If you’ve happened to glance at the Bureau of Meteorology’s radar over the past few evenings and seen what looks like rain settling across the New South Wales coast, only to step outside and find a perfectly dry, starry night, you’re not imagining things. You’re not the victim of a glitchy weather app either. The strange mismatch between what the radar is saying and what your own eyes are telling you has a surprisingly simple, and rather beautiful, explanation: bogong moths. These native Australian insects are on the move, and in such vast numbers that they are fooling one of…

It has probably crossed your screen by now. If you spend any time on social media, you have almost certainly seen the post: a photograph of a woman, overwrought and desperate, with a caption that tells a story so neatly packaged that it practically begs to be shared. The story goes something like this. A French left-wing activist, a lifelong defender of migrants, watched her world collapse when the very people she had championed came to destroy her. They looted her shop, they beat her, they spat on her, they trampled her beneath their feet. She had spent her life…