The March Monthly is here, and our cover story finds a Pulitzer Prize–winner spending time with the prime minister on the eve of a federal election. Anthony Albanese discusses his first term with Geraldine Brooks: the highs, the lows, the general state of Australia’s democracy. It’s a clear-eyed account from a writer famed for her ability to balance the personal narrative and the grand narrative. Back in Australia over Christmas, from her base in the US, Brooks sat down with the PM in the Lodge, and then spent a day with him as he swore in a new ministry and fine-tuned his approach to the upcoming election.It’s 30 years this year since the publication of Helen Garner’s divisive classic The First Stone, and the conversation and social mores around consent, power and sex have become a mainstream consideration. Ceridwen Spark returns to the specific milieu of the university campus, asking how much – in the wake of the #MeToo movement – things have changed and our understanding of power dynamics might have grown.When, last year, David Marr published his latest book, Killing for Country, an account of his family’s involvement in atrocities through Queensland’s brutal Native Police, he anticipated an outcry from the usual suspects on the right of Australian politics. This seemed a reasonable assumption: for year’s Marr had seen his work – particularly his writings on the Stolen Generations – co-opted and pilloried as part of our so-called history wars. What he discovered instead was that in 2025 the culture wars, and the politicisation of history, are being fought in different ways, on different frontiers. Federal politics is now home to such skirmishes, and truth-telling is the biggest casualty.If you’ve driven on Victorian roads in the past few months, and your gaze has tended upwards, to billboards and silos, buildings and random structures, you may well be acquainted with the unmistakable shape of Pam the Bird. Jack Gibson-Burrell is the 21-year-old behind the high-flying, widely distributed bird, and he’s been in court this month defending himself against multiple charges. One person’s street art is another’s “graffiti vandalism”, and the debate has raged in court and out about whether it constitutes a threat to the city. Anna Krien explores the story of Pam the Bird.And The Monthly’s architecture critic David Neustein turns his attention to the big screen, with new release The Brutalist attracting Oscar buzz. While we’ll find out today whether that was warranted, Neustein’s more interested in what this depiction of architecture on film tells us about current attitudes – social, artistic and political – towards the building of public edifices and our physical cities.All this and Jackson Ryan on a scandal in space science, Margaret Simons continues to chase up the death of a think tank, Clare Wright goes electric, Peter Craven mentions the Scottish Play and more besides. All in the March issue of Australia’s best magazine.