All of Hamburg hates the AfD,” tens of thousands of demonstrators chanted in Germany’s second-largest city on 19 January this ...

Mao Zedong, the autodidact son of well-to-do peasants, was rough-spoken, ruthless, mercurial and volatile. Zhou Enlai, the well-educated scion of a fallen but patrician family, was suave, wily, ...

Books & arts Inside the wire Klaus Neumann 17 November 2022 Eighty years apart, a private diary from the Tatura internment camp and dispatches from the Manus detention centre recount the experiences ...

The Monthly and the Saturday Paper are campaigning for fairer school funding. But are they missing the deeper story?

National affairs Too many bedrooms, not enough homes Peter Mares 22 May 2024 Local councils and NIMBYs continue to cop much of the blame for housing shortages. But the full story is a bit more ...

From Sam and Lawrence Freedman’s excellent London-based Substack newsletter, Comment is Freed, comes this insider’s account — with Australian resonances — of the ubiquitous quest for “efficiencies.” ...

National affairs Public service, private interests Paddy Gourley 7 May 2019 Cut short by the election, a parliamentary inquiry was beginning to probe the hidden costs of contracting out of government ...

In the United States, Big Tech’s willingness to splash cash on researchers and the universities that employ them is starting ...

If you want to know about America, study Detroit,” they say. That’s true enough. The glowing CBD, the pleasant suburbs, the fine old institutions and the new industries fired by new technology — ...

Essays & reportage Continent of fire Tom Griffiths 6 December 2023 Australia’s fatal firestorms have a distinctive and mainly Victorian lineage, but the 2019–20 season was frighteningly new ...

International Making sense of Meloni James Panichi 2 November 2022 Labelling Italy’s new prime minister a fascist misses the longer-term significance of her rise to power — and some shrewd decisions ...