There are books that describe the world as it is. And then there are books that refuse that world entirely — that go looking for the fault lines beneath the surface, the unexamined assumptions holding the whole edifice upright, and the questions that polite intellectual society has quietly agreed not to ask.
Some of you were with me during the pandemic years, when I wrote “Contagion: Living with and through the Plague”. That book came into being through an act of collective patronage that I found genuinely moving—readers who cared enough about my ideas to commission an essay, to name a theme, and to dedicate it to someone they loved or admired or wished to honour. The result was something neither I nor any single patron could have produced alone: a book shaped by many minds, yet unmistakably one voice. Several of those essays have since taken on a life well beyond what any of us anticipated. I am proud of that book in ways I rarely feel proud of anything.
I want to do that again. The Hames Report Limited Edition will be twenty years old this year. I want to celebrate that anniversary by inviting subscribers to The Hames Report to sponsor a new book.
“The Human Project: Reflections on the Past, Present and Possible Futures of Homo Sapiens” will not be a comfortable book. It will not flatter the assumptions of any particular camp — progressive or conservative, Western or Eastern, secular or devout. It will be, as the title suggests, a sustained act of intellectual disobedience: essays that push hard against the edges of what we think we know about where our species is headed, what we are capable of becoming, and what we may already have forfeited without quite noticing.
The themes I am drawn to are vast and, frankly, vertiginous — the unravelling of the industrial paradigm that has colonised human imagination for two centuries; the question of whether wisdom is still possible in civilisations organised around the acceleration of everything; the futures that the dominant culture has rendered unthinkable; and why that rendering was never accidental. But the specific shape of each essay will be determined not by me alone, but by you — the patron who commissions it.
Here is how it works.
Each essay in “The Human Project” will be commissioned, and the theme shaped, by a patron. You choose the topic — a question that haunts you, a territory you want me to explore, or a provocation you have long wanted to put to someone willing to take it seriously. You may dedicate the essay to whomever you wish: a person, a community, a memory, or an aspiration. I will write the essay in full, bringing to it everything I have — four decades of thinking, advising, writing and occasionally scandalising audiences across six continents.
There is no fixed price. What I ask is that you offer what my writing feels worth to you — not as a transaction, but as an act of faith in ideas that matter and that can make a difference in the world. Some patrons during “Contagion” offered modestly; others offered generously; all of them, I believe, felt that what came back to them was something they could not have bought elsewhere. I trust the same will be true here.
If this speaks to you—if you have a theme burning a hole in your thinking or simply want to be part of something that will outlast the noise of the present moment—write to me directly at [email protected]. Tell me what you are curious about, what disturbs you, and what you wish someone would finally say plainly and without flinching.
Heresy, after all, has always been where the future hides.
— Richard David Hames