluff and big-noting count for nothing once the bell rings or the siren sounds.

Sport as hope

That level playing field means that at its purest, sport is about hope.

Deep-pocketed sponsors or well-connected family members count for nothing. And that gives birth to some of the world’s best rags-to-riches stories.

Just ask Pelé, who started out in the slums of Brazil kicking around a grapefruit or socks stuffed with newspaper bound up with string because he couldn’t afford a soccer ball, and went on to become one of the greatest players of all time.

There’s no such thing as a nepo-baby in the sporting world. Unless you’re born with that perfect alchemical blend of who knows what, you’ll never make it.

I suspect that’s why people like Donald Trump go to water in the presence of elite sportspeople. He knows it’s the one thing money can’t buy.

I’ve seen the starry-eyes myself.

When my son was in his mid-teens, he was very handy at our local, Australian, version of football.

One year, he shared the club best and fairest award with a young man named Max Holmes. If you’re from Australia’s southern states, you’ll probably know who that is. If not, suffice to say today he’s one of the most celebrated and exciting young players in the league.

Another sport my son excelled at was basketball. And while AFL was his winter sport, the rest of the year he dribbled around the courts. For a couple of years, he was in the Firsts of a local rep basketball team with another young man by the name of Josh Giddey. I suspect plenty of you will know that name.

My son was a good basketballer back when he was playing with Josh. Good. But he wasn’t Josh.

But AFL footy? That was my son’s thing. As a junior, he was a bit of a star. I’d see that look in the eyes of grown men (yes, almost always men) as they asked me about my son’s plans for his sporting career.

These were people who had it all.

Intergenerational wealth. Career success. Fame.

They also had all the things required of a sporting champion and were high-achievers in their chosen fields. They had ambition. Self-discipline. Determination. Vision. Focus. Work ethic. Stamina.

The one thing they didn’t have was the peculiar combination of physical abilities that make for a great sportsperson.

So, they were starstruck. Over the prospects of a fifteen-year-old boy.

Because no matter how well they’d done in life, they knew that he could do the one thing they never could.

Sport is colour blind

For those who are born with the gift, sport can be the golden ticket.

It’s so much more than just two groups of people trying to whack a ball into a net, or two men pummelling the shit out of each other.

It can change lives.

Nelson Mandela said that sport is “more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.”

Soccer—or football, depending on your flag—is called the World Game for a reason. Almost half the world’s population tune in to watch a bunch of people try to kick a black and white ball into a net.

Here in Australia, as we confront our own, homegrown, rise of deeply troubling rhetoric that attempts to erode the multicultural heart of our great nation, the members of our FIFA World Cup team, the Socceroos (yes, that’s really their name) are a beacon to all of us.

Drawn from all corners of the globe, many of them came to Australia with their families to search for a safe place to call home. Three of them arrived as refugees when they were children.

My own family can relate. My son’s grandfather was born to two Greek migrants in the 1930s. When he went to primary school in Australia, he spoke no English. But he was a gun soccer player, a sport called ‘wog ball’ in Australia back then.

My father-in-law learned that sporting prowess was a fast track to acceptance. And although he lived up to family expectations and became a surgeon, he encouraged his own children to pursue sporting success. His son—my husband—became a state hurdling champion.

When we had children, my husband dutifully trotted them off to sporting fields and athletics tracks across the city. Both our son and daughter have become exceptional sportspeople in their own right because their grandfather saw how sport could open doors that might otherwise remain closed.

But things get tricky when malignant forces decide to hitch their wagon to this feel-good story and bathe in the reflected glory.

Jumping on the bandwagon

And that’s why Donald Trump’s impotent display at the White House is so unsettling. He’s quite happy to requisition others’ hard-won acclaim to push his own agenda.

Don’t like it? Tough shit. That’s the message.

It’s fitting that he just returned home after a whirlwind tour of Versailles. Louis XIV built the world’s glitziest palace in the 1600s for the equivalent today of US$3.5 billion and used it to stage extravagant spectacles to keep his court compliant and ensure his name would live on long after he was worm food.

But these things always have ramifications. The excesses of Louis’ court laid the seeds of the French Revolution, for a start.

And then we have Caligula again, who in 39 CE ordered the construction of a bridge straddling the three-mile wide Bay of Baiae made of merchant ships so he could disprove a prophecy that he had less chance of becoming emperor than he did of riding a horse across the strait. The fact he was already emperor by this time says enough about the depth of his imposter syndrome.

Being a worldclass cosplayer like certain other delusional leaders, Caligula whacked on Alexander the Great’s golden breastplate and rode across the pontoon bridge with his army following behind.

He ended the whole ridiculous enterprise with a speech… about himself, of course. This from the Ancient Roman historian, Cassius Dio:

“First he extolled himself as an maker of great enterprises, and then he praised the soldiers as men who had undergone great hardships and perils, mentioning in particular this achievement of theirs in crossing through the sea on foot. For this he gave them money, and after that they feasted for the rest of the day and all through the night, he on the bridge, as though on an island, and they on other boats anchored round about.”

The domino effect for the people of Rome? The use of so many merchant ships for the vanity project caused severe famine across Italy. The bridge building project plunged the empire into a financial crisis.

So, yeah. Make of that what you will.

Bread and circuses

Leaders like Donald Trump and Caligula (now, there’s a match made in heaven) get away with obscene displays like this thanks to the entertainment value of public spectacles that frequently have sport at their centre.

You’ve heard the one about keeping the people entertained with “bread and circuses.” But here’s the full quote from the Roman satirist, Juvenal:

But what of the Roman mob?…. They shed their sense of responsibility long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob that used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, bread and circuses.

Nations have been destroyed by the ambition of a few, by their desire for fame and a title, a name that might cling to the stones that guard their ashes.

Quick potted history for those of you who may have forgotten, the Roman Republic began in 509 BCE after the people overthrew their monarchy in favour of an elected government. It lasted 450 years or so, until a period of unrest that included the assassination of the self-appointed dictator, Julius Caesar, and ended with the rise of Rome’s first emperor… Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavian, crowned Augustus in 27 BCE.

With that, people power stopped being a thing. Juvenal wrote his satires more than a century later, as a commentary on the decline of the Roman Empire. One of the things that had his toga in a knot was the general populace’s disinterest in anything other than trivial pleasures.

Sport as spectacle

“Bread and circuses.” Keep your bellies full, and your mind occupied. That’s the theory, anyway.

Another Roman thinker, Plutarch, put it this way: “The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”

Put simply as long as you’re on the deck of the Titanic focussing on anything other than the iceberg on the horizon, then everything’s hunky-dory for those at the helm.

Aldous Huxley, in his horribly prophetic novel, Brave New World, wrote this in 1946:

“It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.”

The point is that sport as spectacle is the perfect medium to capture the popular imagination when you’ve got a story to sell.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party knew it when they staged the 1936 Olympics.

And Donald Trump knows it as he hosts the FIFA World Cup and, in 2028, the Olympic Games.

Sport as big business

Because with sport, you have a captive audience.

It’s estimated that almost three-quarters of a million people play professional sport worldwide. One in every three people on the planet participate in some form of organised sport.

With that, comes money. A great deal of money. $2.65 trillion a year’s worth of money. h The FIFA World Cup alone is responsible for $10.9 billion in revenue.

And nobody does money in sport quite like the US.

A young French magistrate by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville first picked up on it in the early 1800s. In his landmark book, Democracy in America, he wrote that unlike Europeans, who pursued sport as a leisure activity, Americans treated games as a serious business. Their competition was fierce, they tracked statistics obsessively and linked it to their pursuit of material success.

So, now we find ourselves in a position where thirty teams of men competing to throw an orange ball in a hoop generate $12.25 billion a year for the NBA .

According to Forbes, the Chicago Bulls are responsible for $434 million of that total each year.

And every year for four years, beginning in 2025, $25 million of that will go to the lovely young fella my son once played basketball with.

No regrets

My son dropped AFL and basketball.

Instead, he chose athletics. Last year, he represented Australia at the World Championships in high jump, and this year, he’s the national champion.

He trains every day and flies around the world to compete. Most of those expenses are self-funded. So, he’s not in it for the money.

Yes, he has moments of regrets. But he owns his choice. Because he knows that whether you’re a basketball player on a multi-million-dollar contract, or a high jumper working a day job to pay the bills, you’re both in it for the same reason.

To see how far you can go, and what you can do with the gifts you were blessed with.

As for the rest of us, we get to go along for the ride. To be inspired by stories of human endeavour and victory in the face of sometimes overwhelming obstacles.

I’ll leave you with a thought from the French philosopher, Albert Camus.

He was a goalie. Because, of course he was. Can you think of a more fitting position for an existentialist?

“After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences,” he wrote, “what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

I love writing, and I love having readers. Thanks so much for subscribing, reading, commenting and sharing.

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Heartfelt thanks to those of you who help make that happen.

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The post Bread and Circuses: The 2,000-Year History of Sport as Political Propaganda — From the Roman Colosseum to Trump’s White House Cage Fight first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

Inside the Room Where a Show Lives or DiesOn set, Labassa Mansion, Melbourne. M. Wilson Anastasios, 2023.

There’s an affable man sitting opposite me. He’s smiling. Because, like I say, he’s affable.

My husband is beside me. We’re not looking at each other because we don’t want our nerves to coalesce into a wobbly jelly-mould of crippling anxiety.

Actually, that’s not true. All the nerves on the table are mine. Although maybe my husband is just better at hiding his.

He should be, though. Because he’s been in this spot more times than I have. His stage fright may have had time to evolve into a healthy case of adrenaline-fuelled performance anxiety. I’m still at the “shitting myself” stage.

We’re all dressed casually for the Melbourne cold and nursing lattes as we wait for the affable man’s Sydney-based head of drama to join us via Zoom.

You see, the man sitting across from us is the head honcho and founder of one of the country’s most influential and successful production companies. You have definitely seen one of the many, many things he has brought to screen over the past twenty years.

And today’s the day my husband and I find out whether the story we’ve been working on for the past two years lives or dies.

Because the affable man sitting opposite us is the one who decides whether to switch off the life support system, or whether to give our show another suck of oxygen.

Of course, it’s not that simple. It never is in this industry.

Here’s where the fun begins. And I can’t wait to drag you along on the crazy ride with me. Because I’m going to pull back the curtain and show you how things really work in the dream factory.

It’s not a masterclass, exactly. Because I sure as hell ain’t no master. But it is going to be a real-time account of my journey as we try to get this thing off the ground. It may flop in a matter of months. We might get to ride the rollercoaster for a year or two, only to have it topple off the track when it looks like we’re getting somewhere. Or it may be a blazing hit. I’ve no fucking idea.

One thing I can promise you… it won’t be boring. And you’ll learn some things along the way that will make you look at what you see on screen in a completely different way. As I fly along, I’ll probably make passing mention of something you’d like to know more about. So, don’t be a stranger. Jump into the comments and I’ll answer your questions to the best of my ability.

Today, I’ll be speaking in abstracts. I can’t tell you exactly what our project is yet or name the people I’m speaking about.

That will come in time. For now, the most valuable professional currency I have is the idea my husband and I have been holding close to our chest.

It’s real. It’s tangible. But it’s a chrysalis, still.

It’s at a critical point. Because the most closely guarded thing in the film and TV industry is information. Real information. Not the smoke and mirrors that permeate this madhouse.

I mean, it shouldn’t come as any surprise. This industry is all about creating illusions.

Often, the biggest illusion of all is making it appear that something is going to be big. It’s going to be huge. It’s going to be an absolute blockbuster. Until it isn’t.

The genius screenwriter, William Goldman (of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fame), put it best in the title of his book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

It goes a little something like this. Word gets out that a script is being read by a big star. Because that big star is tight with a legendary director, they’re apparently on board as well. So, now other big stars are lining up, and broadcasters or distributors are sniffing around.

Until they’re not. And possibly, never were. Because something as ephemeral as mentioning a project in passing to Cate, Russell, or Pedro at a gala or awards ceremony is used to whip up interest in a project.

It goes a little something like this:

“Hey, Russell, great to see you mate, how’s it going?”

“Cool, yeah. You?”

“Yeah, good mate. Actually, I’ve got something that’s perfect for you. A dad… ex-Marine… estranged from his daughter. She falls in with a drug syndicate. He has to save her. Think Taken meets Ozark.”

“Yeah, nice. Call my agent.”

That becomes “we’re speaking to Russell about this.”

You see, getting a screen production off the ground is building a house of cards on a beanbag, using fairy dust as mortar.

The people who are the most prolific and committed makers of fairy dust, are producers.

Without them, nothing gets made.

Like me before I stumbled into this business, you’ve probably wondered at the banks of people lined up behind the dais as the best film is presented at the Oscars each year. Sure, there are the cast members. But what about all the others? The ones who, without the Manolo Blahniks, Harry Winston diamond chokers, and Hugo Boss tuxedos, wouldn’t look out of place lining up for a ticket at the local cineplex.

Most of those are producers. And that’s what’s brought my husband and me to this place today. We need someone to take our project on and work with us to get it to the next stage.

Two years ago, my husband and I had an idea for a TV series.

It was timely and hit a lot of hot buttons.

Most of all, it’s personal. Fire in the belly stuff. Nothing is more important than that if you’re planning to commit to a project that might end up tying you up for years.

We sat with the concept for a bit and batted around general thoughts about what it might be, before deciding it was viable enough to work up what’s called a “two-pager” to take out to producers. That means a short (yes, two pages or so) pitch document summarising our show.

Just two pages (we ended up at four) sounds like a doddle, doesn’t it? Insert me laughing fit to burst at that. It’s almost the most difficult part of the whole process.

We had to start by mapping out all aspects of our series. Who are the characters? What is the narrative arc? What is the so-called “inciting incident”— the event that upends the protagonist’s life and sets them off in pursuit of that thing that would be the climax of the story? What does our series look like… what are the “comps” — the productions ours could be compared to?

It’s a big job. It’s also fun.

Because at this stage, there’s nobody telling you what you can and can’t do. That comes later. At this early stage, it’s all just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.

That said, throughout the process, front of mind for both of us were the things that would make the show a less viable prospect for the people with their hands on the purse strings at the broadcasters and networks. A concept that relies too heavily on expensive production elements, no matter how brilliant that concept is, will always struggle to find a taker unless you’re already at a point in your career where international (and by that, I mean American) companies are throwing money at you (Taylor Sheridan, I’m looking at you).

My husband, Andrew Anastasios, has been working at a high level as a screenwriter in TV and film production for years, so he knows the red flags producers are looking for. Some of them are obvious — stunt heavy stories, for example. Others are not — who knew airport scenes are incredibly expensive?

I’ll be outlining more of these surprising handbrakes on production in later instalments. Suffice to say here, more often than you realise, what you see on screen is dictated by financial constraints. It’s lovely to think that creative vision will win in the end. But what frequently ends up happening is that it’s a compromise between the creatives and the people who must pay the bills.

Back to the here and now, and the man Andrew and I are waiting with is one of those people. He’s also someone who respects the creative process and is known for backing the writers who work with him.

It’s why we’ve approached him with our story.

I digress. Which is my schtick. But back to our two-pager.

What Is a two-pager and why does it matter?

Why just two pages?

Producers are busy people with constant demands on their time and notoriously short attention spans. It’s why the so-called “elevator pitch” is so important. You’ve got to be able to summarise your project in the time available to you when the Hollywood gods smile on you and you find yourself in an elevator with someone who can make your show happen.

You’ve got a bit longer than that when it comes to the written form. That’s where the two-pager comes into play. It’s the baited line you throw into the water to see if you can hook a big fish or two.

The most important parts of the document are the first three things on the page: the title, the logline, and the short synopsis.

Coming up with a title is, for me, the most fraught part of the entire process. The same is true of the books I’ve written. 80,000 words novel? Piece of piss easy. 3,000 word essay on the history and politics of the Middle East? Walk in the park.

But capture the spirit, tone, and mood of the project in just a handful of words, or perhaps just one? It’s ball-crushingly difficult. It’s also always the thing I’m working on up until the death knell. Even after I commit to one, I keep playing around with alternatives until I’m at the point of no-return.

And I know I’m not alone in that.

Alien started its life as Star Beast.

Unforgiven was The Cut-Whore Killings.

Casablanca was Everybody Comes to Rick’s.

Titanic was The Ship of Doom… yes, really.

And it’s hard to imagine there being Spaceman from Pluto I, II, and III if the producers had stuck with Back to the Future’s original title.

In our case, the title pretty much wrote itself. I can’t be specific yet, but you’ll see what I mean when I’m able to tell you what it is.

Next up is the logline. It’s the one or two-sentence hook that’s used to sell the story. And not just to producers. They’re the things that gets audiences hooked as well.

Here are some from films you’ll know.

The Godfather: The aging patriarch of an organised crime dynasty transfers control of his empire to his reluctant son.

Jaws: When a great white shark begins to terrorise a small beach town, a police chief, a marine biologist, and a grizzled fisherman embark on a dangerous hunt to destroy it.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: An orphaned boy enrols in a school of wizardry, where he learns the truth about himself, his family, and the terrible evil that haunts the magical world.

Everything Everywhere All at Once: A middle-aged Chinese immigrant is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have lived.

Next up, the synopsis. It’s where the entire narrative arc is summarised, including the full plot and the main characters. Yes, even the conclusion. This isn’t the place to be coy. And it should match the tone of your project. If you’re writing a comedy, the synopsis should play for laughs. If you’re going for romance, your reader should be transported. If it’s horror, they should be turning all the lights on in the house when they’re done reading your pitch.

All up, those three things shouldn’t take up more than a page. 1.5 spaced. Conventional wisdom is that you’ve lost already if you haven’t hooked your big fish by halfway through the synopsis. Sure, after that the rest of the two pager has brief character summaries, episode outlines, if it’s a series, or a full synopsis if it’s a feature film, plus a bit on mood and tone. But if your reader has lost interest by then, they count for nothing.

Half a page. That’s all you’ve got.

None of these things are easy. Because after spending months, or even years, developing what you hope and pray is a complex world with nuanced characters and a fucking mind-blowing plot, you must condense it down to virtually nothing. It’s like taking a fifteen-course degustation menu complete with amuse-bouche and petits-four and being asked to serve it up on a small water biscuit.

But I worked on our pitch and got it done far more quickly than I thought possible. The story, characters, and setting were already painted in colour and three dimensions in my mind. Putting it down in words was easy. The title was snappy. The logline was clear and compelling. And the synopsis was solid.

The ease I had writing the pitch was probably the first indication that we were onto a good idea.

But as a friend in the industry once said to me:

“Good ideas are like bums… everyone’s got one.”

To get that bum off the seat, so to speak, it needs to be put on an exercise regimen, outfitted in the latest bespoke pants, and put in front of the people who decide what you get to see on screen.

That’s where producers come in. They’re the stress test to see which of the bums might have a future.

Over the years, Andrew and I have shown the affable man we’re meeting with today a fair few bums in their raw state. He’s kicked all of them to the curb.

So, my anxiety levels today are not unjustified.

I’m going to leave the bum metaphor alone now, before things get messy.

You may well be asking now why my husband and I don’t just approach the commissioning editors and content directors at the streaming services and networks ourselves. Because they’re the people who will ultimately decide whether they’re going to invest money in making our thing and dedicate screen time to it.

It’s because although we have direct or indirect contact with many of those decision makers, producers like the man we’re meeting with today are working with them constantly. He already has projects in various stages of production with most of the country’s big streaming services. Next time he’s on a call to whoever we decide is the best taker for our show, he can just drop in a “oh, while I’ve got you, I’ve picked up a really exciting new project, I’ve got the creators coming up to Sydney next week, reckon you can squeeze us in for a meeting?”

That’s the first, and possibly the most important thing, this man will do for us.

He’ll get us in the door. Quickly. And with the foundations of a relationship already laid.

It all comes back to something William Goldman said about the film industry. It’s as true today as it was when he first wrote it. “Nobody knows anything.”

He was riffing on the idea that even a film that ticks all the boxes… major leads, zeitgeisty story, whizz-bang effects, huge marketing budget, the buzziest of pre-release buzz… can still be a stinker at the box office.

The number of variables at play in determining the financial success or failure of a screen-based project are infinite. I know this myself from an academic perspective, because I wrote my PhD in cultural economics on the making of superstars in the art market (yes, really). As background, I looked at the exhaustive research that’s been done by economists trying to track the factors that prefigure box office success. I can save you the time… In short? “Nobody knows anything.”

What that means is that as soon as somebody looks like they know something, they’re given the keys to the kingdom.

As far as the decision makers at the networks and streamers are concerned, the man we’re meeting with today, who has had more screen successes than you’ve had hot dinners, has Midas’ touch. Looking at his long, long IMDB credits page, I reckon they’re probably right.

The laptop lights up, and the man’s head of drama is on the screen.

She has a formidable reputation as a producer as well. The thought of having her attached to our show blows my tiny mind. We also need her buy-in on this project.

I haven’t met her in person. My husband has. And she’s as impressive on screen as he said she was in person.

She starts talking. She’s really excited about our project, she says. She knows our characters and has engaged with their motivations. She’s thought deeply about what we want to do with the show and has some interesting suggestions about where we could take the story. My kind of woman.

She also hasn’t said “no” yet.

The producer sitting with us also offers some interesting thoughts about how we might change things. He thinks we’ve included too many antagonists in the story and would like one in particular pencilled out. Perhaps a character we have written as a man could be a woman, to improve the gender balance, he says.

You’ll notice I say they are “interesting” thoughts and suggestions. Because, at this stage, that’s all they are. Suggestions. They’re talking about the things we can change that might make our project more attractive to the people who control what ends up on your screens.

Do we have to take those suggestions on? No. Absolutely not.

Should we seriously consider what they’re saying and acknowledge that they know what they’re talking about? Fuck, yes.

Because these two people stand in the middle between creatives like Andrew and I, and the people who sink money into shows to make them happen. They know their audiences. They have access to vast quantities of data that shows them what their subscribers watch.

And they tell producers what they’re looking for. There’s no point taking them a wood-fired when they’ve asked for steak frites. That’s what these producers are telling us. Start peeling spuds.

Part of it, also, is for the producers to see how well we can defend our project. And to find out how willing we will be to compromise when, as is inevitable, the time comes to make some difficult decisions about our story.

Does it have to be this way? No.

There are filmmakers who create work outside the system. They create, write, produce, film, and distribute their work independently.

There are others — filmmakers like Lars Von Trier, Wes Anderson, and Terrence Mallick — who have carved themselves a niche within the system and control every aspect of their productions. They’re the true auteurs.

Neither Andrew and I have any desire to follow in their footsteps. That means we have to make compromises.

That’s not to say that I’m just going to roll over.

And that’s when things get tricky.

Because the affable man has made a suggestion that cuts to the motivation of our protagonist. The change would undermine the whole premise of the series.

I glance at my husband and can see that he feels the same way I do. Not great.

And so, I push back. Politely, and after acknowledging that the reasoning behind the suggestion is solid. But I explain the domino effect it would have on the whole show. I speak calmly, clearly, and with a smile on my face.

The affable man frowns and looks down at the dregs of coffee in his cup. The woman on the screen says nothing.

My heart sinks. We’re done. I’m sure of it. Game over.

“OK,” the affable man says. “That makes sense.”

I can breathe again.

“So, have a think about those other suggestions,” says the affable man. “And do you think you’ll be able to get it back to us by the start of July? We’ll get you both up to Sydney and book a time to go and see [insert international streaming company here].”

………. He’s picking it up.

………. It’s really happening.

Just. Like. That.

Andrew grabs my leg under the table and squeezes.

We both try to keep calm. And fail.

Celebrations all round.

We grab a charcuterie board and a lovely bottle of Italian wine to share with the affable man.

It’s just the first step.

But it’s a big one.

Join me on the adventure as I try to work my magic and wrangle our story to accommodate the producers’ suggestions. You’ll find this ongoing series over on my Substack.

Some of the things I’ll be doing is in response to broader social and political shifts. Because there are many agendas at play behind the scenes of the things you end up seeing on screen. I’m here to show you how that works. You’ll never watch TV or movie the same way again. I can promise you that.

Most of all, if you’ve got any questions, or would like me to elaborate on any of the things I’ve spoken about here, drop me a note in the comments.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the process.

Next time, I sit down to re-write my two-pager, and discover that one of the producers’ suggestions is actually brilliant. I also find out what it feels like to kill a character I’m quite fond of. Unless I chicken out. Haven’t quite decided yet. Expect a new installment over on my Substack every two weeks or so.

Although all the rest of my stuff remains free, paid subscribers only for this story from this week.

If you want to join me on the ride, you know what to do.

The post How TV Gets Made first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

Inside Jared Kushner’s purchase of the most strategically important island you’ve never heard of

As Albanians take to the streets for yet another day in what’s being called the Flamingo Revolution, the battle is about a great deal more than environmental vandalism and entitled rich people being… well… entitled rich people.

If you thought that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s plan to redevelop a picturesque Albanian island half the size of Manhattan is just about giving the one-percenters another place to park their superyachts, think again.

Because you know who else has been coveting that same island since the Cold War?

Russia. And China.

Yes, really.

It’s a geopolitical drama of epic proportions.

I’m beating myself up for not seeing the big picture myself straight away. All I saw were the revoltingly wealthy, entitled sprogs of the American royal dynasty doing what they do best: milking it like there’s no tomorrow.

But there is a bigger picture. Because there always is. And it was served up to me on a bespoke platter by online commentator, @alimcforever, who posted her mind-blowing findings about the nature of the island and the very fraught bios of the people at the helm of Jared Kushner’s private equity fund. Absolutely worth watching.

Suddenly, it made sense.

So, I put on my own investigative deep-dive suit, and jumped in. I wanted to see how it all works from the geopolitical, historical perspective I bring to the table as a historian.

Put on your scuba gear. And grab yourself a course of antibiotics.

Because it’s going to get very, very deep. And very, very dirty.

All the talk has been about flamingos and nesting turtles. Because Sazan is at the heart of an important site renowned for its natural diversity and pristine ecology… an island declassified for civilian use in December 2024. Much more on that later.

There’s a good reason that this tiny—and very picturesque—corner of Europe is bereft of development. What’s not being mentioned is that Sazan Island has been a designated military exclusion zone since the Cold War.

Yes, you read that correctly. A designated military exclusion zone.

When Ivanka “discovered” the island, and the plans to develop it came to fruition, it was, she said in a widely lampooned interview, “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

While I down a litre of antacid to deal with that bile-inducing word salad, let’s have a look at what she was really talking about.

Let’s start with the yacht trip that started it all.

Because Jared and Ivanka weren’t on just any yacht.

It was owned by Nat Rothschild.

Nat, being a Rothschild, is a billionaire. Of course.

He’s also very well connected. Of course.

He was an adviser to and investor in a company owned by Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska’s, Rusal.

Probably just a complete coincidence. But Deripaska has been described as a “person of interest in the Mueller investigation for his relationship with Paul Manafort.”

(Yes, that Paul Manafort).

Deripaska has vigorously disputed any suggestion he interfered in the American elections.

Deripaska is sanctioned by Australia, Canada, the EU, the UK, and the US. In 2018, the US said that Deripaska “ha[d] been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering”.

In March 2019, Deripaska sued the United States, alleging that it had overstepped its legal bounds in imposing sanctions on him and made him the “latest victim” in the FBI probe into Russia’s interference in U.S. elections. As mentioned earlier, Deripaska denies those claims.

So, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were on board a superyacht owned by a member of one of the world’s wealthiest families, who also has had a close association with a Russian billionaire with quite a reputation.

Of course, I’m not for a minute suggesting any wrongdoing here.

Because rich people know other rich people who know other rich people, right?

Who can blame them for that?

Of course, on a rich person’s superyacht, there’s plenty of room.

So, it wasn’t just Jared, Ivanka and Nat Rothschild on deck sinking mojitos and gazing at the pristine Albanian coastline.

Ivanka’s account of “discovering” Sazan Island while meandering through the Adriatic might be a bit of a porky pie. Because according to Forbes, it doesn’t look like they were there by accident.

One of the other people who was there at some point was the Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama. According to The Telegraph, Nat Rothschild “facilitated” the introduction.

Seems Ivanka and Jared weren’t just there on a five-star cruise. They were there to ink a deal.

Why Albania?

Kushner told The Guardian he was introduced to the idea of investing in Albania through Richard Grenell.

Who’s Richard Grenell you ask? Well, currently, he’s Jared’s “business broker” in the region. He is also Trump’s “presidential envoy for special missions,” and served as a wildly unpopular US ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term thanks to what the German media described as attempts to interfere in domestic politics.

Oh, and as the Chair of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, he led the vote to add Trump’s name to the centre.

Years before he had a stint as Acting Director of National Intelligence in 2020 during Trump’s first term, despite having no experience working in the intelligence community. CNN found that during his time as a paid consultant, he had worked for clients in Iran, China, Somalia, and Kazakhstan.

But it was during his time as special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations from 2019 to 2021 that Grenell got to know the Adriatic coastline.

According to The Guardian, Grenell is why Affinity is in Albania.

He’s been hard at work across the region. Why? Well, in an interview with the Financial Times in July 2024, Grenell said investments like another controversial real-estate deal he was involved with in Serbia are a way of bringing nations closer to the US.

Now, to the island.

As Ivanka put it, channelling her inner-Dora-the-Explorer: “We swam to the island, we went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the topand we were just captivated.”

Barefoot?

I call bullshit on that one. Because unless Ivanka has developed cloven hoofs (always a possibility), there’s no barefoot meandering on Sazan Island, because it’s home to thousands of abandoned military installations and littered with unexploded ordnance.

And this is where things start to get particularly interesting.

Every major Western power has, at some point or other, wanted to hold Sazan.

Have a look at a map of the Mediterranean and you’ll see why.

Control Sazan, and you control the Strait of Otranto; the 72-kilometre-wide entrance to the Adriatic Sea. That means access to the major ports of Trieste, Koper, Rijeka, Ravenna, and Venice, and the multi-billion-dollar trade that passes through them.

The Adriatic is the waterway that leads to the heart of Central and Eastern Europe. It is the only maritime access for Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Albania, and the waterway that carries cargo to Italy’s largest cargo port in Trieste.

On a clear day, you can see Sazan Island from Italy’s Puglia — the heel of its so-called boot. It’s just 85 km from Sazan to the Greek naval installations on Corfu, a NATO chokepoint.

That’s why Ivanka’s untouched paradise is anything but untouched.

When the Italians held the island from 1914-1943, they carved submarine pens, artillery positions and ammunition caves out of the rock, built a harbour on the island’s eastern side, and even built a villa for Mussolini’s personal use.

The Soviets got in on the act from the late 1940s to 1961, when they built the Pasha Liman naval base. Underground submarine pens and hangar spaces cut into the island’s cliffs are bomb-proof and safe from atomic attack.

During the reign of Albania’s totalitarian communist leader, Enver Hoxha, 3,600 one-man nuclear bunkers were built on Sazan, along with kilometres of underground tunnels connecting defensive positions. A garrison to house 3,000 soldiers was also built, along with a chemical weapons plant and nuclear-strike resistant underground bunkers.

“From there, I could control the Mediterranean to Gibraltar,”

That’s what the Cold War-era Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev (yes, he of the Cuban Missile Crisis) reportedly said of Sazan Island in 1958.

But this is nothing new. Sazan has been on the geopolitical hit list for thousands of years.

It was the site for an encounter between Philip V of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s dad), and the Romans. The Romans held Sazan as a crucial staging post to control access to the Italian mainland and, in the other direction, the Greek world.

Prior to the 20th century, the island passed between everyone from Charles I of Anjou to the Byzantine Empire, and from the Venetians to the Albanians, then to the Italians, and then to the Albanians again.

All of those conquests acknowledged the same thing.

Sazan is the keystone of the Adriatic Sea.

For western European powers, it is a defensive staging post to defend the heart of the continent.

As for those wanting to expand into continental Europe, Sazan is the first domino that needs to fall.

From Sazan, artillery can cover the narrow strait. A submarine fleet based on the island can easily move into the Mediterranean unobserved.

When Sazan Island was used as the parking garage for Soviet submarines, Western spy agencies called it “Russia’s secret Gibraltar.”

The key point?

NATO is going to be watching this very closely

Re-establishing a presence here has been a long-term objective for Russia.

Russia already has close ties to land-locked Serbia, which is not a NATO member. A Russian presence in Albania could threaten NATO by choking the Strait of Otranto, and the overland routes into central and eastern Europe.

It’s why keeping the strait open is key to NATO’s southern flank.

Control of the Strait gives the potential to monitor or restrict the shipping and naval activity in the Adriatic Sea and, beyond that, the Mediterranean.

Sazan Island is a springboard to launch an assault on Europe.

The Adriatic is also critical to Europe’s economy

It is Central and Eastern Europe’s main trade artery, with rail upgrades recently increasing freight capacity by 40 per cent.

94 per cent of Austria’s crude oil arrives via pipeline from Trieste, with Italy’s main port acknowledged as the main southern gateway for Central European supply chains.

Central European markets including the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia rely on container traffic through Trieste and Slovenia’s Koper. This has ramped up significantly during the war in Ukraine, with trade routes to Central and Eastern Europe shifting westward to the Adriatic.

Whoever sits on Sazan Island controls it all.

You only have to take a look at what Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz is doing to the world to understand what it would mean to choke the flow of Europe’s trade and energy supply in the Adriatic.

It’s not too big a stretch to say that Sazan Island’s geopolitical importance is greater now than ever.

Enter, China.

There’s a fantastic backstory with that one.

Albania’s Enver Hoxha fell out with Russia when Nikita Khrushchev’s revisionist policies after Stalin’s death in 1953 unpicked the cult-like authoritarian way of doing things that suited Hoxha just fine.

The other prominent Communist leader who didn’t want the status quo changing, was Mao.

By 1961, both China and Albania joined forces to make a stand against the Soviet Union and the US.

China became Albania’s biggest trading partner. It funnelled more than US$2 billion in loans and grants to cash-strapped Albania.

During that time, China sent 7,000 “advisers” to Albania. It also sent many millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment. But although Chinese officials were given access to Albania’s mainland military installations, there’s no record that they were taken to the jewel in Hoxha’s crown: Sazan Island.

When relations between the US and China began to soften in the 1970s, Hoxha broke off the relationship with China, leading to a period of isolation that saw it described as Europe’s North Korea.

Hoxha refused foreign loans, trade, or investment, maintaining a policy of self-reliance. It led to nationwide famine, and Albania’s economic collapse and the fall of the government in 1997.

During that time, Hoxha developed Sazan Island into an inaccessible military fortress to defend Albania against an imagined attack from NATO.

“Debt-trap diplomacy”

Today, China’s so-called “debt-trap diplomacy” has seen it invest heavily in Albania’s regional neighbours, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia.

Albania, which has been aligned to US interests, has so far resisted.

But given that China’s Ambassador to Albania described Albania as a long-term “bosom friend” last year, my guess is that Beijing hasn’t given up on Albania just yet.

The takeaway from all this? The one consistent point throughout Albania’s modern history is that it held onto Sazan Island, no matter what.

The Soviets built the major fortifications on the island, and Albania kicked them out.

The Chinese threw money and military hardware at Albania and were never permitted to access Sazan.

The people at the helm have always understood how important Sazan is from a geopolitical perspective.

What, then, has changed?

Prime Minister, Edi Rama, also heads up Albania’s strategic investment committee, which overrode environmental concerns to push through Jared and Ivanka’s grand plans for Sazan Island.

That decision was made just two weeks after Trump won the 2024 election.

Rama also happens to be a founding member of Trump’s floundering Board of Peace.

When asked whether he was concerned about the potential controversy over selling a publicly-owned strategic stronghold to a private investment company, Rama said that Albania “can’t afford not to exploit a gift like Sazan,” and that he isn’t concerned about bad press “if it helps draw attention and bring investment.”

Well, he’s getting plenty of that.

The Sazan project is a US$1.4-1.6 billion deal, struck by Jared’s investment vehicle, Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, which is linked to his private equity fund, Affinity Partners, set up just after his father-in-law was voted out of office in 2020, and largely financed by billions of dollars from a Saudi wealth fund.

Jared has a history with money from the Middle East.

Way back in 2015, before his father-in-law’s first time in office, he had hopes that a Qatari billionaire would bail him out of a monumental real estate fuck up that had him drowning in debt after the purchase of the devilishly numbered 666 Fifth Avenue building. The Qatari investor pulled out. It’s been suggested that the lingering resentment landed Qatar on the shit list during Trump’s first term in office.

It’s attracted the interest of American legislators. It’s worth quoting in detail from this report from the US Senate Committee of Finance.

“Senator Wyden launched an investigation of Kushner’s conflicts of interest in 2020 with an initial probe into whether Kushner advised Donald Trump to support a blockade against Qatar while Kushner Companies was seeking a billion-dollar bailout from Qatari, and possibly other Middle Eastern officials, for the property at 666 Fifth Avenue. His investigation expanded in 2024 to examine whether Affinity Partners, the firm Kushner launched immediately after the end of the first Trump administration, was in reality a compensation scheme designed in part to skirt federal disclosure requirements. In late 2024, unveiling evidence of Kushner engaging in political activity while on the payroll of the government of Saudi Arabia and other gulf state governments, Senator Wyden referred Kushner to the Department of Justice for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

As an aside, plenty of Affinity Partners’ cash has gone into Israeli startups, a first for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund.

But all is not well

Albanians have started calling Sazan, Ishulli i Trumpëve. “Trump Island.”

Days of protests against the project and government corruption have seen thousands of Albanians take to the streets. They’re being called the “Flamingo Revolution.”

But Rama is pushing on regardless.

“It is very important that we remain welcoming, that we remain fair, and that under no ​circumstances do we receive ​the stigma of being ⁠a country where investors are met with hostility,” he says “There is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop ​as long as I am here.”

The question remains whether or not the Albanian government as directed by Prime Minister Rama had the authority to transfer development rights to a foreign private equity vehicle owned by the American president’s son-in-law and bought with funds from Saudi investors.

Don’t bet against the flamingoes

I’m not in a position here to draw any firm conclusions from any of this. All I’m doing is adding to the enticing pile of breadcrumbs first cast by @alimcforever.

But you can be sure of one thing.

This is not the end of the story.

I love writing, and I love having readers.

Thanks so much for subscribing, reading, commenting and sharing.

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The post Flamingo Revolution: Albania’s Battle Over Sazan Island first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

How I Found My Muse on a Greek Island

I ran away to a Greek island. Because who wouldn’t, given half the chance?

But I arrived on the shores of the Aegean lugging a fair amount of baggage… and none of it Vuitton.

It wasn’t just about floating in crystal clear water, reclining beneath a beach umbrella, and downing more than my fair share of Aperol Spritzes. Though, I’ve got to admit, it was a bit of that.

The reason I washed up on the tiny Greek island of Symi was to find words to express whatever the fuck it was that I was going through.

Most of all, I was searching for my muse, who had gone MIA without leaving a forwarding address. Menopause meant my well of creativity had run dry… so to speak.

Symi was the final leg of what was meant to be the trip of a lifetime.

With the youngest of our kids out of school, my husband and I took off for a three-month vacation in the Mediterranean. A month each in the tiny hilltop town of Gaucín in Andalucia, Sicily’s Ortigia, and an idyllic Greek island just off the Turkish coast.

My plan was to write a novel about a woman of a certain age. I imagined it to be a gently amusing, life-affirming and contemplative piece.

Think Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love for the menopausal generation.

But you know what they say about the best laid plans? Yeah.

It sure wasn’t where I ended up.

When I sat down to write, I couldn’t find the words.

Voices in your head may be a mark of madness. But for a writer like me, they’re where my stories begin.

My mind paints pictures of the people who become my characters.

They whisper to me. I learn their voices, share their secrets. We become friends. They’re my constant companions.

I don’t set out to make them a certain way. I just open my mind, and they appear. That probably makes me sound completely bonkers.

But it’s true.

It’s the well of creativity that’s kept me going.

A multi-dimensional universe is created in my head that my imaginary friends move through. I can see, feel, smell, and taste everything they do.

What ends up on the page is a tiny fragment of that alternate reality.

Pick a paragraph in anything I write, and I can recount the smell of suntan lotion on someone’s skin; the sound of a jet ski out on the bay; and the sharp pain from a pebble trod underfoot, which has tumbled from a garden bed onto a terracotta-tiled walkway warmed by the afternoon sun.

Yeah, I know. It gets silly.

But it really is that vivid… when it’s working.

As I spread my towel on the sun lounge that first day in Greece and took out my notebook, those voices were mute. They had been for a while. And that terrified me.

Confusion about what was happening to me, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was occupying my every waking moment.

The aches… the pains… the sweats… the 3am wakeups… the incandescent raging against nothing and everything… the sense of complete uselessness… well, that was bad enough.

But the thing that distressed me the most was that menopause seemed to have scared off the most special part of me… the part of me that creates worlds.

What was needed to shake me out of a terminal case of navel-gazing was a muse.

She did eventually appear. But in the most surprising of forms.

As I sat there and tried to clear my mind, I watched a woman with whispery silver hair stagger, bow-legged, towards the water’s edge.

A tall man, considerably younger than her, walked beside her, one arm around her waist and the other extended to hold her hand.

Her fierce, arthritic-knuckled grip turned his fingers white.

The pair waded out until the water was waist deep. And then, she set herself free.

She lay on her back and floated—eyes closed, arms outstretched—to where the aquamarine turned inky blue.

There, she began to swim.

It was no miraculous transformation. Bent arms windmilled into the water as pale legs stained with purple veins kicked at the sea.

She moved slowly. Painfully. But, moved, she did.

The young man lowered himself into the shallows and waited.

When she was done, the woman returned, and the process reversed. Only this time, she paused at the edge of the sea while he retrieved a towel for her. She dried herself, took his arm, and they resumed their painful progress towards the line of sun lounges at the top of the beach.

At first, I thought he was her son. The gentle familiarity and affection between the two hinted at that.

Perhaps that was just me indulging in wishful thinking. Because I was half a world away from my own children.

And I was adrift.

Maybe that’s what we hope for when we give birth. That, one day when we need them, our children will care for us as the tall, young man was helping the woman I assumed was his mother.

But, of course, it’s never that simple.

Motherhood is a remarkable, and very beautiful, thing. But… you knew there was going to be a ‘but,’ didn’t you?… a peculiar psychological shift happens for many of us who have carried children to term.

It certainly did for me.

I no longer felt connected to my body. It wasn’t a terrible thing. I actually enjoyed pregnancy. But it did feel like I was the driver behind the wheel of a bus carrying one, very precious, passenger.

My job was to make sure the vehicle was serviced, topped up with the best fuel, and that it stayed on the road until we reached the destination.

But that wasn’t the end of the journey, of course.

Because once I reached the depot and the passenger disembarked, the bus was expected to transform into an all-night diner, with me doubling down as short-order chef, waitress, and dish-pig.

OK, that’s as far as I’m going to push that metaphor. But you get what I mean.

Pregnancy and motherhood teaches you that you no longer control your body.

It belongs to another.

It doesn’t help that society tells women the same thing.

Our bodies are vessels we just happen to inhabit.

To the world, we’re incubators. Ornaments. Sex dolls.

Our purpose is to have things put into us, and things taken out of us.

Is it any wonder that one of the most fraught relationships many of us will ever have, is with our bodies?

The next day, the elderly woman was back with her companion.

I watched her pick her way across the stones again and applauded her complete lack of vanity.

And it struck me that if the sexes had been reversed—if it had been a desiccated Rupert Murdoch clone reclining beside a svelte young woman in an Aegean beach club—my assumption would have been that they were a couple.

That’s because we have no trouble imagining that an older man has sexual needs.

Not so, older women.

The menopausal woman is the sportscar that was all the rage back in the day when it was first released, only now you can’t get parts for it, and it only takes leaded fuel, so it’s sitting up on blocks under a tarp in the garage.

Not the male vehicle, though.

He’s registered with the vintage car club and stored in a climate-controlled garage to be trotted out for race days and coastal drives in summer.

I’ll park that metaphor there.

(… sorry—awful pun).

But things are different for men.

A big part of that is fertility.

While menopause means our ovaries are fit only for producing dust bunnies, testes manage to keep pumping out baby batter until their owners are six-feet-under.

As far as men are concerned, it gives them potency.

Sure, the package is a bit worse for wear, what with the erectile dysfunction, the hair loss, the dad-gut, and moobs that give Dolly Parton a run for her money.

But nature’s all, like, “yeah, dude… don’t worry… we’ll leave you with your sperm… so, book in for a weekly spray-tan, whack on some veneers and hair plugs, and here are some blue pills to get the old noodle al dente again. Chuck in a Ferrari, and you’ll land yourself a second family before you can say ‘child support’.”

Not so, women.

We’re taught that beauty is currency. No matter how much we have deposited in the bank, we’re expected to earn interest on our savings, whatever the cost.

We sculpt, reshape, paint, poke, prod, starve, plump, squeeze and stretch ourselves into shape.

Even when the midlife cloak of invisibility descends, we’ve invested too much to let things slide.

I’m as bad as anyone. I spend way too much on pots of cream that promise to keep my skin dewy and youthful.

And if the bathroom scales start moving in the wrong direction, I’ll up the gym visits and leave the rosé on the shelf for a week or two.

I tell myself that it’s all about keeping healthy. That’s true, in part. But it’s also patented bullshit.

Just because I’m invisible, doesn’t mean I want to be unsightly as well.

Yet the woman I watched floating out in the Aegean had discovered a way to silence self-doubt.

The act of fulfilling a desire—in this case, a dip in the Aegean—was far more important to her than concern about the way she looked doing it.

I envied her.

It’s insidious.

Growing up, I learned that appearances are everything.

Strength wasn’t measured by how well I weathered the storm. It was gauged by how good I looked while I was riding the waves.

Flawless skin, clear eyes, lippy, and a well-coiffed head of hair were pieces of armour I strapped on each day to go into battle.

Hell, when I first arrived in my Greek paradise, I even (don’t judge) wore makeup to the beach. Not a heap of it, mind you. Mascara, a bit of concealer, and some lippy. But makeup, just the same.

In my defence, I was coming off the back of a month spent in Sicily’s Ortigia, where the five-star lido I spent my afternoons was populated by women who looked like Monica Bellucci and changed into at least three bathing suits a day. It was a high-end meat market.

But this was Greece.

I was on a tiny island, living in a village with a permanent population of around twelve and a donkey named Spiro. Humans were outnumbered by cats.

The picture at the top is the view from our balcony. It was metres from the front door to the sunlounge.

Effie at the little market downstairs certainly didn’t care whether my lashes were mascara-fabulous or not. Nor did Constantinos, who set me up on the beach each day.

So why couldn’t I find the same peace with myself as the magnificent woman now snoozing beneath an umbrella a little further along the beach?

Women are conditioned to be eternally dissatisfied with our physical appearance, all the better to train us to be good little consumers.

Because you can bet that whatever it is that you don’t like about yourself, there will be a balm, a contouring trick, or a surgical procedure that will help fix it.

Even the things that are supposed to be our most appealing bits and pieces aren’t enough.

Take me, for example.

Long legs… sure. But my non-existent waist means anything with a belt makes me look like a racehorse wearing a tutu, even when I was at my youngest and twiggiest.

Then there are my decent-sized and perky boobs. Great. Only flounces and pleats are out, or I might as well be a Bavarian beer wench on tankard duty.

My broad shoulders are also a win, particularly in summer when I can go sleeveless. But force me into a high-necked, sleeved top and combine it with the Bavarian-beer-wench chest situation, and I wouldn’t look out of place on the starting bench for the Dallas Cowboys.

Not that any of that deterred unwanted male interest.

Because that’s the other thing about being valued only for the skin-sack of blood, bones, and muscle we walk around in. We may as well be a rump steak displayed under lights in a butcher’s front window.

We’re there for the taking.

What woman doesn’t have a story or fifty?

Tell me as you read this that you’re not nodding along and recalling your own horror stories.

There was the family friend twenty years my senior who offered me a lift home when I was a painfully shy and skinny 11-year-old, and tried to woo me with a hand on my leg and the Bellamy Brothers’ classic, ‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’

Then there was the maths teacher who insisted on fiddling around with the computer cords beneath the desk under my legs and then giving me shoulder massages when he was well into his ‘40s and I was around 13.

Or the boss who rarely let a management meeting go by without making a comment on my breasts or the length of my skirt.

And then there was the man who decided he wanted to be more than just a friend and slipped me a tab of LSD without my knowledge. I lost most of the night and ended up in a stranger’s bed, wondering why the ceiling rose had grown arms that were trying to strangle me. I lost my bag, my keys, my shoes, and my dignity, and was trying to smash my way into my home with a bare fist on the laundry window. A neighbour heard and helped me.

It’s just part and parcel of being a woman.

A catcall from a man driving past? He’s just letting you know you’re appreciated.

Pat on the bum on the train? Just paying you a compliment, love.

A man crosses the road to strike up a conversation while you’re waiting at the tram-stop? Just being friendly.

Ignore it, and you’re a bitch.

Play nice, and you’re leading him on.

Push back, and you’re asking for trouble.

By the time we’re in our twenties, we’ve learnt that we’re prey.

No prizes for guessing who the predators are.

What menopause does to a writer’s brain

When we realise our body is a battlefield, we retreat to our safe place.

Our minds.

Senses work overtime. Cortisol keeps us in a constant state of fight or flight, or fawn.

We learn what we think are the rules of the game. Most of the time, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t.

Then, midlife hits.

And the body decides it’s not going to cooperate any longer. Add to that the loss of purpose that lands for so many of us. I couldn’t count the number of extraordinarily accomplished and brilliant women my age I see struggling with careers in free-fall.

Then there’s the shifting landscape that is later-life motherhood.

We spend decades as chauffeur, chef, nurse, logistics consultant, therapist, strategist, mediator, systems analyst, cheerleader, careers counsellor.

Speaking for myself, I became so accustomed to being the everything to everyone in my household, that when my services were no longer required, it came as a shock.

Without so much as a signed card and a farewell cake in the staff room, much less a gold watch and commemorative plaque, I was sent on my way.

I thought my voices had fallen silent because they no longer had anything to say… that they belonged to a part of me that had disappeared.

Then, I met the woman I had been watching on the beach every day.

She had struck up a conversation with my husband while they were both waiting for coffee in the taverna.

She was, it turned out, an Italian art history professor.

Her companion was neither her son, nor her lover. He was a friend and a colleague who travelled with her to help her cope with the things her octogenarian body could not.

We dined together that evening, and two more after that.

I had been expecting Buddha with double-X chromosomes.

Instead, I found a prize fighter.

Her mind was ferocious. But her body had fallen behind. And she hated it.

When I told her about how I was feeling, she laughed until she cried.

“Don’t be a fool!” she said. “You’re young. You’re clever. You’re beautiful. Enjoy every moment. Because it will never be easier for you than it is now. You will look back on these days with fondness.”

That was the day my voices returned.

I had been searching for characters who were gentle and wise. But they had long departed, if ever they existed.

The people who arrived on my doorstep were unhinged, unwired, and deeply human.

Forget Eat, Pray, Love.

The world that burst into life in my head was ridiculous, real, funny, and furious… all the things I was living.

And ten months later, Sunday Reilly is All Out of F*cks to Give was finished.

I’d been in Greece for a week when I walked bareface to the beach for the first time.

It sounds ridiculous, but it was quite a moment for me. Admittedly, I had built up a rather lovely Mediterranean tan by then, so I had that in my favour.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still buying ridiculously expensive face cream, styling my hair, and wearing red lippy.

But I’m starting to do it for me.

Not for an audience.

I love writing, and I love having readers. Thank you for reading, sharing, and commenting. I f you enjoyed this read, please consider becoming a subscriber. All content is available free, but your support makes it possible … and worthwhile.

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The post Menopause and Creativity first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

What a 17th-century flower market tells us about the $7 billion trading scandal engulfing Trump’s Washington.

What does a delightful, candy-cane-coloured flower have to do with corruption in the highest levels of the US government?

Quite a lot, actually.

As Wall Street reels from the news of the sheer volume of trades President Trump has made in major companies with close dealings with the US administration, market veterans describe the level of activity as “insane,” with another market insider adding: “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

What would have caused heads to roll once upon a time is, today, just business as usual. Which makes my brain hurt.

As I so often do, I turned to the past for answers. And as always, it delivered. In the form of the “Forever Exalted” tulip, as it was known. It reveals how, and why, we find ourselves tangled up in a system that comes up trumps (pardon the pun) for the one-percenters, but leaves the rest of us out in the rain without a brolly.

A golden age

In the 17th century, the Dutch were enjoying their golden age. They were the wealthiest country in Europe, with an embarrassment of disposable income.

But being an austere Protestant society, gilt and flash and dazzle were out as a means of impressing friends and influencing people.

Tulips were another matter altogether. Flowers were seen as a suitably modest way to keep up with the Janszens.

The ultimate flex was the Semper Augustus. One of the so-called ‘broken tulip’ varieties, which meant it combined two flame-like colours in the same bloom, the “Forever Exalted” tulip was a freak of nature.

It was said that only 12 existed; all owned by a director of the Dutch East India Company. Its scarcity only made it more desirable.

In 1633, one bulb sold for more than three times a merchant’s annual wage. At the peak of what became known as Tulipmania in 1636–37, a buyer offered to buy one for the equivalent cost of a Fifth Avenue penthouse today.

Betting on the future

Tulipmania was the first, and the most famous, speculative bubble. But speculators weren’t trading the flowers themselves. They were buying rare, dormant bulbs that would, one day in the future, burst into bloom.

It gave us what’s now called the futures market. And it has blossomed into a multi-trillion-dollar business.

With that much money riding on bets placed on which way the wind will blow on everything from commodities to interest rates and currencies, it’s no wonder the world’s financial markets hang on every erratic public pronouncement that dribbles out of the American President’s mouth.

But there’s one thing that definitely wasn’t on my bingo card for 2026.

In explosive findings, a team from the Queensland University of Technology tracked 15 specific instances of what the authors describe as “unusual trading activity” around Trump’s social media posts over a two-month period as the President launched his assault on Iran.

The activity occurred before Trump posted a comment on Truth Social that caused the oil price to move dramatically.

As the authors put it, “This is not normal and can’t be explained by fluke variations in trading. The probability of patterns this extreme occurring by chance is in the order of one in a billion.”

How much money are we talking about? Well, Reuters reports that around US$7 billion of “well-timed market bets” were made on falling oil prices in March and April “across multiple exchanges and types of fuel and derivatives just before major Iranian policy announcements by U.S. President ​Donald Trump.”

The obligatory note of caution from the authors: “Our data doesn’t prove that insider trading is taking place… the pattern and events over time are exactly what you’d expect to see if people with advance notice of the president’s posts were systematically positioning themselves before he hits ‘post’…. We cannot prove that’s what’s happening, but we can show that something unusual is happening.” [original emphasis].

Insider trading comes in many shapes and forms.

Ask anyone who’s in the business after they’ve sunk a few glasses of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and they’ll tell you that it’s as common as a bump of coke to get you through the EOFY reporting season.

It’s only when insider trading is done at scale and in huge volumes that authorities even notice anything’s gone awry.

The laws exist to ensure there’s a level playing field for everyone who decides to play the market. It’s about building confidence in something that’s as slippery as an eel that’s just taken a dip in a vat of Vaseline.

Why would you sink your hard-earned into something if you knew that a fair number of the people riding the peaks and troughs know far more than you about what’s about to happen? It’s like placing a bet on a horse race that’s already been fixed.

The STOCK Act

That’s why it’s never been regarded as a particularly great thing for people ostensibly working in the public interest and being paid out of the public purse to exploit their position and the privileged information it gives them to play the financial markets.

It might surprise you—it certainly did me—to learn that a law explicitly banning members of Congress and federal employees from using non-public information for personal benefit was introduced as recently as 2012. Under President Obama. Who’s draining the swamp, then?

Before that, it all came down to ethical standards and commitment to the ideals of maintaining a level playing field. And as we know all too well, ethics, morals, and standards don’t feature on the playlist for many of those at the helm right now.

So, am I shocked that someone at the top of the shitheap that is 2026 Washington may be using the inside track to make a motza?

Not even vaguely.

What does surprise me is how brazen it is.

But the biggest mistake anyone can make is to think that the one in three Americans who support Trump no matter what will give even one half of a fancy, feathered flying fuck about any of this.

The point is, they’d be doing the same, given half the chance. They want to smash the system to the ground because it’s failing them. Why would they risk their lives defending a castle when they’re locked outside its walls?

To MAGA, Trump is King Gaiseric leading the Vandals into Rome in 455AD to strip the temples and palaces of their riches and sell its inhabitants into slavery.

Of course, the irony is that unlike the Vandal king, Trump’s not sharing his booty with his followers. He’ll be long gone by the time they’re set loose to loot the ruins. All they’ll find are piles of rubble and rotting corpses.

Because the raiders have already stormed the bastions.

The richest 10 per cent of American families control all but 7 per cent of the US stock market.

Half the population holds just one per cent of all available stocks.

Whoever is profiting off these stock movements, it sure as fuck isn’t the MAGA faithful lining up to buy made-in-China baseball caps and front-row tickets for Melania.

What the always-Trumpers fail to understand is that markets are cruel masters. As the gap between the one-percenters and the rest of us becomes less gulf and more yawning chasm, one thing is absolutely certain. Neoliberalism has failed the vast majority of us.

It became a thing in the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as the high priest and priestess of neoliberalism.

Without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty, its motto can be summed up quite nicely as: “Markets work. Governments don’t.”

That’s why there was an unholy rush to privatise utilities and functions of state in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The idea was that the market would be a much more reliable and constant provider of the things we need to get through the day.

Markets mean choice and freedom.

That’s the thinking anyway.

The flipside?

Markets are Darwinian.

The ‘fittest’ thrive, while the others are left behind. Market forces punish those who need help and would otherwise rely on government support. They’re left to flounder, while the market rewards productive and ambitious members of society.

Fast forward a few decades, and we have reached a ghastly zenith where free market forces are failing vast swathes of the population. Even left-leaning governments bow to the pressures of big business and investor lobby groups, abandoning the interests of the workers they claim to represent.

As trickle-down economics shows itself to be less about the one-percenters showering the rest of us with wealth than it is pissing on our heads from above, I suspect most of us are beginning to realise we’ve been sold a three-legged, blind donkey and a cart with a broken axle.

Is it any wonder the disenfranchised jump on board when a brazen con artist appears on the horizon, waving the promise of jobs, a sense of purpose and pride, and packaging it all up in a national-flag-emblazoned gift box?

The financial markets as they exist today are a honeypot for those with an inside track.

None of this is new. Whoever is playing the market like this is gaming the system as they have been for decades.

Like the tulip craze before it, today’s stock market is a form of institutionalised gambling. It taps into the human appetite for risk-taking… the adrenaline rush of taking a chance on something that may pay off big time.

Tulips… Dot-Com… Subprime Mortgages… NFTs. They’re all the same. And there’s a term for the herd mentality and wishful, magical thinking that lies behind every market bubble.

It’s called irrational exuberance.

Market prices skyrocket when media reports and trending online talking points fuel an emotional response that makes otherwise reasonable people lose their minds. It’s economic FOMO, as investors rush to buy in, even though prices have already detached themselves from reality.

When someone is in a position where a passing comment can see billions of dollars change hands in an instant, that person has a formidable economic weapon at his or her disposal.

A big part of the problem is that “the market” is a house of cards built on a beanbag. Sure, it’s pretty impressive to look at. But it’s one ill-timed breath away from disaster. In part, it’s due to the ephemeral nature of what’s being traded.

I believe that historians of the future will marvel at our wide-eyed faith in a system that’s so deeply flawed, much as we wonder today at what the fuck the 16th century was thinking when it went with lead face paint.

We do need economic systems. We’ve had them ever since we started wanting something more than a tree to hang out in, and some roots and berries to chew on.

It all comes down to exchanging something you have, for something you want.

It begins with barter. When you have two people with commodities they want to exchange, it’s a pretty straightforward affair. They negotiate, and a fair trade is agreed upon.

It’s no different when you’re purchasing something outright. There’s a price tag, you have cash, and you decide whether it’s worth paying what’s being asked.

But modern financial markets are another thing altogether. The futures exchange is a place where people take a punt on what may transpire in the future. And although buying a share in a company on the stock market may give you a say in how it’s run, you don’t really ‘own’ anything in the traditional sense of the word.

You can’t take your piece of a company and put it on the mantelpiece.

But none of this is new.

Futures trading has been going on for a bit.

Four thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, wrote into law rules to govern the sale of assets and services in the future for set prices.

But the first place traders formally gathered to exchange commodities and promissory notes was in 1531 in Belgium’s Antwerp. What was called the bourse was named after the Van der Beurze family, which owned the tavern where the trade took place.

Not one to be left behind, Queen Elizabeth I picked up the idea and established a similar exchange in 1571. The Royal Exchange, as it was called, offered shares in speculative trading expeditions as the British Empire went to sea in search of lands to plunder.

But things really took off in 1602 when the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, decided it needed more nutmeg for its cappuccino, and called for some serious financial backing to cover the cost of bringing spices back from Indonesia, then known to Europeans as the East Indies.

The VOC became the first public company when it issued tradable stocks and bonds to fund perilous voyages halfway around the world to retrieve shiploads of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. At the time, nutmeg was worth more per ounce than gold, and the VOC stockholders were banking on good returns for their investment.

And this is where the trouble begins.

It arises in the clash between two fundamental economic principles.

First, we’ve got supply and demand, which is one of the pillars of the Western economic system.

In an ideal marketplace, prices are set according to how many people want something, and how badly they want it, relative to how much of that something is available.

It’s probably the oldest and most enduring economic principle. It’s a basic, exchange-based system.

Imagine yourself in France’s Pyrenean foothills 30,000 years or so ago.

In summer, scooping trout out of the river is a doddle. You haul bucketloads up to the cave most nights. Going rate? One trout for a handful of Oogh’s tubers and a few hazelnuts.

You’re also going to be smoking some of those fish as well. Because winter’s coming and that river’s going to be frozen over. But your cave mates still need their protein.

As snow blankets the ground, you can ask whatever you want for your stash of dried fish.

Forget tubers. One dried trout will get you a flint and a deerskin. That is, until Grug from the next valley turns up, and he only wants a bundle of firewood and an arrowhead for his dried fish. So, you drop your price to hold onto your customers.

Movement like this is the fibre that keeps the West’s economic bowels regular.

The supply-and-demand mechanism relies on open, fair competition to operate. It’s why anti-competitive practices are illegal. Healthy competition is one of the cornerstones of our economic system.

If Grug dams the river and keeps all the trout for himself, it will put you out of business. That means he can ask whatever he wants for his fish. And, why wouldn’t he?

And that’s where it gets tricky.

Because another pillar of Western economic thinking, homo economicus, means you look after yourself, and yourself alone. The one absolute certainty, according to the theory, is that we’re all rational and self-interested. If there’s a way of improving our financial lot, then we’ll do it. Most of all… and here’s the clincher… altruism doesn’t enter the equation.

Ask not what you may do for others. Ask only what you may do for yourself.

Grug doesn’t care that his monopoly means his customers are paying more than they should for their fish, because it means his family are kitted out in all the latest skins, and he just bought himself the latest rolling stone.

It’s no different today.

Apply that theory to a marketplace that expects you to ignore information that might pay off big… or resist the temptation to tweak a few things to turn something to your advantage and send your share portfolio skyward… and you can see why we’re fucking delusional to think that our economic system is bulletproof.

It’s a system that presumes perfect competition. But competition only works if there’s more than one person selling the same thing, or a substitute that will do in a pinch.

That’s why monopolies are outlawed. Stockpiling does the same thing. If you control the entire supply of something people desperately need or want, you can set the price.

And then there’s the other bête noire of the market. Price fixing. Things stop working when a few people who control supply get together on the quiet and decide what price they’re going to charge for that widget without which our car will stop running.

Then we go full circle back to insider trading, which is about creating a fair playing field for all.

The problem with all of these principles? They’re a slap in homo economicus’ bloated face. Given half the chance, he’ll piss all over them.

Homo economicus is a plague on Western society.

And at the moment, he’s running the show.

I’ve seen the way it works, up close and personal, in another commercial marketplace. The art market. The difference there, is that it’s the Wild West. They don’t even pretend there are any regulations.

During my time managing the art department of a major Australian auction house, I saw how easy it is to fuel speculative bubbles and manipulate prices. More to the point, I saw it actually happening in real time. It made me head back to university to write my PhD on how the art auction record reflects market manipulation. But that’s a story for another day.

The trick with art is that there’s an uneven distribution of information.

Like the insiders betting on stock movements because they know something you don’t, in the art market the people who know what’s going on play the system like a Stradivarius.

Complicating things further is the fact that there’s rarely a real connection between the material value of an artwork and its market value.

Say you find a piece of butcher’s paper with a bird scribbled on it in biro. Its dollar value? Zero. Paper and biro. Utterly worthless in a material sense.

But if it’s signed “Picasso”? Make that a six-figure sum.

And only a small number of people can tell you with any degree of certainty what that value might be. Art is not an ounce of gold you can weigh, or a diamond you can grade. There are so many intangible values involved in estimating its worth, the margin for error is enormous.

It’s like a pot of face cream. There’s nothing tangible for a buyer to rely on when making a choice other than hype and marketing. At that point, price becomes the main indicator of quality.

Under those conditions, price volatility becomes the norm.

And when that’s accepted as a feature of a marketplace, it creates conditions that are ripe for exploitation. Unusual price fluctuations aren’t unusual. They’re expected.

It’s why art has become an investment of choice for criminals across the globe. There are few better ways to launder filthy cash. Buy a Picasso with drug money, then auction it in New York. Dirty money out, clean money in. Easy done. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/3-drug-kingpins-art-adored-316531

But the problem with speculative bubbles, and prices set through manipulation rather than based on real demand?

Eventually, they collapse.

Spectacularly.

As it is with art, so it was with tulips.

In smoky taverns across Amsterdam, thousands of people had sunk their savings into the tulip market, with some bulbs changing hands up to ten times in a single day.

Until, one day, they weren’t.

In early February 1637, the tulip market collapsed in a heap. Demand dried up, and bulbs dropped to a tenth of their value. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160419-tulip-mania-the-flowers-that-cost-more-than-houses

Overnight, the tavern trade in tulips dried up.

As for the Semper Augustus tulip, it turns out its unique colouration came about thanks to an aphid-borne virus that made the bulb impossible to cultivate.

When it first appeared, it was one of the most sought-after objects on the planet.

It’s now extinct.

I think there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

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The post The Tulip and the President first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

From ancient myths to modern TV, the “monstrous mother” keeps showing up; it says more about our expectations of women than it does about motherhood.

Ever feel like you’re not measuring up as a mum? Yeah, I feel you.

No Mother’s Day breakfast would be complete without a steaming hot plate of guilt served up with a side of self-doubt.

So, with Mother’s Day on the horizon, here’s something to make you feel a little better about your imagined failings.

Meet the bad mothers.

It’s a theme that persists in Western pop culture in a way that fathers behaving badly never does. Have a quick scan through the TV guide. It’s a go-to plotline that straddles genres, all the way from horror to comedy.

But why has the “monstrous mother” become such a trope? Is it simply that the absence of a mother figure hits us in the solar plexus? Because there’s a reason so many Disney stories begin with the death of a mother.

There’s something more at play, though.

On Mother’s Day, let’s take a look at why pop culture loves a good mum gone bad.

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Happy Hallmark Card Day

I’ve always told my kids that I couldn’t give two figs about Mother’s Day. As far as I’m concerned, every day should be mother’s day.

I’m a bit of a fun-buster like that. Hallmark Card days have always made me itch, paced carefully as they are through the year to keep the economy pumping as we meet our KPIs as well-trained little consumers.

That doesn’t mean I’m not thrilled about being a mum. The photo up the top is a collection of talismans I carry about in my wallet from early in my two kids’ lives.

Some explanations… Apparently, in my daughter’s eyes, I resembled a lima bean.

And, no. The top picture isn’t a bird’s-eye view of Madonna’s cleavage during her Jean-Paul Gaultier pointy-bra era. It’s a church. Which is odd, given that, as a family, we are committed agnostics.

Finally, the movie ticket is there as proof of the power of disappointing sequels; Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith sent me into labour. My daughter was born the next day.

The mess of motherhood.

I am obsessed with my two children.

But I’ll say it up front.

Being a mother can bring the most thankless, messy, heartbreaking, and traumatic moments in a woman’s life.

At the same time, it is also the source of blind love, transcendent delight and uncomplicated joy. Whether it comes the instant you hold your sticky, flailing newborn child in your arms, or it grows over time—it’s different for everyone—the love we have for our children is deep and pure.

But as anyone who’s tried it can tell you, motherhood is a Gordian knot of complications. These days, we’re expected to juggle childcare with household duties, paid work outside the home, further education… the list never ends.

For me, that was the least of my problems.

Guilty secrets.

The thing that surprised me the most about being a first-time mum was the pervasive guilt and sense of inadequacy that cropped up every time a decision had to be made about the tiny, and completely helpless, human being entrusted to my care.

At the time, I was certain that whatever force of nature decided to bring my son into my life had made a terrible decision by nominating me as responsible enough to care for a child.

Thank fuck I was given my mothering training wheels long before social media was a thing.

There was enough contradictory information out there, even then. I had the maternal and child healthcare nurse telling me when my angelic baby son’s face turned into a weeping moonscape of sores that it was likely caused by my choice of baby face wash, and that it would probably clear up by the time he was two. It was gone in a week.

I didn’t need the contributions of @StayHomeMom and @rawdogging_five_under_five telling me that pasteurised milk would turn my baby into a serial killer, and that he would suffer permanent emotional damage unless I carried him around in a sling spun from Tibetan yak hair and blessed by the Dalai Lama.

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My 80 per cent rule

Of course, I quickly realised that as long as a baby is fed, bathed, kept safe and—most of all—loved unconditionally, being a mother isn’t as difficult as it feels at first.

I figured my babies were born near-perfect. A few rough edges, sure… and my job as mum was to help them smooth those out so that they didn’t keep snagging on things as they moved through life. But I got to a point where I was going by what I thought of as the 80 per cent rule. If I was getting things right about 80 per cent of the time, then I was doing OK.

Trick was not to fuck them up and inflict callouses and scars courtesy of the sharp edges of my own that life had bestowed upon me.

But it took a while to get there.

Because mums barely have time to breathe.And you know what didn’t help? The spectre of the “bad mother” hanging over my shoulder.

She hovers there, a cautionary tale, showing us exactly what happens if we drop the bundle of joy.

Entry level bad mum: “Bad despite her best efforts”

This is the least malignant of all the bad mums.

The dead mum is a favourite of the animated film genre. Bambi. Finding Nemo. Ice Age. Try it yourself. The “missing mother” trope is a thing.

She’s the mother who causes us all existential horror, because she’s the mum who disappears from her child’s life through no fault of her own. She’s “every mum.” And although she mightn’t have chosen the path herself, the outcome is the same. Her child is left to fend for him or herself.

The wicked stepmother

A void is left behind. Traditionally, that vacuum was filled by the “wicked stepmother.”

Right away, the maternal figure is split in two: the “good,” absent half, and the “evil” half that remains. All the toxic things that can crop up between mother and child can be channelled into the “bad” stepmother, without harming the memory of the missing mum.

The stepmother becomes an outlet to channel taboo feelings.

Think about the mother so fixated on her fading beauty that she goes homicidal on her stepdaughter in Snow White. Or Cinderella’s stepmum playing favourites and forcing her stepdaughter into servitude. Then there’s Hansel and Gretel where a woman lands her stepchildren in the care of a cannibalistic witch rather than finding a way to be creative in the kitchen during a time of famine. And how about the gold-digging would-be-stepmother bent on stealing her daughter’s inheritance in The Parent Trap?

The “wicked stepmother” meme belongs to another era, though; one in which divorce and—shock, horror—re-partnering got society’s collective knickers in a knot.

The stepmum was an easy mark. How easy, you ask? Well, she features as the villain in more than 900 stories from around the world.

Moral of the story? No mum = trouble.

Until a saviour appears.

And, yes. That saviour is usually a man; a heroic man who steps in and fixes everything.

Red Riding Hood’s woodsman. Prince Charming in all his guises. Nemo’s dad. Harry Potter’s Dumbledore. Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. Gru in Despicable Me. Although, in fairness, there is also the odd appearance of a fairy godmother, a magical nanny, or a good witch or two.

The warning? If mum can’t do it, a man will be forced to step in… and do a better job of it, while he’s at it.

The “don’t look back” mum.

The dead or missing mum is one thing. The willingly absent mum is another.

This one’s a cautionary tale for women with ambitions that extend beyond their role as a mother.

These bad mums don’t directly cause their children harm. But the result is the same. They expose their children to danger because they’re choosing their own needs over those of their children.

Think the mum in Coraline, who’s so preoccupied with her own career that she doesn’t notice as her daughter is lured into an upside-down world by “The Other Mother” with the promise of the love and attention she’s missing at home.

Or Mary Poppins’ Winifred Banks whose children run away “for the fourth time this week” while she’s off rallying for a woman’s right to vote. Enter the replacement mum in the form of Mary Poppins, who shows Winifred how mothering should be done, and liberates her—and her children—from her selfish ways.

Even this year’s Oscar-winning film, One Battle After Another, went there, when the heroic militant, Perfidia Beverly Hills, abandoned her child and chose the revolution instead, putting her daughter, Willa, in grave danger. Of course it fell to Willa’s bumbling stepfather to save her.

Think about the message we’re getting here. Mums are out doing noble things that would see men showered in bouquets, but instead they’re sent to the naughty corner to watch their kids punished as a direct result of their perceived failings.

The toxic “smother”

That said, give me a mum who takes time out to protest for women’s rights over a “smother.”

They’re the tiger mums. The helicopter mums. The ones trying desperately to prove that they’re doing it all for their children, somewhere between the guilt-trips, the gaslighting, and the string-pulling.

There are the comedic smothers: George Costanza’s mum in Seinfeld. Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth.

Then there are the passive-aggressive mums raising topiary children: Betty Draper in Mad Men. Mother Gothel in Tangled. Margaret White in Carrie. And let’s not forget the iconic Joan Crawford, in Mommie Dearest.

And how about Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister, whose narcissism and pathological need for control set a new bar for smothers the world over. And, as is always the case with bad mums, all Cersei’s children suffered terrible ends.

Homicidal mum

Neglect and manipulation… not great.

Outright filicide (yes, that’s a word) is another.

The murderous mother has her own chapter in pop culture.

Medea, who murders her own children as payback when her husband, Jason (he of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece) takes off with a younger woman.

Angelica Huston as Lilly Dillon in The Grifters, who slashes her son’s neck and leaves him to die. Tony Soprano’s mum, Livia, who took out a hit on her own child. The homicidal tendencies of two generations of mothers in the contemporary horror classic, Hereditary.

The monstrous feminine

To this group, I’d add Ripley from the Alien series. It’s a long narrative arc that documents the monstrous feminine.

When we meet Ellen Ripley, she’s a single cat lady living her best life in outer space. In the second film, she hooks up with a fella, adopts an orphan child, Newt, and gives us the now iconic line, “get away from her, you bitch!” when the alien queen is threatening Newt. Ripley responds by killing the egg-laying queen and torching her babies.

Then, in the opening credits of the third film (spoiler alert), we see Newt and Ripley’s lover die as their spacecraft lands on a prison planet populated by men who have taken a vow of celibacy. In full circle, Ripley discovers she’s been impregnated with an alien. When the film ends, Ripley has shaved her hair and is indistinguishable from the male prisoners; she takes her own life, and that of her “child.”

Subliminal fear

I always wonder how much of this is born of subliminal fear at the thought of being neglected when we’re at our most vulnerable by the person we rely on the most for care.

But most of all, I wonder whether it’s spawned by societal expectations in the West that women should always put their own needs below those of their children. Go back to our cave-dwelling prehistoric ancestors, and child-raising was a communal thing. If a kid was hungry, one working boob was as good as the next.

In modern hunter-gatherer societies, babies are in direct physical contact with another human being for 90 per cent of the day. A squalling baby is never left to cry. Someone responds immediately with comforting or nursing.

But here’s the catch. It’s not just the mum doing the comforting.

Africa’s !Kung people, along with many other hunter-gatherer societies, adopt what’s called “alloparenting.” It means that people other than a child’s mother provide almost half their care. A !Kung baby might be handballed between caregivers up to eight times an hour.

Impossible expectations

Is it any wonder we Western mums find it hard to measure up? Even if we’re lucky enough to have a partner who does their bit when it comes to co-parenting, the message we’re given loud and clear is that mums should be doing most of the work. Or bad shit happens.

My point here? I doubt bad mums feature much in !Kung pop culture. Because a village is raising their children.

A !Kung child will never grow up with a subliminal fear they will be neglected or deserted. Because it’s a foreign concept to them.

In the West, that’s not the case. We’re taught that without a “perfect mother,” whatever the fuck that means, we’re cooked.

Barefoot and pregnant

I guess what I’m asking is why the bond between mother and child is portrayed as so sacrosanct in the West that any time a mum feels herself on shaky ground, it’s seen as a threat to society’s fabric?

Does the patriarchy feel so threatened by any woman who dares prioritise her own needs that we get the monstrous mother as a cautionary tale to keep us in line?

There’s no doubt that the powers that be know how important that control is.

Control the mothers. You control the future.

Hitler knew it. As do the policymakers at the Heritage Foundation, who are manoeuvring to remove American women’s right to vote, and force them back to the kitchen sink, where they’ll be chained, barefoot and pregnant.

Mothers make the world go round

I read something the other day that blew my mind.

“All the people on this planet are women and their children.”

Yes, yes. I know. The same could be said for fathers. But that’s not the point here.

We mothers are doing our best.

And it could be a whole lot worse.

If you’re in any doubt, just whack Carrie, Coraline,or Animal Kingdom on the TV.

Happy Mother’s Day.

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The post Why are we so obsessed with ‘bad mums’? first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

Gallipoli was a military failure—but it shaped the values Australians still identify with today.ANZAC graves, Gallipoli. Photo: M. Wilson Anastasios

Want to understand Australia?

Then find your way down to a local war memorial before dawn on the 25th of April.

Anzac Day.

As you stand there in a sombre huddle with a group of people gathered beneath an Australian flag unfurling in the morning breeze, the sun will peek above the horizon, and a lone bugle will play the Last Post.

There will be tears.

And you need to remember one thing.

Anzac Day is Australia’s most significant national holiday. And you’re there to commemorate an epic military failure.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Anzac Day recalls the day our soldiers were handed their backsides on a plate by a Turkish army hellbent on defending its homeland.

If you can begin to unpick whatever the fuck that says about us, you’ll find yourself much closer to understanding the things that make us who we are as a nation.

This is all said with the caveat that what I’m talking about here is post-European Australia. Not the mind blowingly expansive history of the First Australians who have called this place home for at least 65,000 years.

They have their own origin stories. And they’re a hell of a lot older than the ones I’m talking about.

This is the story of the birth of modern, post-colonial Australia, and the forging of the Anzac legend.

It’s a story I have a personal connection to. And probably not in the way you imagine.

Disclaimer: I’ve got skin in this game.

A little while ago, I wrote a novel that became a bestseller, based on a script my husband had written. That script was picked up by Russell Crowe. It became the film, “The Water Diviner.”

It came about after my husband and I spent a huge amount of time in the place now known as Türkiye working as archaeologists when we were younger (a story for another time).

But it took a while for us to find our way to the place that’s as close to a pilgrimage site as any for young Australians.

As I watched busloads of Aussie tourists take off for day trips to the memorial park in the Dardanelles where the ANZAC troops landed, I was a Gallipoli sceptic. It had a whiff of nationalism and jingoism that didn’t sit well with me.

But one year, we happened to be passing by on the way to visit a friend in the beautiful seaside village of Assos. So, we took the plunge.

My only regret was that I hadn’t done it sooner.

What I saw there changed me forever. Because it helped me understand why that place is so important to us as a nation, and how it helped shape our identity.

The year is 1914.

When Britain declared war on the 4th of August, 1914, it was only 13 years since Australia had federated. Although independent in many respects, we remained part of the British Empire, and we considered ourselves at war too, even though the frontline was half a world away.

When King George V called for volunteers, hundreds of thousands of young men across the continent saw it as a chance to see the world.

By the end of the war, one in ten Australians had enlisted to serve.

Australian soldiers would go on to distinguish themselves on the Western Front, and in Palestine and the Sinai.

But it would be a battle that ended in tragedy and defeat, at the place in Turkey known in Greek as “beautiful city”—Kallipolis, or Gallipoli—that would come to define us as a nation.

“The adventure of a lifetime.”

It certainly would be that.

But not as they pictured it.

Jim Martin was born on the 3rd of January, 1901, just two days after the Federation of Australia itself.

By 1915, Jim was 14. And he was about to lie about his age.

Who hasn’t bullshitted to get into a club, or buy a slab of beer, right? I know I have. But Jim Martin lied to go to war.

His mother begged him not to.

But he did it anyway. Because, kids.

It was April 12, 1915, when he fronted up to the enlistment office to join up.

After a month or so training, he was shipped off to Egypt, and from there, he was sent to Gallipoli.

At 2.00am on the 8th of September, Jim landed in Anzac Cove. He went with his platoon to a battlefield that was locked in a brutal and bloody stalemate.

Jim would later write to his family that they shouldn’t worry, because “I am doing splendid over here.”

For that, I read: “Yeah, whatever, mum. You’re worrying about nothing. I’ll be right.”

Because what kid of 14 wants to admit that maybe mum was onto something?

Playthings of Empire

Britain had its eyes on Turkey for a number of reasons.

For a start, the man who was First Lord of the Admiralty, in his first outing at the helm of power, Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill), wanted to get his hands on the Ottoman Empire’s oil fields. If British troops took the Gallipoli peninsula, it was a short hop to Istanbul, then known as Constantinople.

And then there was Russia. Turkey had a stranglehold on the Dardanelles Strait (yes, Straits have been causing trouble for a very long time) that cuts its way between the European and Asian continents and feeds from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. That meant Russia’s Black Sea fleet couldn’t join forces with its allies in the Med and, beyond that, the Atlantic.

A plan was laid. And troops were sent into action. Their mission was to seize the northern side of the strait.

Problem is that it was a shitty plan.

It was also overseen by armchair warriors.

One in five of the 75,000 soldiers who landed in the Dardanelles on April 25 were from Australia and New Zealand. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps… ANZAC.

Amongst those soldiers were Indigenous Australian troops who hid their ethnicity to sign up, because as non-citizens (yeah—don’t get me started), it was illegal to enlist.

But the ANZACs were sent on a fool’s errand.

While the British and French landed at the flat end of the peninsula, the ANZAC troops were beached a kilometre off-course, on a tiny cove carved out of vertical cliffs.

It was meant to be an easy march across flat ground. Instead, it became a scramble to safety, as Turkish troops fired at the soldiers from above.

It was a disaster. The ANZACs didn’t stand a chance.

Barely any of the 16,000 Australians and New Zealanders had any experience of combat. By the end of the first day, one in eight of them were dead or wounded.

The commanders of the ANZAC forces both advised the British commander-in-chief to withdraw their troops.

He decided to dig in instead.

Because, of course he did.

Australia changed in an instant.

From the Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1915: “On the day the news came that Australian soldiers were in action at the Dardanelles, and the first list of our killed and wounded arrived, we were a changed people.”

Official War Correspondent, Charles Bean, became the poet laureate of the Anzac legend. His words, more than any other, shaped our idea of who these soldiers were.

Bean landed with the troops on 25 April. His photos from the front perpetuated the legend of the bronzed Aussie superhero as suntanned soldiers defied enemy fire, and stripped off to swim in the waters of Anzac Cove.

Bean added them to the Classical pantheon, describing the ANZAC soldiers as “…These bronzed giants with the strength of Hercules and the winged sandals of Perseus.”

It’s from Bean that we get the portrait of the resolute Aussie larrikin who’s tough and faces adversity with gallows humour. Bean’s ANZAC soldier is reckless in the face of danger. Most of all, respect is earnt. Egalitarianism became the foundation of what it means to be Australian.

The other thing Gallipoli said about us? We’re not too keen on taking orders.

Unlikely allies

For eight months, the ANZACs gained no ground.

As the conflict dragged on, in places the Turkish and ANZAC trenches were only metres apart.

Life in those trenches was next-level ghastly. 25,000 men were crammed into an area no bigger than Sydney’s Olympic Park.

When winter came, it was bitterly cold. And in summer, it was a cauldron.

Rations were scarce and barely edible, and there was no fresh water supply.

As fallen bodies stacked up in no-man’s land like bloated, rotting dominoes, an armistice was called to allow time to bury the rotting corpses.

As Turkish and ANZAC soldiers worked side-by-side in unimaginably awful conditions, bonds were formed. And when the soldiers returned to their trenches, as legend has it, their hearts were no longer in it.

They began tossing each other gifts. Cigarettes. Cans of bully beef. One Gallipoli legend tells of the time a can of vile bully beef was thrown back from the Turkish trench with a note on it: “cigarettes, yes, bully beef, no.”

True or false? Who knows.

Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

The legacy this myth left behind was an enduring bond between Australia and Türkiye.

Just as 53,000 Allied soldiers died invading a sovereign nation, at least 87,000 Turks died defending their homeland.

On both sides, the takeaway was the same.

War is hell.

And the men at the top calling the shots could go to hell with it.

For Australia, that gave birth to a stubborn determination to forge our own path.

News from the frontline

If it was so fucking awful, why did boys like Jim Martin jump at the chance to go to war?

And, more to the point, why didn’t the Australian government pull its troops out of what was quickly becoming one of the worst places on earth?

Problem was, nobody other than those at the front really knew what was going on.

You’ve got to remember that this was long before social media and citizen journalism.

It wasn’t until the Vietnam war that conflict-zone journalism began showing the unvarnished truth of what was really happening on the battlefield.

There were no iPhones or drones. News came in the form of heavily censored newspapers, or silent, heavily curated newsreels played in cinemas.

Letters home were piecemeal affairs after the censors did their bit and went all Epstein Files and redacted anything referring to… well, anything other than the most mundane personal information.

So, nobody in Australia knew what their boys were going through.

Until Keith Murdoch

Yes, you know that name. Father of Rupert.

Only Murdoch Senior did a good thing. So, yeah. Apparently the apple sometimes falls half a mile away from the tree.

Murdoch spent four days in Gallipoli and met with Charles Bean and the embedded British journalist, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. His assessment of the conditions the ANZAC soldiers were enduring was scathing.

In a letter to his friend, Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, he said: “I write of the unfortunate Dardanelles expedition in the light of what knowledge I could gain on the spot…It is undoubtedly one of the most terrible chapters in our history. Your fears have been justified.”

The letter, which is now recorded in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, was the trigger that ended with the withdrawal of ANZAC troops from the Dardanelles.

Beating a retreat

In late 1915, the British Cabinet decided to retreat from the Dardanelles.

The ANZAC troops did so under cover of an ingenious plan to dupe the Turks. They set up rifles with cans full of water suspended from their triggers. Holes drilled into the cans meant the water dripped out at varying rates. Once the can was empty, it activated the trigger, and the rifle fired.

The covering fire meant the ANZAC soldiers escaped with very few casualties.

The last of the troops were gone by 4:00 AM on the 20th of December, 1915.

But although the Australian troops had left Anzac Cove, they would never be forgotten.

Blood and bone

Fertiliser ain’t what it used to be. Once upon a time, tens of thousands of bodies left after battles including the Battle of Waterloo were ground down into fertiliser.

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky… Funky, indeed.

At Gallipoli, things changed. An Imperial War Graves Commission was established. Officers returned to the peninsula and, with Turkish assistance, retrieved the bodies of the lost.

Those fallen soldiers were identified and buried with full honours and grave markers in cemeteries on the land of the people whose shores they had invaded.

“They have become our sons as well.”

A charismatic and brilliant Turkish military leader distinguished himself at Gallipoli.

His iconic command, “I do not order you to fight, I order you to die,” inspired his men to hold the heights until reinforcements arrived.

Kemal Atatürk went on to lead modern Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. And he never forgot his time on Gallipoli, and the brave ANZAC combatants.

Today, a memorial at Gallipoli records Atatürk’s words to the families of the men who died invading his homeland.

“You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”

I challenge you to read that without tearing up.

I know I am.

But was it even Atatürk who wrote those words? Even that has been challenged.

Hit or a myth?

Many historians question the truth behind these stories. They point to clear examples of antipathy between the Turks and Australians to counter the prevailing belief that the two sides became best mates.

Let’s face it. After months stuck in fly-blown trenches taking potshots at each other, neither side would have been feeling very positive about the enemy.

But that’s not the way myths and legends work.

The tale I’m telling here has been evolving for more than a century. It’s a legend that has grown to serve many masters.

A young nation was crying out for a foundation story.

Australia needed to define itself as distinct from our Imperial motherland.

And Gallipoli, where Australia’s sons made a stand and distinguished themselves for their unique character, did the job.

Anzac is the legend Australia needed.

Is the Gallipoli legend lacking in nuance, and does it overlook many uncomfortable truths? Undoubtedly.

But myth transcends reality and becomes something much greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s because human beings are storytellers. And sometimes real life just doesn’t cut it. It needs a bit of a do-over.

For example… if you ask me, Jesus was a charismatic and spiritually evolved dude who had some great ideas about looking after each other and making the world a better place.

Cleopatra definitely picked her nose. She may even have eaten her boogers.

Elvis laid curly ones in the toilet just like the rest of us.

Marilyn got her period every month like all people with lady parts all around the world, and would have had plenty of hormonal breakouts to go with it.

But who wants to think about that? Definitely not me.

Myths and legends are things people can hold onto.

They serve a higher purpose than pure fact.

We spend all day, every day, wrestling with the itty, bitty, gritty facts of everyday life.

Fantasy allows us to dream of a more perfect existence. Something that elevates us above reality.

It reflects who we want to be, what we aspire to, and how we hope the world will remember us.

And it makes the unimaginable, bearable. It gives meaning to the impossible.

It shapes the future in a way it wouldn’t if the rough edges hadn’t been sanded off.

That’s why it seems fitting that Gallipoli and the Dardanelles—itself the focus of human mythmaking for many thousands of years—has assumed such an important role in Australia’s own post-colonial foundational legend.

Fantasy becomes reality

By the Second World War, the myth of the Aussie soldier as a devil-may-care, irreverent, brash, laugh-in-the-face-of-danger force-of-nature as forged in the crucible of Gallipoli had inspired a new generation of young Australians on the frontline.

They also took with them our suspicion of authority, and “yeah, nah, mate, steady on” attitude to anyone who got a bit too big for their own boots.

The Australians who headed off to WWII did so with the Anzac legend in mind. They had something to live up to and inspire them.

My favourite quote from the Australian military brass in the Second World War is the following from Brigadier George Vasey to his troops: “Here you bloody well are and here you bloody well stay. And if any bloody German gets between your post and the next, turn your bloody Bren around and shoot him up the arse.”

But the best assessment of our Aussie troops in WWII belongs to the enemy; namely the legendary German Field Marshall, Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox: “If I had to take hell, I would use the Australians to take it and the New Zealanders to hold it”.

My first visit to Anzac Cove was transformative.

As I stood on the perfectly manicured green lawns between the modest headstones of the young men who died there serving an Empire’s folly and looked up at the impossibly steep cliffs they were expected to scale, I started weeping.

I didn’t stop until I boarded the ferry to cross the Dardanelles Straits.

I’ve returned several times since, including once for the centenary of the Gallipoli landings in 2015, and once with my own two children.

My son, at the time, was just shy of the age Jim Martin was when he landed there.

Aftermath

Of the half a million Australians who served in the First World War, over 60,000 were killed. That was somewhere between 10-15% of the male population aged between 18 and 44.

It was a shocking blow. We had the highest death-rate relative to our population of all the countries in the British Empire.

That was why we needed the Anzac legend. We needed to believe that something positive had come out of the tragedy; that the terrible losses counted for something.

One of those we lost was Private Jim Martin.

On the 25th of October 1915, he was diagnosed with typhoid fever and evacuated from the front. He died the same day and was buried at sea, just three months shy of his 15th birthday.

It gave Jim the dubious honour of becoming the youngest Australian known to have died during the First World War.

Legend has it that his mother’s hair turned white when she heard the news.

She never recovered from the shock of losing her son.

Anzac Day lives on

Once upon a time, the powers that be were concerned that the Anzac Day service would dwindle as veterans of the two world wars disappeared.

There are bigger numbers now, than ever. Thousands of Australians also gather at Anzac Cove in Türkiye for the dawn service held there every year.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about peace. War can go to hell… quite literally.

But that’s the point of Anzac Day. It’s not about celebrating war.

It is anything but a display of military might. There is no parade jam packed with phallic missiles, squeaky tanks, and goosestepping troops.

Anzac Day is a day of remembrance for all of us.

Anzac Day is a solemn tribute to the making of a young nation.

It’s also a reminder of how war resonates through generations, and an expression of gratitude for those who fought and died to defend the things we hold dear.

Underpinning it all is a silent plea that perhaps we will never have to experience anything like Gallipoli again.

With the shitstorm engulfing the world right now, and cosplaying warriors calling the shots, it couldn’t come at a better time.

Think of that, as the Australian flag unfurls in the chill morning air, and the immortal lines from the Ode of Remembrance ring out:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

Lest we forget.

The post Understanding Anzac Day: Lessons from Gallipoli first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

How the Marrakech Medina broke me and the creative midlife reckoning that followed.

The hormonal rollercoaster of being a woman of a certain age comes with the erosion of the foundations of who you think you are as a person. I was completely unprepared for that.

How is that possible? How many utterly cringeworthy videos about what to expect from puberty did we have to endure? Where’s the ‘how-to’ guide for the other massive hormonal shift half the world’s population goes through?

For me, it isn’t just about the physical symptoms, although they certainly are a thing. What is it with the itchy ears? And the waking up at 3am? I swear that’s where the idea of witches came from.

It was just a bunch of perimenopausal women grabbing a broom and doing a bit of housework in the dead of night.

The biggest issue for me, though, has been the erosion of my sense of self.

For an article just published on Mamamia, I write about how the midlife mess I navigated while on my dream holiday in Europe became the raw material for my latest novel, Sunday Reilly is All Out of F*cks to Give.

If you’re a woman of a certain age like me, I reckon you’ll relate.

The Gap Year I Took at 50, and the Breakdown I Didn’t Post on Instagram

I went to the Mediterranean looking for inspiration. Instead, I found a reckoning.

Read more here…

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The post Meaghan on Meaghan in Mamamia first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

How viral AI cartoons are doing what missiles can’t

Have you noticed?

The war isn’t just in Iran. It’s in your feed.

But who would have thought the weapon of choice would be LEGO?

I, for one, never thought I’d see the day when we weren’t just consuming propaganda, we’d be distributing it.

Willingly.

With accompanying emojis.

But, here we are.

“Explosive News!”

In 2025, a new YouTube channel was launched.

Akhbar Enfejari, or “Explosive News!” was about as explosive as a fart in a bathtub. It barely made a blip amongst the 120 million channels competing for eyeballs.

The message from its Iranian creators was consistently anti-Western. “Send this video to filthy America so it explodes,” it urged its 2.5 viewers.

Then, in February this year, something changed.

And the world changed with it.

That something was that America and Israel attacked Iran. And the brains behind Explosive News struck on a winning formula, co-opting an animation style nicked from the LEGO movies, and adopting Western pop-culture tropes to communicate their anti-American and anti-Israeli message.

Now, it’s a smash hit.

While Trump and his limp-dicked armchair warriors send Americans into battle, millions of viewers tune in to rapid-fire, scathing responses to the war that isn’t a war created by what the New Yorker describes as a group of students with a background in social activism.

The creators’ original intention was modest. They wanted to reach Iranian viewers. But now, they’ve gone—can I say “ballistic,” given the circumstances? Probs not.

Let’s just say they’ve gone “global.”

Their clips have been reposted on X not only by Iran’s Tasnim News Telegram, but also by the Russian state media agency, RT.

Their messaging isn’t particularly nuanced or sophisticated. They align themselves and the Iranian people with other groups who have suffered at the hands of American hegemony: Vietnamese; Native Americans; Afghans.

One of their more potent recent clips set against a catchy reggae tune digs into Trump’s connection to the child-rapist, Jeffrey Epstein… allegedly, as they are careful to point out.

The team can produce a two-minute clip in just 24 hours; a feat that would be impossible without the pre-mix, pre-fab, ready-to-wear visual tool that is generative AI.

Since they first appeared, there have been many pretenders attempting to replicate their success. Those pale imitations lack something vital. Perhaps it’s the fire in the belly.

As the Explosive News team puts it, quoting a Persian proverb: “What comes from the heart will surely sit upon the heart.”

But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are not the good guys

Let’s be absolutely clear. The men at the helm of the Iranian regime are not the good guys. Quite the opposite.

I do not, by any measure, support a political apparatus that hangs people from cranes for fancying someone of the same gender. That’s right. They use construction equipment to murder their citizens.

Amnesty’s human rights report on Iran makes for sobering reading.

Its penal code includes flogging. Blinding. Amputation. Crucifixion. Stoning.

Iranians who fall foul of the law… things like peacefully protesting, letting a lock or two of hair escape from under a headscarf, or daring to drive a car if someone is unfortunate enough to have been born with a vagina… are disappeared into torture facilities colloquially known as “fingernail factories.” And it goes without saying that the brutal torture dished out in those prisons includes sexual violence.

And women aged 13… actually, let’s call them what they are: 13-year-old children are deemed old enough to walk down the aisle. Although fathers can apply for an exemption if they want to marry off their baby girls even younger than that.

So, yeah.

Getting stoned.

Getting stoned in Iran does not mean what it does in the West.

Roll in the hay with someone you’re not married to?

Stoned to death.

Sneak a cheeky alcoholic beverage?

Stoned to death.

Same-sex snogging?

Stoned to death.

Just last week, an 18-year-old musician, Amirhossein Hatami, was convicted of moharabeh – enmity against God – and executed after months of torture following his arrest during the anti-regime protests in January.

So…

The mullahs are not good people.

No argument from me on that.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Where I’m going with this is to look at what’s being called “slopaganda.”

This is a canary in the coal-mine moment for the world. And right now, that bird is gasping for air.

Because even if the brains behind Explosive News claim they’re completely independent of the Iranian regime, thanks to slopaganda, they have achieved the impossible.

They have made the bad guys sympathetic.

“If truth isn’t flashy, it’s kinda lonely.”

Explosive News knows its audience. “Let’s face it,” they say. “If truth isn’t flashy, it’s kinda lonely.”

And their punchy, on-point clips are certainly flashy. They go viral because they’re so fucking shareable.

The Trump administration’s counterpunch?

Cringeworthy, triumphalist mash-ups of real-life footage from America’s attacks in Iran with Call of Duty clips. I almost called the paramedics to revive me from a crippling case of second-hand embarrassment.

It’s the equivalent of whacking a block of marble with a soggy facecloth.

Explosive Media’s efforts achieve everything Trump’s resident thumb-in-a-suit aka “communications” director, Stephen Cheung, has been unable to do via the White House’s amateurish attempts to win hearts and minds online.

So, what’s the difference?

It’s LEGO, for fuck’s sake!

I can tell you exactly why Explosive Media’s videos are making such a mark.

For a start, it’s LEGO. Who doesn’t have brilliant childhood memories of LEGO? Other than finding a piece with your foot in the shagpile.

Straight away, you’re hooked. Even though you’re watching bombs and flames and women and children fleeing in fear, it’s LEGO!

It’s co-opting an iconic and much-loved brand to communicate an idea. The warm-fuzzies it inspires make us drop our guard.

It’s the one guaranteed way of getting the attention of all those people out there who aren’t political; who don’t want to be confronted with grim scenes of death on the frontline.

It’s casting Mel Brooks as Hitler in The Producers.

The question, of course, is whether recasting psychopathic warmongers as bobble-headed and foolish toys diminishes the very real threat they represent.

That’s the payoff, I guess. Eyeballs on screen, yes. But at the cost of turning an existential crisis into a bit of a chuckle to like and repost.

But that’s what satire is all about.

Society stripped bare

Comedy and satire work because they pull back the curtain and reveal us for who we really are, not who we pretend to be.

Want to understand somebody? Learn what makes them laugh. It reveals more than you can imagine.

It’s even more true of an entire society. Find out what makes a community’s collective side split and you expose its soft underbelly.

Plato knew that. When a friend asked for a book recommendation so he might understand Athens, the philosopher recommended Aristophanes’ comedies.

Exposing our soft bits

Satire and humour have an important role to play in society.

Power takes its place on the podium. Humour’s job is to be the acid that eats away at the plinth while satire shines a light on its flaws. Neither is expected to offer a solution. Their job is to point out what’s not working.

There’s a long and noble tradition of comedians speaking truth to power with a brutality and frankness forbidden to others.

The court jesters of old were permitted to mock rulers without fear of retribution. They got away with quips against the rulers of the day that would have landed another’s head quite literally on the chopping block.

Jesters were given the fool’s cap and marotte mimicking the monarch’s royal crown and sceptre in acknowledgement of that unique right.

Even the deathly serious Martin Luther—he of the Reformation—used jest when he was ripping into the Catholic Church. He went so far as to call himself a court jester. And I’d like to believe that’s why he gave us the Diet of Worms, which will never not be funny to me.

Can you laugh at yourself?

That’s why a good measure of a person is their capacity to laugh at themselves.

With that in mind, it’s worth revisiting the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when then-President Obama ripped the tangerine blowhard a new one.

Donald Trump—at the time nothing more than a civilian in the audience—was pushing the “birther” conspiracy; the furphy that Obama was born in Africa, rather than Hawaii.

Obama roasted Trump to a crisp and served him on a platter with sides and condiments. You can see Trump steaming. It would be a wonderfully satisfying scene, if you didn’t also know that this was reported to be the moment at which the Great Fatsby decided to run for office.

In a fit of pique, Donald boycotted the dinner entirely during his first term. He’s planning to attend for the first time on 25 April this year.

Instead of a comedian, the 2026 dinner will feature a TikToker who reads minds. So, the Donald should be safe, as he appears to have lost his.

Laughing your head off… no jokes

Top of the list on a society’s health report card is how well it deals with satire when it’s turned inwards.

Take a look at the French Revolution. It was a very serious affair. When the short-lived people’s uprising was pushed aside by Napoleon—a small man with imperial ambitions—and the French monarchy made a return in the first decades of the 19th century, an artistic revolution took place that inspired a blossoming of caricature and satirical drawings.

Cartoonists like Honoré Daumier became superstars; the 19th century equivalent of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Their work criticising politics and morals spread across the nation like wildfire in the publications, La Caricature and then Le Charivari.

But then, the monarchy turned. In 1832, Daumier was thrown into prison for depicting King Louis-Philippe as a grotesque, pear-headed monster.

By 1835, political satire was banned outright.

Sound familiar?

That’s why fascists fear humour most of all.

Autocratic regimes see humour as an existential threat for good reason.

They control the populace with fear, division and anger. Violence is the lingua franca of fascism. Come at a Nazi with a baton, and they know how to fight back.

But tackle them with a well-placed quip, and it stops them in their tracks.

That’s because they laugh at people. They love a pratfall… a bit of slapstick.

But laughing with others? The nuance of irony? Self-deprecation? Satire? Deadpan? May as well be speaking a foreign tongue.

The art of satire

There’s a distinction between two of the main forms of satire, both dating back to Roman times.

The Roman satirist, Horace (65-8 BCE) was known for gently mocking social vices and human follies. Horatian satirists aim to inspire smiles, rather than fury.

Think the gentle ribbing behind The Simpsons, or Saturday Night Live, which spotlights politicians’ personal quirks through good-natured mimicry, rather than painting them as evil.

Juvenalian satire is the flipside of the same coin. Juvenal was another Roman satirist who lived in the second century AD. His humour was abrasive and razor-sharp. If he was around today, he’d find a spot in South Park’s writers’ room

It’s tempting to see the two satirists as reflecting the times in which they lived. Horace was working during the dying days of the Roman Republic, while Juvenal lived through the birth pangs and power struggles that characterised the early Roman Empire. Juvenal used parody and exaggeration to make monsters out of the men who expected to be worshipped as gods.

Sound familiar?

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

The Explosive News LEGO clips work so well because the best satire finds its way into our homes and everyday life. We understand it because it speaks our language.

And it survives. That’s why despots despise it. More often than not, satire makes more of an enduring mark than they do.

Case in point? Nursery rhymes. What better way to spread a message than to dress it up in bunting and deliver it to a baby’s crib?

Here’s just one example.

Mary Mary Quite Contrary isn’t a song about a woman who loves gardening. It’s a ditty about Bloody Mary, Henry VIII’s daughter. She’s also the “Bloody Mary” who gave us the drink.

Mary was a wild-eyed Papist as Britain was being torn apart by religious wars between the Protestants and the Catholics. Her “garden” in the nursery rhyme is about the graveyards she was filling with Protestant martyrs.

“Silver bells”? They were thumbscrews.

And “cockleshells”? Well, they were torture instruments used on male genitalia. And I don’t want to think too hard about that. But any man who heard his wife singing Mary Mary Quite Contrary to their wee ones back in the day would have been left with an enduring impression of the murderous queen.

Truth or fiction?

How much of that was truth? Who’s to tell?

Things like nursery rhymes, cartoons, and YouTube clips are effective because they’re woven into our social fabric. They have the potential to be Trojan horses; delivering a sucker punch to powerful forces that are too preoccupied with other business to see what’s going on in our living rooms.

That’s why they’re such a deadly instrument for propaganda.

Propaganda is the manipulation of beliefs to achieve a political end. As a term, it first cropped up in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV came up with the term Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or “Congregation for Propagating the Faith,” to describe the papacy’s mission to spread the Catholic doctrine across the globe.

Slopaganda

In 2025, a trio of scholars used the word “propaganda” to coin the fucking genius term, ‘slopaganda’ for the unholy mash of generative AI slop and propaganda we’re grappling with today.

To demonstrate just how far up to our necks in slop we are, the authors quoted the following figure: News Corp Australia is currently dishing up 3000 stories generated by AI a week. That’s right. 3,000. Stories. A. Week.

With four out of every five Australians turning to News Corp for their news, that is terrifying.

And not just because it’s a media company that peddles the Murdoch family’s narrative and world view.

The long-term impact of what this saturation-level of AI-generated slop means for all of us is next-level horrific.

Because it goes deeper than just selling ideas.

It’s changing the way our brains work. And in the digital age, there’s no escaping it.

Spreading the word

Propaganda has always been linked to technology. When the printing press made its first appearance in Renaissance Europe six-hundred years ago, it was a big win for those with an agenda to push.

It gave us pamphlets. Gazettes. Posters. Then, as literacy improved and there were enough people who could read them, newspapers like the ones printed in post-Revolution France appeared.

But with the 20th century, things really took off. Hitler’s poisonous mouthpiece, Joseph Goebbels, invited himself into Germany’s lounge rooms and cinemas, and spread the Nazi doctrine far and wide across film and radio.

Then the 21st century dawned.

“Flood the zone with shit.”

That was Steve Bannon in 2020 during his impeachment trial.

Whatever else he is, Bannon doesn’t miss much. He knew then that the fact more people were tapping into online news sources was a potential goldmine for those wanting to shape the political narrative.

As “mainstream media” became a slur and “fake news” entered the vernacular, trust in the Fourth Estate was undermined. Today, most people rely on unregulated social media sources for their news.

Don’t have to look far to see how this can play out.

Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where political advertising assisting the 2016 Trump campaign was created using data drawn from 67 million Facebook accounts without the users’ consent?

Cambridge Analytica is also believed to have helped sway the Brexit campaign.

Know who was one of the company’s vice presidents? Steve Bannon.

Yeah.

Amateur hour

But that was ten years ago. With the advent of generative AI, it’s amateur hour compared to what’s possible today.

Slopaganda can be produced and customised to target specific demographics at speed and in vast quantities.

We’re drowning in it.

And the means of digital dissemination available to flood the zone with shit makes the deluge almost impossible to stop.

Made to measure

But it’s more insidious than that.

Because the stories you encounter online are tailor-made to fit you.

This is something very new. And something we’re still grappling with, psychologically. Most of us are completely unaware of how comprehensively the things that appear on our screens are being filtered to fit whoever the algorithm thinks we are and, more ominously, what it wants us to think.

It used to be that you’d buy the same newspaper to read on the train into work as your mum, your neighbour, and the guy who had the desk beside you in the office. Sure, you’d all read the same article through a lens coloured by your unique life experience. But journalism back then was governed by a series of principles that held it apart from influence or opinion peddling. “Without fear of favour,” the saying went.

Today, you get news tailored to fit your beliefs, based on your online behaviour. This is a new form of propaganda.

It’s feeding you a party line you’ve already signed up for.

Attention economy

Slopaganda feeds you the same narrative, over and over. It confirms what you already believe, whether that’s based in fact or not.

And it works because there’s comfort to be found in the familiar.

The deluge of information available online is overwhelming. When we’re wading through the slop, we grab on to anything that seems familiar or looks entertaining.

That’s why Explosive News’ LEGO clips work so well. With limited time available to us, we’re careful about where we direct our attention.

Why so negative?

Bad stuff always does well online. No surprises there.

It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism. Remembering negative events might have saved your ancient ancestor’s life back in the days when they were wandering in the wilderness.

That’s why stories that trigger horror, fear, outrage, and grief have such an impact on us. Negative news worms its way into our brains because, subconsciously, we think one day it may save us.

Slopaganda taps into this.

It’s what Roland Barthes described as ‘exnomination.” It’s a “divide and conquer” method as old as the hills that reinforces negative stereotypes to create fear and suspicion between demographic groups. So, for example, reporting on crime committed by white people as “crime,” while at the same time describing crime by people of colour as “Black crime,” or “immigrant crime.”

By profiling you through your online behaviour, slopaganda will send content your way that magnifies your biases, preferences, and beliefs.

You’ll be ushered into a silo where all you ever hear are things you already think you know.

Microtargeting slopaganda will mean you never see anything that challenges your beliefs. And with what we now know about neuroplasticity, that is never going to work out well for us.

A divided population is a compliant population.

There’s a reason that works for would-be autocrats.

The people holding the reins of power would prefer us to waste our energy squabbling amongst ourselves rather than turning our attention to the shitfuckery going on upstairs.

That’s why there are no real moves to monitor and control the tsunami of slopaganda that’s drowning us. Why would they send us the lifeboats when it’s keeping us in check?

It’s bread and circuses for the modern era.

Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

And now, the world is doing Explosive News’ job for them. Gone are the days of having to head out in the dead of night with clag and brushes to whack propaganda posters up on billboards.

We’re posting and reposting their political rhetoric for them.

We’re all unwitting and unpaid promoters of Iranian propaganda.

I did not have that on my bingo card for 2026.

Last week, Explosive News’ YouTube channel was banned.

A short time later, it was resurrected on Instagram.

The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

Which leads us to “Brandolini’s Law,” or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

In 2013, programmer Alberto Brandolini declared that the “amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

But there’s nothing new under the sun.

Jonathan Swift got there first in 1710 when he wrote “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”

Strange days, indeed.

What do you think? Are you drowning in slopaganda? Or are you managing to stay afloat? Let me know in the comments.

The post LEGO’s Role in Viral Anti-War Propaganda first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.