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The Quarterly Essay

Quarterly Essay presents significant contributions to the general debate. Each issue contains a single essay written at a length of about 25,000 words. It aims to present the widest range of political, intellectual and cultural opinion.

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Publisher : Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd.

ISSN: 1444-884X; 1832-0953

Categories: News, Politics & Social Issues; Literary

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Quarterly Essay

Quarterly Essay 93: Bad Cop - Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics

Lech Blaine

Where will Dutton lead the Coalition?

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Quarterly Essay 92: The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It

Alan Kohler

What caused Australia's housing crisis – and how we might fix it

Quarterly Essay 91: Lifeboat - Disability, Humanity and the NDIS

Micheline Lee

What ails the NDIS?

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Quarterly Essay 90: Voice of Reason - On Recognition and Renewal

Megan Davis

Why a First Nations Voice to Parliament is a ‘constitutional moment’ that offers a new vision of Australia

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Quarterly Essay 89: The Wires That Bind - Electrification and Community Renewal

Saul Griffith

A compelling vision of green energy at a local level

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Quarterly Essay 88: Lone Wolf - Albanese and the New Politics

Katharine Murphy

A portrait of a leader in the making, and a nation on the move

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Quarterly Essay 87: Uncivil Wars - How Contempt is Corroding Democracy

Waleed Aly,Scott Stephens

Why is public debate increasingly polarised - and what can we do about it?

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Quarterly Essay 86: Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America

Is the US-Australia alliance now based on a fantasy?

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Quarterly Essay 85: Not Waving, Drowning

Sarah Krasnostein

How can we mend Australia’s broken mental health system?

Quarterly Essay 84: The Reckoning - How #MeToo is Changing Australia

Tracing the impact of Australia’s #MeToo moment

Quarterly Essay 83: Top Blokes - The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power

What makes a top bloke? Does the myth of the larrikin still hold sway? And whatever happened to class in Australia?

Quarterly Essay 82: Exit Strategy - Politics After the Pandemic

George Megalogenis

In the wake of the pandemic, will we see a new politics of social security and concern for the future?

Quarterly Essay 81: Getting to Zero

Alan Finkel

An essential guide to how Australia can tackle the climate crisis

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Quarterly Essay 80: The High Road - What Australia can Learn from New Zealand

Laura Tingle

In a tumultuous year, Australia and New Zealand have never been closer, as we move towards a shared travel zone. But why, despite being so close, do we seem to…

Quarterly Essay 79: The End of Certainty - Scott Morrison and pandemic politics

An urgent, grounded essay about Scott Morrison and conservatism today by one of Australia’s leading commentators and analysts.

Quarterly Essay 78: The Coal Curse - Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future

Judith Brett

In this nuanced and insightful essay, Judith Brett looks at the consequences of Australia’s coal addiction, from stalled climate-change policy to tensions between farmers and miners. She assesses where to…

Quarterly Essay 77: Cry Me A River - The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling Basin

Margaret Simons

The Murray-Darling Basin is the food bowl of Australia, and it’s in trouble. What does this mean for the future - for water and food, and for the people and…

Quarterly Essay 76: Red Flag - Waking Up to China’s Challenge

Peter Hartcher

China has become a key nation for Australia’s future - for our security, economy and identity. But what are China’s intentions and strategy when it comes to Australia?

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Quarterly Essay 75: Men at Work: Australia’s Parenthood Trap

Annabel Crabb

In this  Quarterly Essay , Annabel Crabb deploys political observation, workplace research and her characteristic humour and intelligence to argue that gender equity cannot be achieved until men are as…

Quarterly Essay 74: The Prosperity Gospel – How Scott Morrison Won and Bill Shorten Lost

Erik Jensen

A dazzling and insightful look at the federal election, built from pen portraits and reports from the campaign trail.

Quarterly Essay 73: Australia Fair - Listening to the Nation

Rebecca Huntley

In this vivid, grounded essay, Rebecca Huntley looks at the state of the nation and asks: what does social-democratic Australia want, and why?

Quarterly Essay 72: Net Loss - The Inner Life in the Digital Age

Sebastian Smee

We live in an age of constant distraction. Is there a price to pay for this?

In this superb essay, renowned critic Sebastian Smee explores the fate of the inner…

Quarterly Essay 68: Without America - Australia in the New Asia

America is fading, and China will soon be the dominant power in our region. What does this mean for Australia’s future?

Quarterly Essay 67: Moral Panic 101 - Equality, Acceptance and the Safe Schools Scandal

Benjamin Law

Are Australian schools safe? And if they’re not, what happens when kids are caught in a bleak collision between ill-equipped school staff and a confected media scandal?

Quarterly Essay 66: The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock

The Great Barrier Reef is dying. Extreme weather is becoming all too familiar. And the Coalition government is divided and paralysed.

Quarterly Essay 65: The White Queen - One Nation and the Politics of Race

Most Australians despise what Pauline Hanson stands for, yet politics in this country is now orbiting around One Nation.

Quarterly Essay 64: The Australian Dream - Blood, History and Becoming

In a landmark essay, Stan Grant writes Indigenous people back into the economic and multicultural history of Australia. This is the fascinating story of how fringe dwellers fought not just…

Quarterly Essay 62: Firing Line - Australia’s Path to War

James Brown

Going to war may be the gravest decision a nation and its leaders make. At the moment, Australia is at war with ISIS. We also live in a region that…

Quarterly Essay Issue 59: Faction Man - Bill Shorten’s Path to Power

The top job is within Bill Shorten’s grasp. But who is he? How did he rise to become Labor leader? And does he have what it takes to beat Malcolm…

Clivosaurus: The Politics of Clive Palmer: Quarterly Essay 56

In Clivosaurus, Guy Rundle observes Palmer close up, examining his rise to prominence, his beliefs, his deals and his politics - not to mention his poetry. Rundle shows that neither…

Dragon’s Tail: The Lucky Country after the China Boom: Quarterly Essay 54

Andrew Charlton

In this timely Quarterly Essay, Andrew Charlton demolishes some myths about Australia’s long boom. Around 2000 Australia’s economy became tied to the supercharged rise of China. We had the good…

That Sinking Feeling: Quarterly Essay 53

Paul Toohey

In Quarterly Essay 53, Paul Toohey looks at one of Tony Abbott’s signature promises: to stop the boats. Has his government succeeded? If so, at what cost?

Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation

Rather than relaxed and comfortable, Australians are disenchanted with politics and politicians. In this brilliant short book - an expanded and updated version of her acclaimed Quarterly Essay - Laura…

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Man-Made World: Choosing between Progress and Planet: Quarterly Essay 44

Across the globe, economists and environmentalists vie over who has the right response to climate change, population or food security issues. In this groundbreaking essay Charlton argues that our descendants…

Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation: Quarterly Essay 43

Robert Manne

In the third Quarterly Essay for 2011, Robert Manne investigates the forces that shape public debate in Australia. When it comes to key issues for the nation, who sets the…

Quarterly Essay 3: The Opportunist - John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction

What have the Howard years meant for Australia? In this third election issue of Quarterly Essay, Guy Rundle answers this question and looks ahead to the type of government that…

Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era

In the aftermath of the 2010 election, Megalogenis considers what has happened to politics in Australia. He dissects the cycle of polls, focus groups and presidential politics and explores what…

Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era: Quarterly Essay 40

Power Shift: Australia’s Future Between Washington and Beijing: Quarterly Essay 39

This essay considers Australia’s place between China and the US. As the power balance shifts and China’s influence grows, what might this mean for the nation? How to define the…

Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd: Quarterly Essay 38

This irreverent, controversial account is a ground-breaking, in-depth profile that traces Rudd’s years in Queensland, in China, in opposition and finally in government. Based on extensive research, observation and interviewing…

What’s Right?: The Future of Conservatism in Australia AUDIO BOOK EDITION

What did George W. Bush and John Howard do to conservatism? In their wake, the conservative parties in the US and Australia seem to have lost their way. How did…

What’s Right? The Future of Conservatism in Australia: Quarterly Essay 37

Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country

Mungo MacCullum

In Australian Story, Mungo MacCallum investigates the political success of Kevin Rudd. What does he know about Australia that his opponents don’t? This is a characteristically barbed and perceptive look…

Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country: Quarterly Essay 36

Mungo MacCallum

Mungo MacCallum investigates political leadership in Australia, past and present. This is a barbed and perceptive look at the challenges facing the Rudd government and Australia. MacCallum argues that the…

Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia: Quarterly Essay 35

Noel Pearson

Noel Pearson argues that nothing is more crucial to future success than a proper education, and that too many in our society are being left behind. He also looks critically…

Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull: Quarterly Essay 34

Malcolm Turnbull has quite a job ahead of him as leader of the Liberal Party. How is he going so far? What can we expect in the years ahead? This…

Quarry Vision: Coal, Climate Change and the End of the Resources Boom: Quarterly Essay 33

This is an essay about ‘quarry vision’, the mindset that sees Australia’s greatest asset as its mineral and energy resources, coal especially. How has this distorted our national politics and…

American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama: Quarterly Essay 32

Kate Jennings

Timed to come out immediately after the November 2008 election in the US, it offers a series of memorable snapshots of America in fascinating flux: Bush’s last days in office…

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WRITING & PUBLISHING

Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein on writing Quarterly Essays

Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein are the two most recent authors of Quarterly Essays. Jess released The Reckoning: How #MeToo Is Changing Australia in late 2021, and Sarah released Not Waving, Drowning: Mental illness and Vulnerability in Australia in early 2022. Quarterly Essays are prestigious, but they are notoriously difficult and always come with intense time pressure. In this interview, Jess and Sarah discuss how they did it and why they signed up for it.

Jess  is an investigative journalist and the author of See What You Made Me Do . She has been a producer for ABC Radio and journalist for Background Briefing , and Middle East correspondent for  The Global Mail . Her reporting on domestic abuse has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards.  See What You Made Me Do  won the 2020 Stella Prize and the ABA Booksellers’ Choice Adult Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

Sarah  is the multi-award-winning author of  The Trauma Cleaner and  The Believer .  Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals in Australia, the United Kingdom and America. She holds a doctorate in criminal law.

ASTRID: Welcome Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein. I can't believe the two of you are appearing together on The Garret.

JESS: Here we are.

SARAH: Today.

JESS: Thank you both for joining us. And today I want to be really nerdy, which works for The Garrett and The Garret's audience. I want to talk about the Quarterly Essays now.

Jess Hill, you wrote your first Quarterly Essay last year, published at the end of 2021, about #MeToo. And Sarah, you have just released your first Quarterly Essay about mental illness and vulnerability. I'd like to ask both of you, what does a Quarterly Essay represent? And why have you both put yourself through the sheer horror and pain and suffering of writing one?

Jess, yours was published first, so we'll start with you.

JESS: Oh, I've already gone through part of the amnesia process, because it's been several months since I finished it. Look, I've always been a fan of the Quarterly Essay format, partly because it's substantial enough to be a thorough investigation of a topic, but it doesn't carry the pressure of a book because it's only around for a few months. Well, unless you write a classic.

And to be honest, Chris Feik from Schwartz had been asking me to write a Quarterly for a while and I sort of had been resisting because there's just a lot going on. And then, then he said, ‘Well. Like, okay, what about #MeToo? Write about #MeToo’. And I'm like, ‘Okay’.

So as usual, like my life just kind of carries me along this drift. Because people asked me to do things. It wasn't burning inside me to write a Quarterly Essay about the #MeToo movement. And much like when I wrote about domestic abuse for the first time, I actually was a bit like, ‘Oh, what am I going to spend 20 to 40,000 words writing about #MeToo? Hasn't it all been written? It's something that's been flogged to death, this subject’. And sure enough, within days, you realise, well actually, as usual, it has been written about a lot, but certain narratives have solidified that really need messing with and reinterrogating. Of course you could actually write that much just on the last 12 months in Australia, let alone the developing weather system that exploded into me too. So I wish I could say, ‘Oh, this has been formulating in my mind for months and finally I got the opportunity to put it on paper’. I wish I was like a more meaningful person sometimes like that, when really a lot of the time I'm just a hack who's been asked to write something.

SARAH: You have to refer to that as negative capability, Jess. You are a meaningful person, you're just waiting to use it.

JESS: That's right. I think my internalised self-critic stops me being a deeply meaningful person on that level of driving forward. It's just like, ‘Oh, they think I'm good enough to write about that. Okay. I guess I will’.

ASTRID: Look Jess, being thought of as good enough to write a Quarterly Essay is a compliment. But also Sarah, and I are both going to make you leave behind or put aside for now your self-deprecating way and really embrace the fact that you are one of the authors of a Quarterly Essay that has written a classic, right? No, one's going to forget the Quarterly Essay on #MeToo.

JESS: Oh, thanks Astrid.

ASTRID: And Sarah, you now have also written a Quarterly Essay. It just has hit the shelves. You went in knowing this was a tough gig. Why and how?

SARAH: I wrongly, as it would turn out, thought this would be refreshing sorbet between books. I thought, ‘Oh, like that's not book long. That's fine. You can't really go past 40,000 words. And it's an essay. I love an essay. So I'll do that between my last book and disappearing into the next one’. And I was a 100 per cent wrong about the refreshing palette cleansing character of what this is. But at the same time, everything about it is quirky.

So the style notes that you get from Chris are a word discursive document about... [Laughter] A very loose dos and don'ts. And I am such a nerd that when I read these notes, I teared up because it is the ideal form for me to take. It's noteworthy in its lack of prescription on the format. Apart from that there shouldn't be too strident a policy analysis, which is the reason why I left my legal work. And it should be the largest possible view of a current issue. You have the freedom to do that in a formally inventive way or not, or whatever, as long as you're coming at it originally in the substance, and the form is flexible enough to allow you to do that.

Wonderful, very touching, poignant, lovely. And then there's the horror of that degree of freedom when you're just trying to come up with something original. And it's a lot.

ASTRID: I've previously spoken to others who have written Quarterly Essays, including Ben Law. And everybody seems a little bit shell shocked afterwards because of the intense time period that all the research has to happen. A Quarterly Essay is of course published four times a year, and you can't push the deadline back in any significant manner.

You both are writing about nuanced and complicated areas of life. You are also writing about them two years into a global pandemic that has directly impacted the subject matter that you are writing about. How does that change your approach? So for example, rates of domestic abuse. Potentially terrifying when we think about lockdowns in Australia, Jess, and I don't know a single person whose mental health is as good as it once was, particularly in Melbourne that experienced the very long lockdowns. So when you are putting out such a document, how do you even place it in the context of a global pandemic?

JESS: It's been interesting the way that #MeToo had such a resurgence in Australia right in the middle of COVID. We were so stuck within our four walls, and even when we weren't in technical lockdown, everything was pretty much lockdown. There was so little interaction. And yet there was, in terms of the so-called women's movement or women's issues, this massive public reckoning. And very public. On the streets and are coming together and are dividing apart. And all these things was going on at a time when we weren't even really seeing each other in person, which flavours it in a way, because it's easier to objectify people, even from within your own movement or on your own side, for want of a better word, when you don't see them in person for a couple of years. So, you can start to get very heady about things and not drop into the humanity of it.

When it came to writing about it, I don't think I was really conscious of placing it within the conditions that we were in. Because I think with the Quarterly , even though it is transient in its format, I also think you're writing a historical record. So that was really, for me, the most important thing was to write a clear... And as Sarah's saying, like do it from the broadest possible view... Record how #MeToo came about, or my personal view on that, because there will be a million different interpretations of that, and then how it bounced through Australia to what it became in 2021 and how it exploded in Parliament. And so that for me was more important.

I have to say also is that as personally, just coming off the back of a lot of work. The SBS series had just finished earlier in the year, then I did a podcast series and there was no break in between at all. And I was pretty burnt out. And poor Chris and everybody at Black Inc, I feel like I owe just unrelenting gifts because from the time that I started writing, I had seven weeks until print. I submitted the last chapter the night before we went to print! So in a way, that rushed, very rushed, very quick period of writing and editing meant that I couldn't get too carried away with even placing it in any context. It had to roar out of me, and I had to not make any mistakes.

I'm sure Sarah had this too, that thing of being so responsible for people's not just individual stories, but the stories that unite so many stories. You have a lot of responsibility to get that right. You have a lot of responsibility for your sources. A lot of my focus was just on how can I make sure that I am doing the best by the people who are named in this essay, and that I am representing the people who are not, and who have not been platformed. And the rest was just like cross fingers and hope.

ASTRID: Your topic is slightly different, Sarah, and you do draw the linkage between mental health and Jess's essay. For example, instances of mental ill health turn up in the system, first and foremost, through instances of violence in the home. What do the two of you think – and I know you didn't pre-plan this, Jess, I don't think you would've known whose essay was coming after you – but what is the statement of two Quarterly Essays coming out that are about not traditional policy issues, not traditional men's business, if I can be so broad as to label it like that? We're talking about women, we're talking about #Metoo, we're talking about mental health, which affects everybody but is so often stigmatised and not admitted to. What is the cumulative impact of two Quarterly Essays ?

SARAH: Well, I've been thinking about not this exact question, but these issues for something else I'm working on, which is much more creative writing, but I think the point transposed as well onto that question.

One of my many bug bears is a focus on the discourse, national history, or the sections of a newspaper along entirely arbitrary, and now canonical lines, so there is such a thing as ‘economics’ or ‘economic history’ or ‘political history’ or ‘military history’, when it's all social history. And it is all inexorably co-created, relationally sourced issues manifesting in different parts of our institutional collective life. So I think it's not inevitable in the sense that nothing's really inevitable, but it makes sense to me that there would be two gal writers having a go at examining our collective life through the prisms that Jess and I have chosen to look at a very complex – I'm trying to phrase this without swearing –

ASTRID: You're allowed to swear.

SARAH: – clusterfuck of national policies through our chosen lenses… That I think the significance. Rather than writing more abstractly about politics as a separate entity or international patterns or relations separately, we are looking quite clearly at what we value and the gaps between our national rhetoric and our enduring collective behavioural patterns, whether they manifest as seemingly intractable patterns of interpersonal violence in the home or the workplace (where the overwhelming majority, but certainly not all victims are female), or whether it manifests also in the home, but in our public life and in our criminal justice system, in our educational system, in our healthcare system, as this kind of compulsively repeated pattern of caring about fixing these problems only so much and no further.

So that's a very long way of not answering the question, I apologise.

JESS: Oh, that's really made me think a lot just when you were talking there, Sarah, about Martha Gellhorn, who was one of my sort of original journalistic heroes. And for those who haven't heard of Martha, one of the first female war correspondence, very much of her own making, known for instead of reporting the ‘game of war’ and what's going through the minds of the strategists and the high profile commanders, she got like right down onto the street and with the people. And particularly the story about the invasion of Finland where she's like... It was really a different way of doing war reporting. And I think that through the prism of what people might see as the softer – not softer in terms of their impact, but the sort of like more touchy feeling of feminine issues like mental illness or domestic abuse, or #MeToo, is that actually, as you say, you are talking about very serious political and policy issues, but you're coming through the prism of human experience rather than keeping it in this sort of unreachable cerebral level. But there is still very much a contest of ideas, but making sure that it doesn't get separate from the grassroots, from the actual experience of the living people who are subject to the whims and fancies of all these great thinkers and strategic masterminds and politicians.

Sometimes I think the more feminine issues, what they do is actually just bring us back to Earth and give us a better chance at finding better solutions than just talking at the policy level.

SARAH: And I think it's also a way of short circuiting a lot of the debate about issues on which we have too much empirical data for this to be a debate. It goes straight to the human heart of the matter. It's the so what of these potentially rarefied debates about what it looks like to do institutional reform in late stage capitalism, blah, blah blah. So what? How does it impact us on a daily basis in the home, all of us together? That makes a something much more pressing.

JESS: When we continually relate it back to the grassroots, it also takes those academic ideas about reform or about smashing systems or about... I think when you are really reporting from that level of the personal, you have to take those ideas through to their end point. Like okay, if we were to do this really interesting reform, how would it affect X, Y, ?. Or if we were to just forget reforming the system, because the system is so entirely buggered, what is the actual effect of that? Because I think we can get stuck – I mean, everywhere in the world, but we can get really stuck in these academic sort of niches and new sort of normal niche comes along that academics and thinkers want to explore, but can so often be disconnected from. Well, how would that actually work in reality? Instead of just like, how does it make us feel or how interesting is it to explore?

SARAH: Yeah.

ASTRID: I don't think I would be able to find a reader of either of your Quarterly Essays who didn't feel and understand and empathise with what you're writing about. But the Quarterly Essay is a niche audience, Quarterly Essays aren't read by everyone. And so a question for both of you. Who is the audience of the Quarterly Essay ?

JESS: There is the subscriber base. So there's the rusted ons, about 9,000 or 10,000 people. And then it's really, I think, a matter of who do you reach with it? There are obviously people who are going to be more inclined to buy a journal of this kind, just exploring ideas. They're probably more likely to be the Radio National audience, for example. God bless the a Radio National audience. But what I found really interesting is – especially going to events in the last few weeks, and one in particular at the Adelaide Writers Festival, where I appeared with Grace Tame – is that when it came to the signing line, these were not just standard Quarterly Essay readers. And in fact, many said they'd never bought a Quarterly Essay and were now really interested in finding out more about it. I had high school girls buying the Quarterly Essay . Teachers. So sometimes, I think the Quarterly Essay audience is to an extent what you can make it and to an extent related to the topic. So when Alan Finkel writes about are getting to zero emissions, he's going to get a different audience to the audience that me and Sarah are going to get for our essays. And fortunately, writers festivals and other institutions are quite keen to promote Quarterly Essays , like they've got a reasonable amount of status. So yeah, sometimes it's just about what can you generate and what audience can you generate?

Sarah: The thing that's always struck me about it is how it punches above its weight, not just with the leadership, but with the potential influence, if it resonates in a certain way. It can set an agenda in more daily newspapers, for or against, whatever. It gets topics ventilated outside a rarefied circle. So, I mean, I like a rarefied circle very much, don't get me wrong. But if you want to do this professionally, you can't just live there. So it is the best of both worlds in that sense. It first has to pass through a very considered, particularly literary, I want to say, or engaged audience before it gets into the discourse more generally (if it's going to do so).

JESS: That's, that's a really good point. I think because there are some journals that do tend to remain much more within the readership, like sometimes the Griffith Review and other journals. It'll be very rare for them to go outside of their known audiences, but because the Quarterly Essay is topical, it becomes news just by being a quarterly. And yeah, like I mean, extracts go in the paper. And I think if we look at these things as a system, that even if people don't actually read the whole essay, that they'll probably engage with some of the ideas that were presented in it, through all of these other... Through your podcast, and through the ways in which it's promoted.

ASTRID: This is a podcast for writers, and I often speak to writers about how they represent the viewpoints and the voices of others. I want to ask you that, but before we get there, I want to just stay on the Quarterly Essay topic. Because the Quarterly Essay is a thing, sometimes rarefied, sometimes breaking out to a whole lot of a wider audience. What does it take to get selected to be the writer of a Quarterly Essay ? Because I feel like that's a rarefied list. And if I can insert myself with an opinion here, it is changing over time, the list of who gets to write a Quarterly Essay . So my question to you both is, who gets to write a Quarterly Essay, and why do you think you were picked?

Jess, you're laughing at me. I know there's thorny things in there.

JESS: No, no, nothing. Nothing particularly thorny. Who gets picked? There's a very large conversation about who gets chosen to represent the intellectual side of Australia. And this is not to cast shade on Schwartz, but more just how that landscape gets created in general. The list is still pretty overwhelmingly white. That needs work. You know, when I was a producer at the ABC, you needed to really consciously... I actually needed to consciously when I was putting panels together, make sure that they were 50 per cent women represented because 10 years ago that was actually the work that needed to be done. And now there is much more work to be done that is close to the surface.

I think that the Quarterly Essay , it strikes me that it is a pretty rare person that writes long form in Australia and long form journalism. You do have to have the experience, and I guess some runs on the board to be able to write something like this in such a short period of time. I couldn't have written this before I wrote my book, I think that was a really great sort of staging ground. I know other writers of Quarterly Essays who maybe haven't written a book before have been really shocked at how hardcore it is. And I guess to an extent, there needs to be some name recognition, I think, because the Quarterly Essay does, as Sarah saying, try to set a bit of an agenda. So some expertise in the area that you're writing about or some name recognition. But yeah, aside from that, I don't know.

SARAH: I would second all that. And I think that observation just about kind of the dearth of spaces to write at length factually and creatively is not something that we really have a lot of. And if it's the length that you are... My background was academic immediately before I wrote my first book, and I would get more scared by 1,200 words than 40,000 words, which is my length. And I enjoy having the space to do that. And even in the compressed kind of deadline, it's still time to let the issues aerate and marinate, and it's a really unique space. So, I think it does select people that have that experience and are sufficiently masochistic that they are enthusiastic about doing it.

But I agree also, Astrid, that it is changing over time. I mean, when I think back to my favourite ones before it even occurred to me that I too might throw my hat in the ring for it, it was Anna Krien – both of her’s, but particularly the live export market, Jess's now, and the observations from Rebecca Huntley. And I'm not looking for the gal writers specifically, I'm looking at these topics and also the way in which most of them were written. So I have other ones that I really enjoyed as well, but what I can tell you off the top of my head, these were the ones that made me think that I too would be good at doing that, or at least capable of asking, of pitching without having a laugh come back. They are the female ones. But yes, I agree. The diversity issue does need to be addressed.

JESS: I think also there's obviously a crossover with Black Inc authors and the Quarterly Essay , although after what I put the team through with See What You Made Me Do around deadline, they should have known it would be probably repeated.

It was interesting seeing Lech Blaine's essay that came before mine. That's not a diversity on a cultural level, but on a class level, it represents something very different for the Quarterly Essay . Having come from writing memoir –  memoir that obviously is doing a lot more heavy lifting than just telling a story with car crash, talking about masculinity and so many other things, and trauma – his style of writing the Quarterly Essay was very unlike almost any Quarterly Essay that came before it.

You know, he wrote quite consciously on and off in ‘Boganese’. It was very much writing... Almost like Gonzo writing on lyricism. The whole writing style is lyricism. And I was really inspired by what he did with the form, which was very different. Coming from a very working class background brought a totally different sensibility. I think that was really... I would love to see more chances taken on people who don't come out of the mould. I don't think myself or Sarah come out of a mould per se, but I think that Lech was the furthest outside what you would expect as an author of a Quarterly Essay .

SARAH: That is such a good point, Jess. I think that it also speaks to a new way of looking at Australian history that is the thread that the last... Well, I think like you can trace in the last two, two or three years worth of Quarterly Essays . It's a new way of looking at what in the world are the enduring persisting patterns that takes it out of where... To whom those traditional modes of history and historical debate have been assigned. As, you know, ‘This is the way of looking at credible academic or scholarly history’.

Lech is a perfect example of that, seeing these continuities, these patterns, these values, their expression, how it falls on the ear, how we are meant to understand things said and things meant. He brings all of his particular background characteristics to understanding that and illuminating that terrain. So I think that's another kind of subtle trend.

ASTRID: Another thing about the Quarterly Essay is the correspondence at the end and the right of reply. So Sarah, this hasn't happened to you yet, but it will in about three months.

JESS: You wait.

ASTRID: In your essay, Sarah, there are letters published in response to Jess's previous essay. And of course your right of reply, Jess. So, two questions. Firstly, how does that feel personally, because this is not something common in widely available non-fiction published in Australia, the fact that you reprint the supporting or opposing views? And what is the role of that correspondence in the Quarterly Essay ?

JESS:  You know, I was having a chat to Anthony Lowenstein about something kind of corollary to this yesterday. And it was about sort of the dearth of intellectual disagreement amongst Australian writers, particularly at writers festivals, which is both, I think, a symptom of how Australia has become quite anti-intellectual, and also of the fact that many on the Right who get platformed fall into a pretty narrow band of culture warriors. I think the so-called Right or conservative media has become pretty bad at platforming its intellectuals, because that wasn't what was getting bang for their buck.  So there's a paucity there. And of course, writers festivals, they're a bit of a circuit and getting writers to come across for $300 a session, coming interstate, I guess maybe some writers would be turned off if they were heading into a sparring match. But there is that sort of... As you say, there's not a lot of space for disagreement. And even in reviews it can be that you find that person writing the review of that other person's book, they're friends, they're mates. It's a very small writing community. So what's great about the Quarterly Essay correspondence. It's not that you have some sparring match at the back, but it's that it is encouraged. This is not going to risk your connection with that person, that we are supposed to be interrogating the ideas. It's not personal. It'd be great if there was more of it.

Now, when it came to the correspondence to mine, most of it was just lovely. I was really lucky. I was really wondering like, ‘Oh, what's this going to be like?’ And some of it was... Certainly some of it interrogated things I hadn't managed to interrogate, and added new things that I hadn't even thought of.

The only real challenge came from Janet Albrechtsen. And I really wanted that challenge to be nuanced and sophisticated. I wanted that even against my own better knowledge. And look, there were parts. But again, it was just in that culture warrior frame where it felt like to engage with it critically was being sucked into that vortex. And even points that she made that just, given a bit more thought, would've had more meat on their bones just came across quite shallow. Such as, ‘If I'd been a more curious writer, I would've looked at how certain people, read women, have taken advantage of the #MeToo movement for their own ends’. There's a point to be made there about how #MeToo can be used in all different ways, but the inference there is really clear that it would be women who are trying to corner men. I think we've seen from both sides various types of ways that me too has been weaponized. But not really so much in terms of false allegations – in fact, that was more heralded as a likelihood by people like Janet and her ilk, and didn't come to fruition, not in any high profile way that we've seen. So there was just things like that where I thought, ‘A bit more thinking in this response would make this a really interesting sort of debate’. But instead I feel like I didn't really even give what you are saying that much attention because you're coming at it from a warrior perspective and it's really boring.

So there's a bit... I think what the correspondence does, even when it's not disagreeing or trying to spar, is it does bring out your blind spots. And I thought it was a great response to Lech's essay before mine from Allison Pennington, really talking about his focus on male larrikin figures and where were the female larrikin? Where was the Julia Gillards, those sorts of figures? And that was a blind spot in Lech's approach, or perhaps just it wasn't a narrative he was exploring. It's great just to open up that whole concept to other eyes because you can't, in that short amount of time (even if you do use up all of your words as Lech and Sarah and I have), you're just not going to get everything. You've got your own path that you're treading.

SARAH: And we're not unfamiliar when you publish... The exception isn't hearing back from readers, the exception is having a right of reply. We mostly have to tolerate definite legitimate criticism which improves our endeavours, and equally many criticisms that are ideologically driven and factually lacking. We just have to suck that up 99 per cent of the time, because it doesn't behoove the position to get into a shit slinging match with readers that just don't like your work. That's part of the job. You develop a scab or a bruise or techniques of taking it on and forgetting or what have you. So to have that dialogue format is really rare and, I think, precious.

Because like Jess said, when you write about life, it is in ineluctably partial and selective. And we have our own focus areas for our own reasons and to be able to speak and disagree in a respectful environment – or, if it's not respectful, at least in an environment where people are equally heard. I mean, that is really a beautiful thing… So I'm telling myself this now and I'm going to play it back when the bile is rising, I'm sure, in three month’s time.

JESS: Oh, what you have to look forward to, Sarah.

ASTRID: Sarah and Jess, I would like to thank you both for speaking to me, but I would also like to say as an avid fan of the Quarterly Essay series, with all its ups and downs, I do think that you have both written classics. Jess, your work on me too, Sarah, your work on mental ill health are exceptional.

My favourite ever Quarterly Essay was Karen Hitchcock's from 2015, I believe, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly. And I cried the first time I read that, and she identified everything that went wrong with the aged care system through the pandemic, and we all found out the hard way, the brutal way. That's how important I think Quarterly Essays are – they give us the understanding of what we should have about what matters.

Thank you so very much and may everybody start to read the Quarterly Essays .

JESS: Thank you, Astrid. Thank you, Sarah.

SARAH: Thanks.

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Australian housing wealth is meaningless, destructive and fundamentally changing our society

High-priced homes do not create wealth, Alan Kohler says, they redistribute it. Now financial success is largely a function of geography, not accomplishment

• Alan Kohler on how housing policy entrenches inequality – Australian politics podcast
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My parents were married in 1951 and, with a war service loan, bought a block of land in South Oakleigh, eight miles from Melbourne’s central business district.

I don’t know what my dad was making then, but apparently the average wage in 1951 was about 6 pounds, 11 shillings a week, or £341 a year. And judging by average prices back then, they would have paid about £1,000 for the land. (By the way, the median house price had more than doubled in 1950, recovering from the big fall caused by price controls during the second world war, on which more later.)

Dad was a carpenter and built the house himself, including making the bricks, working on weekends and at night, and Mum and Dad lived in a garage, to which I was brought home when I was born and where I spent the first three years of my life. But if they had bought a house and land package, which was rather more common than building it yourself, they would have paid about £1,250. So, like the median family at the time, they would have paid about 3.5 times household income (Mum didn’t work) for their first house, which was about average for the time.

When my wife and I bought our first house, in 1980, we paid roughly the median house price of $40,000, and I was making around the average weekly earnings as a young journalist – $220 a week, or $11,500 a year. So we also paid about 3.5 times my salary for the house, although we were better off than my parents because my wife was working, for about the same salary as mine, and my mum didn’t, which was normal for both times. Workforce participation for 30-year-old women had increased from 32% to 50% by 1980, as a result of the social/sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.

Over the past four years our three children and their partners all bought their own first houses. They’re doing it later than we did, and much later than my parents, so they’re making better money, and both partners are working, of course, but they paid about 7.5 times each income for their houses. That is typical: in August 2023 the median Australian house price was $732,886, which was 7.4 times annualised average weekly earnings.

In other words, my children – and all young people today – are paying more than twice the multiple of their income for a house than their parents – and their grandparents – did, and it’s only vaguely possible because both partners work to pay it off.

The problem started with the new millennium.

It is impossible to overstate the significance to Australian society of what happened then. The shift that began in about 2000 in the relationship between the cost of housing and both average incomes and the rest of the economy has altered everything about the way Australia operates and Australians live.

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Six per cent compound annual growth in the value of houses over the past 23 years versus 3% annual growth in average incomes has meant that household debt has had to increase from half to twice average disposable income, and from 40% of GDP to 120%. This is the most important single fact about the Australian economy . The large amount of housing debt Australians carry means that interest rates have a much greater impact on their lives, and this in turn affects inflation, wages, employment and economic growth. In the Australian economy, the price of houses is not everything but it’s almost everything, as the economist Paul Krugman once said of productivity.

Land and energy are the two basic economic inputs apart from labour, but while Australia has more of both than just about any other country, we export most of the energy and price our own at global parity, so there’s no homegrown advantage there, and we crowd into a few cities and pay each other seven to eight times our salaries for land.

High-priced houses do not create wealth; they redistribute it. And it’s meaningless because we can’t use the wealth to buy anything else – a yacht or a fast car. We can only buy other expensive houses: sell your house and you have to buy another one, cheaper if you’re downsizing, more expensive if you’re still growing a family. At the end of your life, your children get to use your housing wealth for their own housing, except that we’re all living so much longer these days it’s usually too late to be useful. And much of this housing wealth is concentrated in Sydney, where the median house value is $1.1m, double that of Perth and regional Australia.

It’s destructive because of the inequality that results: with so much wealth concentrated in the home, it stays with those who already own a house and within their families. For someone with little or no family housing equity behind them, it’s virtually impossible to break out of the cycle and build new wealth.

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It will be impossible to return the price of housing to something less destructive – preferably to what it was when my parents and I bought our first houses – without purging the idea that housing is a means to create wealth as opposed to simply a place to live.

That’s easier said than done, as China’s president, Xi Jinping, has found. He has been banging on about this for five years, saying that housing is not for speculation but for living in, but no one seems to be listening in China, and no one would be listening here either if the prime minister was saying the same thing. But anyway, he’s not.

The growth in the value of Australian land has fundamentally changed society in two ways. First, generations of young Australians are being held back financially by the cost of shelter, especially if they live somewhere near a CBD and especially in Sydney or Melbourne; and second, the way wealth is generated has changed. Education and hard work are no longer the main determinants of how wealthy you are; now it comes down to where you live and what sort of house you inherit from your parents.

It means Australia is less of an egalitarian meritocracy. Material success is now largely a function of geography, not accomplishment. Moreover, the geographic wealth gap is being widened by climate change, as floods and bushfires make living in large parts of the country uninsurable and financially crippling, but many families have no choice except to stay where they are because those areas are low-priced and they can’t afford to move.

The houses we live in, the places we call home and bring up our families in, have been turned into speculative investment assets by the 50 years of government policy failure, financialisation and greed that resulted in 25 years of exploding house prices. The doubling of prices as a proportion of both average income and GDP per capita has turned a house from somewhere to live while you get on with the rest of your life into the main thing, and for many people a terrible burden.

This article was amended on 28 November 2023 to correct a miscalculation of the average annual wage of a carpenter in 1951.

This is an edited extract of Alan Kohler’s Quarterly Essay, The Great Divide: Australia’s housing mess and how to fix it , published on Monday

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Gagosian Quarterly

Summer 2024 Issue

Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday painter

Curated by francesco bonami,  sunday  is the first solo presentation of new work by maurizio cattelan in new york in over twenty years. here, bonami asks us to consider cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works..

Photo: courtesy Maurizio Cattelan

Francesco Bonami has curated more than one hundred exhibitions, among them the Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Whitney Biennial in 2010. He writes for La Repubblica , Artnews , and Vogue Italia . His most recent books include Post: L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità sociale (Feltrinelli, 2019) and Mum, I Want to Be an Artist: How to Avoid Delusions (Karma Books, forthcoming).

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Frank and Jamie (2002): it sounds like Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy. Since it is actually a sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan, the simile isn’t strange, for people often find his work slapstick and funny. In fact nothing could be farther from the truth. Cattelan is a political artist at heart—not in the vein of Hans Haacke or Barbara Kruger but more like Aristotle, a sort of craftsman of social issues and ultimately of social and collective feeling. His political stance is not moralistic, accusatory, or preachy; he presents the issues as they are, or as a general public could perceive them.

Frank and Jamie are two policemen, leaning upside down against a wall. They were the first work Cattelan showed in New York after 9/11 and his last in any private space in the United States, in that case the Marian Goodman Gallery, until this spring. Far from being funny, the two figures are a symbol of power subverted—the Twin Towers in human form. The work shows how contemporary history, or its chronicle, influences our understanding of the world and our daily life: how we deal daily with power without running the risk of having our lives disrupted by it.

Cattelan doesn’t really seek answers. As Marcel Duchamp used to say, “There are no solutions because there are no problems.” There are no answers because there are no real questions—life is what it is, unraveling under our feet. In our delusional state, we might wish we could change it, but we can’t. After  Frank and Jamie came the triumph of the retrospective at the Guggenheim, New York, in 2012, to be followed by America (2016), the gold toilet installed in the museum at the mercy of the visitors’ number ones and twos, according to the need. The natural heir of Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, America made the cover of the New York Post , but the subtext was loaded: Donald Trump soon became president of the United States, making America rather more than a childish and expensive commentary on a world of luxury gone adrift.

Maurizio Cattelan,  Frank and Jamie , 2002, wax and clothes, dimensions variable

While Cattelan’s infamous banana taped to the wall is called Comedian (2019), and a recent variation, a taped empty banana skin, is called Clown (2023), Cattelan is neither a comedian nor a clown but a combination of the two that produces a dramatic character, a kind of Robin Williams of art history, trapped in a body and fighting his true inner self. The result of this inner fight is a body of work that defies the conventional understanding of art, since it always refers to something outside the art world, even if art-world professionals can’t help but draw connections to other artists, from arte povera to Lucio Fontana. Such references are certainly possible, but are unintended and often serendipitous.

Besides being a closet political artist, Cattelan is also a bard of what I call “recreational violence,” or “RV.” Violence, like politics, is an intrinsic part of his language and philosophy, if often camouflaged under a veneer of humor. The new body of work is the logical expression of what was hidden in the too-obvious America : luxury and privilege can’t shield you from violence, articulated as some sort of ultimate entertainment, or the revenge of boredom and social resentment. You may be able to afford and enjoy making your daily number 2 on a solid-gold toilet, but that pleasure can’t save you from someone with an assault rifle coming into your bathroom to interrupt your bowel movement.

Seen from a distance, that could be very funny. Charlie Chaplin used to say, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.” Cattelan similarly does a close-up, then a long shot, going in and out on reality. The last scene of Sam Peckinpah’s  Wild Bunch  (1969) may be enjoyable from a cinema seat, but the difference between the description of an action and the action itself can be dramatic and horrible. That gap between description and action, between entertainment and danger, is where Cattelan puts himself and the viewer. He and the viewer are in what we might call a Sunday state of mind, because Sunday is simultaneously a beautiful day and an ugly one, a holiday edging toward its own demise—edging toward Monday.

Installation view, Sunday , Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, April 30–June 15, 2024. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

A gold panel covered with gunshot marks is like a Sunday: the background to a celebration gone bad, very bad. Shooting is not a novelty in art; we go from Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867–69) to Goya’s  Third of May 1808 (1814), from William Burroughs shooting everything and anybody around him to Chris Burden shooting at an airplane in flight, from Valerie Solanas’s attempt on the life of Andy Warhol in 1968 to Richard Avedon’s iconic photograph (1969) of the scars she left on Warhol’s body. But Cattelan’s Sunday (2024) goes a little farther, removing the presence of the shooter and transforming violence into a sort of pattern, a decoration, a memory of human folly. His wall could be the wall of some Las Vegas casino bullet-riddled by a disgruntled gambler. There is beauty in the aftermath of tragedy. The walls still standing from Beirut’s civil war look more like the ancient ruins of sandstone buildings than the rubble remaining from human insanity. Cattelan opens a way through this possible misunderstanding, speaking of the irresolvable contradictions between freedom and violence, fun and horror. Like a variation on Colonel Kurtz in the last scenes of Francis Ford Coppola’s A pocalypse Now  (1979), Cattelan seems to murmur not “The horror, the horror” but “The fun, the fun.” Not that he dismisses the horror, but he sees the other side of it—the fun. Obviously not the fun of the victims but the unimaginable but definitely present fun in the mind of the mass shooter.

What continues to puzzle Cattelan is the way fun can again and again produce horror, as is shown by the endless series of tragedies perpetrated in the name of the fictional freedom to be able to defend yourself. To the extent that Cattelan’s large shot wall makes vague reference to Duchamp’s  Large Glass (1915–23) in the Philadelphia Museum—the victim stripped bare, rather than the bride—it invokes the artist’s submission to fate, chance, and the inscrutability of real meaning. Since there is no real meaning in violence, it is pointless to seek it; yet when recreational violence is part of the daily routine, with disposable victims and disposable murders, another kind of silent violence seeps through the seams of the social pattern and Cattelan unjudgmentally dives into it, creating a parallel world to the spectacle presented by recreational violence.

Maurizio Cattelan, You , 2021, platinum silicone, epoxy fiberglass, stainless steel, real hair, clothes, hemp rope, and flowers, 55 × 15 ¾ × 10 inches (140 × 40 × 25 cm); installation view, Maurizio Cattelan: You , MASSIMODECARLO, Milan/Lombardy. Photo: Zeno Zotti, courtesy the artist and MASSIMODECARLO

In that world, Cattelan analyzes how human degradation and humiliation, consistently pursued, can achieve a sort of classical dignity, the dignity of human subjects erased by the social structure yet still breathing, like mummified corpses not yet dead. All of this appears in November (2024), a fountain recalling the Manneken Pis (1619), the street-corner sculpture of a pissing kid that has long been a landmark of Brussels. The difference is that what we see is not a playful child but a half-dozing male figure slouched on a bench with his penis in his hand, peeing on the ground. While it’s unclear whether the work is a monument to self-destruction or to survival, it certainly monumentalizes defiance of the written and unwritten laws of social and urban life; it is also another hymn to an awkward way of defining freedom. The male figure has no need of a gun to feel free or to avenge social injustice—his weapon is his own dick. He has no need to create horror, he is satisfied with inducing disgust. He dares you to take a selfie if you wish, and many will. In Cattelan’s work, repulsion, disgust, and violence are unavoidable backdrops to our detached and fictional lives. What’s the difference between a small child peeing in a fountain and a grown man peeing on the floor? It’s just a matter of convention. If you’re free to buy an assault rifle in a department store, what’s wrong with pissing in public? Sunday and November show an America gone adrift in the ocean of freedom while some kind of political hurricane is approaching.

Cattelan is shy of addressing these issues explicitly; his work does not directly respond to or comment on what’s happening. He’s like a Sunday painter setting his easel on the sidewalk, unaware that a murder will soon occur there, or maybe that two people will fall in love there, or that something else will happen, including maybe nothing. He is a Sunday painter. His job is to paint, without judging it, whatever will happen that Sunday, on that sidewalk, at that time.

Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday | Curated by Francesco Bonami , Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, April 30–June 15, 2024

Artwork © Maurizio Cattelan

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OUR MINISTER

Dr. Joseph Lozovyy was born into a Christian family in Elektrostal, Moscow Region, and was raised in a pastor’s home. From the age of fifteen, he began actively participating in the music ministry of the Baptist Church in Mytishchi, where his father served as a pastor, and also played in the orchestra of the Central Moscow Baptist Church. From 1989, he participated in various evangelistic events in different cities of Moscow Region and beyond. From 1989 to 1992, as a member of the choir and orchestra “LOGOS,” he participated in evangelistic and charitable concerts, repeatedly performing on the stages of the Moscow State Conservatory, the Bolshoi Theatre, and other concert halls in Russia and abroad. In 1992, his family moved to the United States. In 2007, after completing a full course of spiritual and academic preparation, Joseph moved to Dallas, Texas, to engage in church ministry. In 2008, he founded the Russian Bible Church to preach to the Russian-speaking population living in Dallas, Texas.

– Bachelor of Arts in Music (viola) from the Third Moscow Music School named after Scriabin, Russia (1987-1991)

– Master of Theology (Th.M); Dallas Theological Seminary, Texas (1999-2003);

– Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) Hebrew Bible (Books of Samuel): University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom (2007).

– Doctoral research (2004-2005) Tübingen, Germany.

– Author of a theological work published in English: Saul, Doeg, Nabal and the “Son of Jesse: Readings in 1 Samuel 16-25, LHBOTS 497 [T&T Clark/Continuum: Bloomsbury Publishing]).

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/saul-doeg-nabal-and-the-son-of-jesse-9780567027535/

Joseph and his wife Violetta and their son Nathanael live in the northern part of Dallas.

Saul, Doeg, Nabal, and the “Son of Jesse”: Readings in 1 Samuel 16-25: The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Joseph Lozovyy T&T Clark (bloomsbury.com)

Joseph, his wife Violetta and their son Nathaniel live in North Dallas, Texas where he continues ministering to Russian-speaking Christians and his independent accademic research.

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Amazon Reports $143.3 Billion in Revenue for First Quarter of 2024

The company also reported that profit more than tripled, to $10.4 billion, topping Wall Street expectations.

By Karen Weise

Karen Weise has covered Amazon from Seattle since 2018.

Amazon reported its highest first-quarter profit on Tuesday as it continued to wring efficiencies out of its retail business and recharge growth in its cloud computing operations.

The company was also for the first time on track to have $100 billion in annual cloud computing sales.

The company had $143.3 billion in revenue in the first three months of the year, up 13 percent from a year earlier. Profit more than tripled, to $10.4 billion. The results beat analysts’ expectations.

“It was a good start to the year across the business, and you can see that in both our customer experience improvements and financial results,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said in a statement.

After a year of companies paring back tech spending, Amazon’s lucrative cloud computing business has been regaining steam. Sales from cloud computing were up 17 percent, to $25 billion. The growth was the fastest pace in more than a year. Operating income for that business grew 84 percent to $9.4 billion, accounting for most of the company’s operating profit.

Amazon’s share price was up more than 3 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Amazon spent about $14 billion on capital expenses and leases in the quarter, a figure particularly driven by investments in cloud computing, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said on a call with investors. That amount was about $1 billion more than for the same period last year. He said Amazon expected to spend more as the year goes on, “primarily to serve the generative A.I. opportunities that we are seeing.”

The company has been building data centers and making other infrastructure investments to keep up in the race to turn A.I. advances into real businesses. Microsoft has been closing Amazon’s lead in cloud computing, in part from customers wanting access to advanced A.I. systems from its partner, the start-up OpenAI.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to their A.I. systems.)

Sales of generative artificial intelligence services amounted to “multibillion dollars” a year, Dave Fildes, Amazon’s head of investor relations, said on the press call. Last week, Microsoft said A.I. accounted for more than a fifth of its cloud computing growth, leading analysts to estimate the A.I. sales were about $1 billion in the quarter.

“Generative A.I. may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud,” Mr. Jassy said in a letter to shareholders this month.

What analysts consider the most profitable parts of Amazon’s retail business have been growing the fastest. This includes advertising, which grew 24 percent, to $11.8 billion. In January, Amazon began putting ads into video streaming for Prime members, unless the customers paid an additional $2.99 per month to opt out. The subscription business, which includes Prime and other upgrades, brought in $10.7 billion, up 11 percent.

Amazon has been focusing on shipping products quickly by putting more items closer to customers. The faster the delivery, the more customers turn to Amazon. The company said on Monday that 60 percent of items ordered by Prime members in major U.S. cities were delivered the same or the next day after being ordered. The number of items customers bought rose 12 percent in the last quarter.

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In January, Amazon abandoned a $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner, after regulators in the United States and Europe expressed skepticism about the deal. In the latest quarter, it had $73 billion in cash and equivalents, up from $34 billion two years ago.

Karen Weise writes about technology and is based in Seattle. Her coverage focuses on Amazon and Microsoft, two of the most powerful companies in America. More about Karen Weise

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Apple’s quarterly iPhone sales plunge 10%, but stock price surges on dividend, stock buyback news

FILE - In this June 16, 2020 file photo, the sun is reflected on Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York. Apple will reports earnings on Thursday May 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

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Apple on Thursday disclosed its steepest quarterly decline in iPhone sales since the pandemic’s outset, deepening a slump that’s increasing the pressure on the trendsetting company to spruce up its products with more artificial intelligence.

The 10% drop in year-over-year iPhone sales for the January-March period is latest sign of weakness in a product that generates most of Apple’s revenue. It marked the biggest drop in iPhone sales since July-September period in 2020, when production bottlenecks caused by factory closures during the pandemic resulted in a delayed release of that year’s model.

The current iPhone downturn was the main reason Apple’s revenue for the latest quarter decreased 4% from last year to $90.8 billion. It marked the fifth consecutive quarter that Apple’s revenue dipped from the previous year. Apple’s profit in the past quarter totaled $23.64 billion, or $1.53 per share, a 2% dip from last year.

But both Apple’s revenue and earnings per share came in slightly above analysts projections, according to FactSet Research. Apple also predicted its revenue for the April-June quarter will rise modestly from a year ago, which would end the recent streak of erosion.

Part of the iPhone deterioration during the first three months of the year stemmed from a big boost in sales during the same period last year when Apple said it was filling pent-up demand caused by pandemic-driven shipment delays.

Even as it stumbles slightly, Apple remains one of the world’s most prosperous companies. The Cupertino, California, company hammered home that point by announcing a 4% increase in its quarterly dividend to 25 cents per share. The company also committed to spending $110 billion buying back its own stock, a move that investors cheered but may fuel criticism that Apple is spending more money catering to Wall Street than creating more innovative products.

Bolstered by the increased dividend and stock repurchase commitment, Apple’s shares rose nearly 7% in extended trading after the news came out. The stock price has fallen 10% so far this year, erasing about $300 billion in stockholder wealth.

Although investors have been dismayed by the weakening iPhone sales, they are also concerned Apple may be losing its edge as other tech giants such as Microsoft and Google sprint out to the early lead in artificial intelligence technology that is expected to reshape the industry and technology.

The latest quarterly report “leaves no margin for doubt about Apple’s current state of affairs,” said Investing.com analyst Thomas Monteiro. “More than ever in the past decade, the company needs new products and solutions.”

Apple is widely expected to unveil more AI services in June during an annual conference showcasing the next version of its software for the iPhone and Mac computers.

“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era,” Apple CEO Tim Cook assured analysts during a Thursday conference while promising more details will be announced soon.

Weak sales in China were again a factor in the latest quarter, with revenue in that region falling 8% from last year to $16.37 billion as rival smartphone makers gained ground in one of the company’s largest markets. Even so, analysts had been anticipating an even bigger sales decline in the results, providing investors with a measure of relief.

Apple had a few bright spots in the past quarter too, most notably in its service division, which saw its revenue rise 14% from the year before to $23.87 billion.

The division reaps a significant portion of its revenue from a lucrative deal that locks in Google as the search engine that automatically answers queries on the iPhone — an arrangement that is a focal point of an antitrust trial currently wrapping up with closing arguments in Washington this week.

Commissions collected on digital transactions within iPhone apps are also a major revenue source within Apple’s services division, an area being targeted in a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit alleging the company is running an illegal monopoly that locks out competition to the detriment of consumers.

That case is expected to take several years to resolve, but European regulators already are forcing Apple to allow more alternatives to its proprietary iPhone app store as part of the Digital Markets Act.

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