The capitalism-versus-socialism binary obscures the design question that governs performance: which institutions should be assigned to which domains, and how do we revise these assignments as evidence accumulates? Drawing on Schumpeter’s dynamic efficiency critique, the Hayekian knowledge problem, and contemporary debates between market abolitionists and real-utopian hybrids, I defend an explicitly experimental political economy: markets … Read more
The Next Democratic Nominee for 2028?
Why the 45–55 Cohort from Electoral Powerhouses Matters Democrats face a genuine hinge point in 2028. The goal isn’t only to win—it’s to hand the party to a leader who can knit together the Biden-Harris coalition, cut into GOP gains with working-class and younger voters, and front a credible governing record. That’s why the sweet … Read more
The line we agree to cross
There is a point beyond which the sermon ends and the invoice begins. Every lofty declaration contains its own reservation clause, the little asterisk that saves the speaker from their better self. We are forever telling one another what we believe, and then adding, sotto voce, the conditions under which belief is suspended. There is … Read more
The Empress Hotel: “The Big E”
If you live in Sydney, you might be able to name a few famous pubs: The Hero, The Oaks, and Watson’s Bay. However, there is a pub that should be just as famous, and you wouldn’t know it even if you were standing in front of it. The erasure of The Empress Hotel from Sydney’s … Read more
The Third Fleet: Twenty-Eight Winter Days at Sydney Cove
In August 1791, four ships forced a fragile penal settlement to become a city, as witnessed from Governor Phillip’s verandah, Surgeon White’s ward, Commissary Palmer’s ledger, Bennelong’s point, and the calloused hands of a working man. 1 August: The Arithmetic Changes The lookout’s cry carried across the winter harbour like a struck bell. A square … Read more
Sancak-ı Şerif; Relic, Ritual, and Ottoman Statecraft
From the Battlefields of Medina to the Palaces of Istanbul This is the story of a relic: a banner revered across empires under sanctified titles Sancak-ı Şerif, Ukab, Âlem-i Şerif, and the Holy Banner of the Prophet Muhammad (Rasûlüllah (s.a.s) ‘a ait sancak). It is not merely cloth, but a physical embodiment of legitimacy and … Read more
3/4
7×7, Autumn, Twilight, Thursday. Other liminal things, not quite the end, but still enough time to run down. Something is unsettling about three-quarters. Not the fraction itself—that’s clean enough, a neat division that any schoolchild can visualise with a pie chart or a measuring cup. It’s the feeling of three-quarters that gets under your skin: … Read more
Too Effective for Their Own Good: NATO, Feminism, Vaccines and the Paradox of Success
We live in a world built on invisible scaffolding. It’s not the monuments we notice most, but the quiet, unremarkable stability—the absence of disaster, the daily freedoms that feel so ordinary we no longer remember they were once extraordinary. NATO, feminism, and vaccines belong to this category of “invisible institutions”: they have worked so well, … Read more
If you’ve glimpsed the fire outside the cave, then you have a duty to return and help others see it too
Explaining Things to People Who Don’t Want to Hear Them By the time they reach Year 11, most of my students have already made up their minds. About politics, about science, about what matters and what’s a waste of time. It’s not that they’ve deeply studied the issues. It’s that they’ve absorbed enough headlines, slogans, … Read more
The Sweet Revolution: How Ancient Seafarers Created the World’s First Global Economy
Long before European colonisers turned sugar into an engine of slavery and empire, Austronesian mariners carried the precious cane across half the globe in one of history’s greatest agricultural dispersals—and inadvertently laid the foundations for globalisation itself The Mountain Discovery That Changed Everything In the misty highlands of New Guinea, 10,000 years ago, someone made … Read more