Inside Story

On the surface, Singapore gleams. It’s wealthy, orderly, safe. The trains (generally) run on time, the amenities are plentiful, and the tiny city-state punches above its weight in international rankings to do with governance and education. Singapore is regularly brought up by policy wonks and politicians around the world — and across the political spectrum — as a model to lea...

A few months ago, when I was in the middle of a dispiriting time wrestling with words and seriously questioning my professional choices, my friend Siobhán got in touch bearing unexpectedly good tidings. Siobhán is a writer and editor for a European news magazine who had commissioned me the year before to write a piece on the decline of American soft power.

A publishing...

Politics in Australia is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Measured in terms of their apparent emotional connection to issues and causes, Australians seem more “political” than ever, and yet political institutions and voluntary organisations are shells of their former selves.

Twelve per cent of Australian employees are members of trade unions, down from 65 per cen...

Some years ago, Belinda Webster, the founder of Tall Poppies Records, received in the mail a cheque for $10,000 from the writer and arts patron Barbara Blackman. It wasn’t payment for a large order of CDs or even a donation to the not-for-profit label, but a personal gift — a token of appreciation. Webster, who seldom had much money, sat down outside her local post office in ...

One measure of the significance of a political concept is the persistence of contests over its meaning. As the political scientist Uriel Abulof pointed out in 2023, “self-determination” was “the single shared principle” to which Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler all subscribed — “in words,” at least, but “rarely in action.” Self-determination, he added...