Since 2006, the Economist Intelligence Unit has measured the quality of democracy in 167 countries and territories across the world. Its last index, for 2024, was published in February. Over the past ...

Over the past few years, though, I have watched versions of reckoning with China unfold across very different milieus, each shaped by a unique vantage point. For Kaiser’s generation of American ...

A new album from the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is a journey up to, through and away from Beethoven’s piano sonata in E major, Op. 109, the music making, as we’ve come to expect from Ólafsson ...

“I cannot live with You —” goes Emily Dickinson’s poem. “It would be Life —/ And Life is over there —/ Behind the Shelf.” Once upon a time many Australian homes had the books of Patrick White out ...

Christian Swegal’s Sovereign (Amazon Prime) moves with quiet inevitability towards a terrible conclusion. Tense, difficult and deeply confronting, it is an emotionally precise film. This is tragedy ...

Books & arts A studio of one’s own Maria Nugent 14 November 2025 Drusilla Modjeska’s questing account of modernist artist-women in twentieth-century Europe ...

Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto’s first state visit to Australia earlier this month had two major results, the first of which would once have been considered security-related and the second ...

Under Donald Trump, the United States no longer operates as a serious nation. Being serious about power and interests should be the simple first step of any nation, especially a superpower. A serious ...

International Can the world be governed without the US? Michael Jacobs 5 July 2025 A UN conference discovers the absence of the United States can be an opportunity rather than a hindrance ...

Books & arts Australia in the world Graeme Dobell 8 August 2025 An indispensable seventy-year record of foreign policy reaches its thirteenth volume Books & arts How Australia does security and ...