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The news that, after more than 14 years of public overtures and backroom negotiations, Julian Assange was finally to be freed and sent home to Australia felt not just momentous but like the end of an unhappy chapter for our notions of public speech and journalistic freedoms. It was an impression bolstered by the alacrity with which our lawmakers publicly celebrated the outcome: prime ministers past and present, attorneys-general and other ministers lined up to herald this as a consequential moment. In the August issue of The Monthly, we consider the question of how earnt that feeling might be, from two distinct but parallel perspectives. Kieran Pender looks as the fortunes of whistleblowers and whistleblowing laws under the Albanese government, while Malcolm Knox asks whether lovers of serious journalism have cause for confidence about what comes next.

Elsewhere in the issue, we have multiple considerations on the selling of ideas: the moments when political imperative or commercial ambition require the mounting of a persuasive case for change. Jenny Sinclair goes beyond the slogan to explore the dangers and the motivations behind a “Bex and a good lie down” and what the old practice of foisting addictive pharmaceutical powders on housewives suggests about the way women have been historically controlled. Royce Kurmelovs takes us back to a time when the gas industry was compelled to convince Australians that it represented a cleaner, safer energy answer; a campaign whose legacy is powerfully felt today in public debate. And science writer Jackson Ryan breaks the first rule of the internet and finds himself engaging with an online critic who has taken issue with his defence of climate science. It’s a lovely, personal account of trying to change someone’s mind at a time when public debate is increasingly polarised. Through correspondence and, ultimately, travel to North America, Ryan forms a strange friendship, across disagreement, towards something resembling persuasion.

Plus there’s Daniel Browning’s tribute to the career and legacy of the late artist Destiny Deacon, Frank Bongiorno offering a history of old age in Australian politics, Indigo Perry on telling stories around the vagaries of memory and the shadow of loss, Evie Wyld feeling homesick and more besides.