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 ...

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 ...

National affairs Gallup’s errant offspring Murray Goot 16 September 2025 How did pollsters come up with such different figures on Palestinian recognition?

Other Voices Why do we still have so many radiologists? Noah Smith 17 October 2025 AI model-makers predicted a sharp dropoff in jobs. So far, reality is refusing to oblige ...

National affairs Pharmaceutical warfare Lesley Russell 24 March 2025 How far will the Trump administration follow Big Pharma in targeting Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme? International ...

Towards the end of ABC TV’s special “Sovereign Borders“ edition of Q&A came an intriguing but frustrating back-and-forth about the number of migrants Australia welcomes each year. The key protagonists ...

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, 93 per cent of children attend public schools. In Alberta, the province that topped Canada for reading and science in the latest round of OECD tests, ...

In November 2017 a group of protesters in São Paulo burnt an effigy of acclaimed gender theorist Judith Butler outside an academic conference she was attending, while waving crucifixes and national ...

Angst, one of the more common words borrowed by anglophones from German, entered the English language in the 1920s. It was a key term in the writings of Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger, and seemed ...

What will the House of Representatives crossbench look like after next year’s election? The answer could well determine who forms government. The current one — sixteen members in the 151-strong ...

It is salutary to turn on the television on the morning after the biggest landslide to the Labor Party since 1943 and the Liberal Party’s worst-ever election defeat. We must have had Sky on by the ...