In the Monthly Comment from March 2006, Gideon Haigh celebrates the sesquicentenary of the secret ballot, Australia's most important (and least celebrated) political innovation. Elsewhere in The Nation Reviewed, John Button looks back on the waterfront dispute through the lens of Bastard Boys. Katie Cohen talks with the sartorially splendid Chilli Boo, fashion maven and T-shirt designer - and all of seven years old. Anna Goldsworthy observes heated performances of classical music in the far north. And Richard Cooke tracks down the fall guy in the most famous "scream tape" of all time, immortalised in Seinfeld, in which jazz drummer Buddy Rich excoriates a band member for daring to wear ... a beard.

In The Monthly Essays, there's Alfred McCoy's groundbreaking 2006 investigation of David Hicks' imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay, revealing the legal sleights of hand that landed the Australian there, the torture techniques used by his American captors and, through it all, the complicity of this country's government. Equally compelling is Chloe Hooper's fly-on-the-wall account of a 2005 Young Liberals conference in Tasmania, a glimpse of the next generation's political machinations both alarming and hilarious. Plus, from six months ago, there's Noel Pearson's prescient essay on Barack Obama and the difficulties he faced in his bid for office.

In Arts & Letters, Monthly film critic Luke Davies enters the monkish quiet of a remarkable and meditative documentary. Drusilla Modjeska is captivated by a young Australian woman's novel about Vietnam. Inga Clendinnen tackles Norman Mailer's swan song, a frustrating attempt to imagine the young Hitler. Rounding out the book coverage, Ramachandra Guha revisits a classic yet all-but-forgotten memoir from the 1960s that reveals a special link between India and Australia. And Monthly rock critic Robert Forster revels in albums from two reigning queens of indie, singer-songwriters Beth Orton and Chan Marshall, AKA Cat Power.

There's also twitcher extraordinaire Sean Dooley on that most controversial of birds, the pigeon; Kerryn Goldsworthy on the serial swindle of summer commercial-television programming; and one of Shane Maloney's finest Encounters - Malcolm Fraser and Galarrwuy Yunupingu's legendary fishing trip, in 1978.