MIL-OSI Export

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Ley, Deputy Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation

Tumultuous times create heightened, often complex, emotions. It can be hard to voice or even identify our feelings when faced with war, illness, worry, or great changes of any kind.

Poetry offers many gifts – among them, capturing, reflecting or even just sitting beside us with our thoughts and feelings.

We asked five poetry experts – all poets themselves – for the poems they turn to in anxious times, for comfort or company.

We’d love to hear yours, too – you can share them in the comments section.

---

The Storm – Eugenio Montale

One poem I’ve been returning to this year is an old favourite: Charles Wright’s translation of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm. The title in Italian is La Bufera, an idiom Dante introduced in the Inferno, more akin to “tempest” or “squall” than “storm”, though I like the simplicity of Wright’s translation.

The first stanza begins in a relatively recognisable, concrete world: a thunderous March storm pummels a magnolia tree with hail. The storm swiftly becomes figurative as the poet addresses someone who has been startled awake from a “nest of sleep” by “sounds of shaking crystal”. The realist world becomes populated with surrealist images of gold flaring:

like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids,

and lightning that

                                          blanches
the trees and walls, freezing them
like images on a negative.

The poem sweeps up destabilising images and sounds of a storm’s destruction:

the jangling sistrums, the rustle
of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,
the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango.

Montale moves entirely into metaphor with his subtly devastating final lines, where the reader is invited to see the storm as a metaphor for death’s simultaneous release and devastation:

sweeping clear your forehead
of its cloud of hair,

you waved to me — and entered the dark.

For all its residual mystery and strangeness, The Storm is a poem that insists on recording, with striking clarity, what loss leaves behind: a heightened and twinning attention to the world’s ephemeral beauty, and the permanence of its grievous absences.

Sarah Holland-Batt is a poet and professor, and head of writing at UTS.

---

The Peace of Wild Things – Wendell Berry

“The mind has mountains, cliffs of fall,” as Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote. But a poem can create an inner room in the mind, a place of shelter from a threatening and precarious world. Poems can be “amulets against the darkness”, as the poet Molly Peacock noted. It’s another good reason to commit them to memory.

Wendell Berry is a Kentucky tobacco farmer and environmental activist, better known for his prose than poetry. His plain diction is lightly rhetorical. Always grounded in the material, his poems are gently sacramental.

The Peace of Wild Things opens in anxiety, but the speaker finds temporary rest in nature’s immanence:

I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

Two overt metaphors are crucial. The future taxes our lives, whether it’s making plans, or fearing the worst; other animals are tax-exempt. The “day-blinds stars” are a reminder that certain transcendent and objective realities remain, whatever our perception may suggest.

Unlikely as it seems, peace is always a possibility.

Aidan Coleman is a poet and senior lecturer, English and creative writing, Southern Cross University.

---

Of Mutability – Jo Shapcott

I first came across Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability in a time of illness – which is also, fittingly, the circumstances under which it was written. I love the awful sensuality with which Shapcott speaks of this in the opening lines of the poem –

Too many of the best cells in my body
are itching, feeling jagged, turning
in this spring chill

– and how immediately this opens up into something shared, an almost universal vulnerability. There are so many ways you can understand what it means to

                                          feel small
among the numbers. Razor small.

The poem establishes a sense of great fragility and deep uncertainty:

Look down these days to see your feet
mistrust the pavement and your blood tests
turn the doctor’s expression grave.

But then it turns to offer a hope that’s grounded in the real world, and, in its metaphysical possibilities, marvel at the world and all that it contains:

Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets,
angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,
join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or
learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,
flying, fishing, sex without touching too much.
Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.

This vulnerability exists, it says, but so does all of this wonder – and it is up to you what you make of it.

Fiona Wright is a poet, writer and tutor in creative writing and communications at Western Sydney University.

---

God’s Grandeur – Gerard Manley Hopkins

In trying to cope with the death and destruction being meted out by people towards each other and the biosphere, I have a clutch of poems I turn to as a means of survival.

A poem that often helps gets me through, due to the sheer power of its language, the “sprung rhythm” engagement with an essence of being, is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ God’s Grandeur, which contemplates “bright wings” over and around damage, while deeply lamenting it. It begins gloriously –

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

and unfolds into the reality of human impact on the (“bent”) world as it –

wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And yet, Hopkins then lifts us, with “And, for all this, nature is never spent”.

Though the poem resolves in the spirit through Hopkins’ specific faith, it can be extrapolated into something we might all share in, across cultural spaces.

What matters here is his search for the “inscape” of the specificities of “nature”, which ultimately opens words out to unseen meaning.

John Kinsella is a poet and emeritus professor of literature and environment, Curtin University.

---

The Art of Disappearing – Sarah Holland-Batt

The quintessential poem for anxious times has to be W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming. Several of its lines have found their way into popular discourse, including the apocalyptic “the centre cannot hold”.

In her poem The Art of Disappearing, Sarah Holland-Batt improvises upon Yeats’ evidently timeless theme with a sensual, intimate and relatable lyricism. The poem begins with the lines:

The moon that broke on the fence post will not hold.
Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.
The house you grew up in; its eaves; its attic will not hold.

Holland-Batt goes on to lay out fragments of a life that appears, always and inevitably, to be slipping from the grasp of its speaker. The poem manages the feat of being nostalgic and equanimous at the same time. I find its homages – Rilke makes an appearance alongside Yeats – reassuringly connective.

Luke Johnson is a poet and senior lecturer in creative writing, University of Wollongong.

– ref. Poetry for an anxious world: 5 experts share poems of grief, hope and restoration – https://theconversation.com/poetry-for-an-anxious-world-5-experts-share-poems-of-grief-hope-and-restoration-279859

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/13/poetry-for-an-anxious-world-5-experts-share-poems-of-grief-hope-and-restoration-279859/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ronald Kramer, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

There is a seemingly endless flow of crime dramas on streaming platforms these days. Many are fictional, some dramatise real historical crimes and criminal figures.

But have you noticed how many characters – hero or villain, fictional or based on a real person – are explicitly or implicitly written as neurodivergent?

Consider the super-sleuth detectives of The Killing, The Bridge, Bones and more recently Will Trent.

The protagonist of The Killing obsesses over cases to the point of abandoning almost all other social obligations. And it’s hard to miss how Saga Norén from The Bridge (Sonya Cross in the American remake) or Temperance Brennan from Bones are portrayed as “on the spectrum”.

As for Will Trent, he is explicitly known to be dyslexic and implicitly portrayed as somewhere on that same autism spectrum.

The same often applies to an anti-hero, too. Dexter Morgan, the much-loved serial killer of Dexter, is a psychopath, albeit one who has been trained to work on the right side of the moral fence.

Shows that reimagine historical crimes and characters – often as archetypes of evil – also depict them as different in ways other than simply their propensity for violence.

Take the popular recreation of American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. The show suggests Dahmer suffered a brain injury and frequently portrays him as socially stunted.

In Manhunt, there are numerous references to the supposedly high IQ (alongside his mental illness and insanity) of Ted Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber – the stereotypical “evil genius” in other words.

Why this prevalence of neurodivergent protagonists, and what are viewers gaining by watching crime stories predicated on this form of difference?

[embedded content]

Different but conformist

In my book Ableism, Now Streaming: Disability and Cultural Representations of Crime, I argue this staple of popular culture is less about any voyeuristic impulse or offering glimpses into otherwise forbidden worlds, and more about providing flattering reflections of the status quo.

In one sense, this follows simply from the depiction and casting of these characters. Productions can be seen as inclusive and tolerant of difference, as can audiences.

But in another sense, these neurodivergent heroes and anti-heroes are loved because they are ultimately conformist. They do the work society, especially its branches of criminal justice, demands.

This is obvious in The Killing, The Bridge and Bones, where the neurodivergent hero is “weird” and “quirky” but works with and within the state, usually ensuring the demise of the “bad guy”.

Even Dexter has a moral code, which turns out to reflect a very conventional worldview. Rightly or wrongly, he is a walking advertisement for the moral justification of the death penalty.

Dexter frequently does away with due process, all those pesky legal technicalities that supposedly help the worst of the worst escape punishment. He embodies the type of immediate, vengeful justice many seem to desire.

[embedded content]

Reassuringly not normal

The other flattering reflection of the status quo involves the audience being reassured about the relative normality of its own existence. This is most obvious in the cultural fascination with serial killers and rare, extreme forms of criminal behaviour.

In her book Extraordinary Bodies, critical disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson suggests the notorious “freak shows” of the 19th and 20th centuries became popular American attractions because they served a similar function.

By putting disabled bodies (often due to unusual medical conditions) on display, these shows allowed audiences to feel good about themselves. They could exit the spectacle taking comfort in the knowledge they were “not like that”.

The freak show worked by playing with familiarity and difference: the bodies on display were recognisable as human, but still apart. Similarly, many serial killers seem to superficially embody normal attributes – often white, male, able-bodied, calm and rational – while hiding a twisted psyche.

The message is hard to miss: the serial killer is quite distant from normal, and their dramatic depiction can be viewed as a 21st century version of the freak show.

Crime storytelling is a way to naturalise social boundaries between normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, moral and immoral. We are fascinated by Dahmer’s cannibalism, for example, partly because it tacitly normalises the consumption of animal flesh as something that need not be questioned.

People can leave the cinematic or televisual freak show saying to themselves, “Well, at least I don’t eat people, I can’t be all that bad.”

Meanwhile, those neurodivergent detectives and police operatives reassure us that we can embrace difference when it conforms to, or serves the interests of, a society we want to believe is fair and just.

– ref. Special agents: the rise of the neurodivergent hero in TV crime drama – https://theconversation.com/special-agents-the-rise-of-the-neurodivergent-hero-in-tv-crime-drama-279312

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/13/special-agents-the-rise-of-the-neurodivergent-hero-in-tv-crime-drama-279312/

IRNA News Agency

When news reports first indicated that US Vice-President JD Vance was going to lead the Americans in the negotiations with Iran, the country the US and Israel are waging a foolish war against, there was a sense that someone even as young him may have recognised the train wreck that Donald Trump was creating.

Former top negotiators real estate developer Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, had already proven to be self-enriching charlatans like Trump.

If someone understood a little — only a little — more about the state of affairs, they could be excellent replacements to Witkoff and Kushner and save America from a crisis of its own making.

As it transpired, that person was not Vance.
​
In the negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, the US vice-president proved to be no more than a minion to Trump, not someone who can rise to the occasion and stop the stupid war that is taking down the American military and the global economy.
​
If you cannot see how disastrously America and Israel are conducting the war, here is Professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on European history, parsing it for you in plain language on March 18, just two weeks after the war started:
​

“[Trump] took the greatest military force in world history, lost the war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else.

I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.”
​

By now, it is an open secret that Trump is being blackmailed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who holds evidence of degenerate behavior by the US president from his devilish days on disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

But even in a moment of incompetence, incredible loss, and national humiliation for America like this, Vance had a chance to save his country.
​
Now we know for certain that everyone who has ever worked for Trump is diminished by it. Vance was an exception only for a second.
​
IRNA News Agency is state-controlled media.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/13/why-vance-couldnt-stop-the-trump-train-wreck-an-iranian-perspective/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Marchant, Research Assistant & PhD Candidate in Mental Health, Swansea University

Family courts step in at some of the hardest moments in a child’s life, when parents separate or when there are concerns about their safety.

We already know that children involved in care proceedings are more likely to self-harm. But most children who come into contact with family courts are there because of disputes between parents, not safeguarding concerns. Until now we have known comparatively little about these children or what happens to them after court proceedings end.

For the first time, our research tracked self-harm over time in these children. We found that children who go through the family courts, whether because of parental separation or welfare concerns, are more likely to self-harm than those who do not.

This doesn’t mean the courts themselves are causing harm. This increased risk is more likely linked to the circumstances that lead families to court in the first place. Family courts are an often-missed opportunity to offer help.

We analysed anonymised family court records alongside routinely collected health data for more than 700,000 children between 2011 and 2018. Around 17,000 had been involved in private cases – usually disputes over finances or living arrangements after separation. Another 5,500 were involved in public cases, where local authorities step in over concerns about a child’s welfare.

The risk of self-harm was about twice as high after private cases and more than three times as high after public ones.

Previous research shows that families in contact with courts often face challenges beyond the courtroom. They are more likely to live in deprived areas and to experience mental or physical health problems, in both caregivers and children. These factors are already known to increase the risk of self-harm in young people.

Historically, people designing services for families have not always had enough data to guide the decisions made in family courts. Evidence now shows elevated risks not just of self-harm but for a range of adverse outcomes, including depression, anxiety and poorer educational attainment. Yet family courts receive far less public attention than many other issues affecting young people.

A warning sign we shouldn’t ignore

Self-harm is relatively common in adolescents. Most young people who self-harm do not go on to die by suicide. However, it is one of the clearest signals of distress and one of the strongest risk factors for suicide. This makes early identification and support especially important.

Children who come into contact with family courts should be a priority for support.

Parental separations are common. Many children experience them and their effects can be underestimated and downplayed because of that. Around one in ten separating families turn to family courts to resolve disputes, often as a last resort because of the financial and emotional costs. It may also reflect high levels of conflict between parents.

The decisions made during these proceedings can be life changing for children. Where families reach the point of involving family courts, we should ensure that support is available for the whole family, especially for children.

Family courts are in a unique position. They come into contact with children and families, with complex and intersecting needs, at important moments that have the potential to shape the rest of their lives.

We believe that contact with the courts should be seen as an opportunity to identify the needs of these families and offer practical, timely support to children and their families. This might include wider networks such as schools, community services and primary care or to provide clearer pathways to specialist mental health support where needed.

Decisions made in family courts have the potential to shape children’s lives at critical moments. These moments should be seen as signals of need, not just legal milestones. If we act on them, we have a real chance to support children at the point they need it most.

– ref. Children going through family courts face increased risk of self-harm, new research finds – https://theconversation.com/children-going-through-family-courts-face-increased-risk-of-self-harm-new-research-finds-278263

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/13/children-going-through-family-courts-face-increased-risk-of-self-harm-new-research-finds-278263/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julien Benoit, Associate professor in Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of the Witwatersrand

Between 280 and 200 million years ago, a group of animals evolved which would eventually give rise to mammals, including humans: the therapsids. They were first described more than 150 years ago, based on fossils from South Africa. Since then, many more fossils have been discovered.

James Kitching, one of the most talented South African fossil hunters of the 20th century, excavated many thousands of therapsids from the rocks of the Karoo (a semi-arid region of the country’s interior). He also found fossilised dinosaur eggs, but neither he nor any palaeontologist after him ever found therapsid eggs.

They should exist, because some mammals (platypus and echidnas) do lay eggs. But Kitching began to doubt that therapsids laid eggs: perhaps, he thought, they were, like most of their mammalian descendants, already viviparous (giving live birth)?

We are scientists who study extinct animals and the environments they lived in millions of years ago to understand more about the evolution of life. In our new paper we describe, for the first time, the embryo-containing fossilised egg of a 250 million-year-old mammalian ancestor.

It finally shows that therapsids were indeed egg-laying (oviparous). This discovery sheds new light on the reproduction and survival strategy of that group of animals.

A 20-year-old mystery

The fossil egg and embryo we described was discovered near Oviston, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, by John Nyaphuli, a palaeontologist from Bloemfontein, in 2008. It’s been kept in the National Museum in Bloemfontein. We knew that it belonged to a species that lived 252 million to 250 million years ago called Lystrosaurus, but we didn’t know whether the species was an egg-layer. The adult looked like a pig, with naked skin, a beak like a turtle, and two tusks sticking out and pointing down.

The reason it took 20 years to prove that it had been in an egg is that this fossil preserves no shell. Only a curled-up embryo is visible. If there was a shell, it was likely leathery or had dissolved. Only the most advanced dinosaurs laid hard-shelled eggs.

So how could we find out whether this young creature had once been inside an egg?

The answer to this question lay in the advanced technology of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility at Grenoble, France. There, we used a powerful X-ray source to image the inside of the bones of the embryo. Under this treatment, the fossil unveiled all its long-kept secrets – most crucially, its stage of development.

We discovered that the lower jaws of its beak were not completely fused. This developmental trait is only found in modern turtles and birds in which jaw bones fuse long before they are born so that their beak is strong enough for the hatchling to catch and crush its food.

This meant that our curled up Lystrosaurus embryo had died in ovo (in an egg), tightly nestled in its soft, leathery eggshell. This was the evidence palaeontologists had been looking for.

Thanks to the synchrotron-assisted examination of its lower jaw, we could finally demonstrate that this embryo was indeed that of an unhatched Lystrosaurus baby.

Famous survivor

What does it unravel about the survival strategy of Lystrosaurus?

Lystrosaurus is a herbivorous (plant-eating) therapsid famous for surviving the “Great Dying”, which was a major mass extinction of species 252 million years ago. During this event, 90% of all living things on Earth died. Life almost ceased to exist, which makes this the second most important event in the history of life on Earth after the origin of life itself.

How Lystrosaurus survived this is still an intriguing mystery, but the egg gives a possible clue. The fossil we describe shows that the animal laid arguably large eggs for its body size. Large eggs are produced by species that feed their embryos with yolk rather than milk. The young develop to an advanced stage in the egg and then they hatch. In contrast, monotremes (the platypus and echidnas), which feed milk to their young, lay small eggs because the baby is fed after hatching. The large size of its egg implies that Lystrosaurus did not feed milk to its young.

---

Read more: A secret mathematical rule has shaped the beaks of birds and other dinosaurs for 200 million years

---

More relevant to its survival strategy, this further indicates two things. Firstly, it means that the egg was less prone to desiccation (drying out). The larger the egg, the smaller its surface area (comparatively speaking), so Lystrosaurus eggs would lose less water through their leathery shell than those of other species of that time. Given the dry environment during and in the immediate aftermath of the extinction, this was a significant advantage, especially since hard-shelled eggs would not evolve for another 50 million years, at least.

Secondly, a large egg implies that Lystrosaurus was likely precocial, meaning that the babies likely hatched at an advanced stage of their development. Lystrosaurus hatchlings were big enough to feed by themselves and run away from predators, and would reach maturity faster so they could reproduce early.

---

Read more: How predators may have shaped the way some southern African lizards survive and reproduce

---

Growing up fast, reproducing young and proliferating were the secrets of Lystrosaurus survival.

Our ability to identify the fossil egg adds to our understanding of the origin of mammalian reproductive biology and lactation, and the survival strategy of Lystrosaurus in the most devastating biological crisis. This is significant to better grasp how modern species might cope with the current sixth mass extinction of species.

– ref. Embryo fossil found in South Africa is world’s oldest proof that mammal ancestors laid eggs – https://theconversation.com/embryo-fossil-found-in-south-africa-is-worlds-oldest-proof-that-mammal-ancestors-laid-eggs-277673

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/13/embryo-fossil-found-in-south-africa-is-worlds-oldest-proof-that-mammal-ancestors-laid-eggs-277673/