Review
When war-planning and politics collide
Book review: War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War, by Andrew Payne (Colombia, 2023)
Political scientist Andrew Payne…
Words as weapons in the war of ideas
Book review: The Book at War by Andrew Pettegree (Profile Books, 2024)
Millennia before Gutenberg invented the printing press, the Book of Ecclesiastes warned that “of…
How to fix Japan
Book review: The Contest for Japan's Economic Future: Entrepreneurs vs Corporate Giants by Richard Katz (OUP, 2023)
There is no advanced economy more in need of fixing than…
Why big projects fail: Climate change and AUKUS submarines
Book review: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (Penguin Random House, 2023)
We don’t need to look at detailed statistics to know that large-scale…
Manager of the internet, controller of the world?
Review: Underground Empire: How America Weaponised the World Economy, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Allen Lane, 2023)
Among foreign-policy thinkers of today, there’s…
Why do we travel to unsettling places?
During a summer break, The Interpreter will feature selected articles each day from throughout the past year. Normal publishing will resume 15 January, 2024. This article first…
Manila’s killing fields: Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on the poor
Book review: Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder In My Country by Patricia Evangelista (Penguin Random House, 2023)
“When I become president, when I take my oath of…
The Fix: Nationalist theatre, with a twist
We’re asking contributors to put together their own collected observations like this one – and as always, if you’ve got an idea to pitch for The Interpreter, drop a line via the…
Espionage top ten
Australian spooks are not a literary lot. The secret services of Britain and the United States have spawned many spy fiction authors, but we are still waiting for a domestic John…
The Fix: A death in Malta
We’re asking contributors to put together their own collected observations like this one – and as always, if you’ve got an idea to pitch for The Interpreter, drop a line via the…