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Walkley award winner, Waleed Aly , will be in conversation with Frank Bongiorno on Waleed’s new book Reasoning with Chaos. Dispatches from disorder, a guide to finding sense in these times ofuncertainty from one of Australia's greatest communicators and thinkers.

Day after day, we're bombarded with the drumbeat of news that veers from the shocking to the unfathomable. How do we come to grips with this chaos? For years, in his multi-award-winning column, that is exactly what Waleed Aly has done. In this book, he revisits these articles, written during a concentrated period of profound upheaval, to see what they reveal. The columns are not simply reproduced: they are sorted into themes that give them new life, illuminating each other and highlighting common threads between disparate events that surprised even their author.

Tying all these together are twelve new essays that reflect upon the definitive elements of this chaotic age: parsing what is revolutionary in this moment but also what is not; examining our changing relationships with technology and each other; and identifying the things that really matter in life even as the upheaval tries to obscure them. If the environment is one of disorder and disorientation, the task is finding one's bearings. These are real-time reflections cast in a new light. They distil what it is like to live in a time when the old order is collapsing but the new one is not yet born.

'This collection shows Waleed Aly is the standout, clarion voice of reasoned argument for our turbulent times.' Sarah Ferguson  'An incisive, elegant thinker, Aly makes sense of the often incomprehensible.' Julia Baird

Dr Waleed Aly is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist, academic and lawyer. He is an adjunct at Monash University from which he holds a PhD in politics. He presents The Minefield on ABC Radio National with ethicist Scott Stephens every week. His current column with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald has been running since 2012. For over a decade, Waleed co-hosted The Project and has won both a TV Gold and a Silver Logie, .

Frank Bongiorno AM FRHistS FASSA FAHA is Donald Horne Professor of History and Public Ideas at the University of Canberra, Emeritus Professor of the Australian National University and President, Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS). His most recent book is Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke government. Edited by Frank Bongiorno, Carolyn Holbrook and Joshua Black. (2026)

The vote of thanks will be given byProfessor Mark Kenny, Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute

Books will be available for signing from 5.30pm and again after the event. 

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A podcast will be made available after the event.

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