Australia has one of the world’s most educated populations. We have stable institutions, a strong economy and advanced technology. Yet we seem to face endless obstacles when it comes to solving our problems with good public policy. Is it the ideas, the culture or the political contest that get in the way?

And if we can’t solve problems – even…

Inspired by US podcasts like Women of the Hour and Call Your Girlfriend, Can U Not? is one of a new crop of Australian podcasts centred around entertaining and insightful critiques of pop culture – as young women experience and enjoy it. Hosts Brodie Lancaster and Kamna Muddagouni cover topics as broad as the merit of awards, celebrity Snaps…

The mind works in obscure, often inconvenient, ways. Do you find you can recall every line of Wayne’s World dialogue, but you’ve forgotten your own blood type, your seven times tables, your grandmother’s maiden name, the year of the Battle of Hastings?

What do our minds retain, what do they discard, and why? Diving deep into the subconscious for this…

What are the most important questions facing Australians – today and in the future? 

The Wheeler Centre is roaming Australia, collecting the nation’s most urgent questions and thrashing them out with some of the sharpest thinkers we know. We’re doing it in panel discussions at Brisbane Writers Festival, Perth’s Disrupted Festival of Ideas, Darwin Festival and National Young Writers Festival…

For years, Palestinian writer Laila El-Haddad has been documenting daily life in Gaza. She’s done it with a journalist’s eye for detail, a chef’s instinct for taste and smell and a mother’s hopes and anxieties for the future.

As a reporter, El-Haddad’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, New Statesman and the Guardian and on the BBC, CNN…

‘One day justice will be done and the jailer will replace the jailed.’ Hisham Matar’s father wrote these words in a smuggled letter to his family in 1992, while imprisoned in one of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s notorious jails in Tripoli.

Jaballa Matar was a political dissident, kidnapped in 1990 by the dictator’s agents, and jailed. For years he wrote occasional letters…