“Scarborough Fair” is what Ellen Stekert calls a “go around song,” one that is passed from singer to singer, down centuries, across oceans, shape-shifting all the while. “Go around songs” shed and ...

At the annual Shangri La security dialogue in Singapore two weeks ago, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth didn’t just ask Australia to spend more on defence. He also unveiled plans for a new US ...

If citizens don’t have confidence in their public services, at least on balance, they will be more reluctant to pay taxes and the extent and quality of services will spiral downwards. It’s worth ...

Does anyone remember “American carnage”? In his 2017 inaugural address Donald Trump portrayed a collapsing society, emphasising in particular the “crime and gangs and drugs” destroying America’s ...

A few ordinary games as a defender with the Tasmanian Football League’s Glenorchy club ended any prospect I had of a footballing career. In those days, football was still a celebrated part of ...

Too often tales of exploration are told only from a whitefella perspective. But as this story of a roving zoologist reveals, “the observed” were observing closely when the American–Australian ...

This new book’s journey to publication has been fraught. Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023.Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of ...

Producers who get behind yet another TV series about wealthy Americans and their disconnect from the real world surely know they must offer something more than the scenic indulgences of six-star ...

For someone who would seem a snug fit for the unspectacular style of political leadership, Anthony Albanese has certainly left his mark on Australian political history in a short space of time: first ...

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer calls it “a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science.” Donald Trump’s administration seems intent on dismantling the educational ...

When Didier Eribon’s mother was eighty-seven, he and his estranged brothers placed her in a nursing home in Fismes, near Reims, northeast of Paris. Within a few weeks she had become bedridden and ...

The most significant thing about the allegations at the heart of Monday’s Four Corners report on Scott Morrison’s friendship with QAnon supporter Tim Stewart is that the prime minister has repeatedly ...