Writer
Ten years after the transparency acts forced the Assembly to legislate in public, the deal-making that once ran this country has not disappeared. It has changed shape — and changed who holds power.
The press-freedom bill passed at 4:12am by the narrowest possible margin. Our correspondent spent the night in the chamber. This is how it happened.
The northern coast escaped the winds. The flooding that followed them may prove the more lasting emergency.
As the northern passage opens for a record fifth consecutive summer, the fortunes of one remote harbour town have become a barometer for the whole shifting geometry of world trade.
The National’s revival of “The Glass Diplomat” has been celebrated as a triumph of staging. Its real subject is the performer the audience almost never sees.
The autumn rate signal sent markets soaring. Read the minutes rather than the headline, and a more cautious — and more interesting — story emerges.
We have built a culture that rewards the instant reaction and punishes the second thought. A newspaper, of all things, should defend the right to change one’s mind slowly.
High on a windless plateau, a new array of instruments is straining to hear the faintest signal in the universe — the echo of its first light. Getting there meant defeating a subtler enemy: noise.
A leaked archive of ministerial messages reveals how the governing coalition actually makes decisions — and how little of it happens in the rooms designed for the purpose.
A new national gallery has hung its collection with no chronology, no nations and no wall text. Curators call it radical. Visitors, so far, call it a relief.
The next bottleneck in the semiconductor supply chain is not a factory or a design. It is a purified powder produced, almost entirely, by four plants in three countries.
A conductor’s experiment in playing without sheet music has produced the most talked-about season in the philharmonic’s history — and a quiet argument about what memory does to music.
An inquiry into a decade of disputed local elections has reached an uncomfortable conclusion: the system worked, and almost no one believed it.
On a thousand hectares of arable land, the most valuable crop may no longer be the one you can eat.
Water that sank from the surface a thousand years ago is only now returning. A study of that slow circulation carries an uncomfortable message about the pace of change.
A decade after selling its roads to private operators, the metropolis is reversing course — and discovering that undoing a privatisation is far harder than signing one.
A small experiment in a neighbourhood branch has quietly become the most borrowed service in the city’s library system. It contains no books at all.