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 ...

Books & arts One hell of a story Mark Baker 28 October 2025 Why write a book about the Battle of Shah Wali Kot, and why now?

Here, Haydon’s film is a point of flexion where a narrative of the passing race is confronted by one of resistance and revitalisation. Trukanini’s reburial campaign was a significant event for a new ...

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 ...

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 ...

Across the southeast of the continent now known as Australia, the recent bushfire season provoked a surge in interest in Aboriginal peoples’ fire practices and knowledge. These practices are often ...

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 ...

The proceedings of the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization don’t normally make headline news. (Except perhaps in Ocean Freight Times.) But the ...

Our European ancestors locked us in a madhouse. To explain why their society was technologically more complex than others, they came up with what I call the Great Divide — the separation of the ...

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 ...

Leftist online personality Hasan Piker recently took a trip to China and — like many other influencers who have been there — declared it to be a paradise, praising “abundance-style consumption paired ...

Moree might be booming thanks to cotton and other crops, but many of the benefits haven’t yet reached the local Aboriginal people, the Kamilaroi, who comprise at least a fifth of its 9000 people.