What The Borrowing Buys
Reflections on Debt in Australia and Elsewhere
Theme archive
Musings on Democracy and Institutions
Democratic legitimacy, institutions, public trust, civic life, and the fragility of collective decision-making.
The Little Blue Book
And the fiction we nostalgically call the international order
Misreading Xi
An Alternative Argument for Australia's Public Inquiry into AUKUS to Consider
The Crown and the Machine
A man in his late seventies stands before the British Parliament wearing several centuries of borrowed authority — crown, ermine, a phalanx of guards whose uniforms date from wars nobody living can possibly remember —...
Certainty’s Standing Ovation
A thousand people rose to their feet in Sydney on 22 August 2026.
Two Priesthoods
My local pharmacy ran out of tablets by the second week.
Outside The Prayer Hall
When Feelings Arrive Before Words
A Correction Before It Arrives
A curator in a regional art gallery is completing the wall text for a group show.
The Instrument and The Cage
What Language Does When No One is Watching
Radius of Trust
How a Threat With No Rivals Still Produces Enemies
The Order That Never Arrived
When Institutions Obey a Rule Nobody Wrote
What Remains When the School Has Gone
A Manifesto for Education Beyond Industrial Economism
Towards a Theocracy of Capital
When Wealth Becomes a Weapon
Prisons Of Our Own Invention
Industrial Economism and the New Servitude
The Architecture of Certainty
At the Strait of Hormuz this week, commercial vessels are still queuing for passage — more than a dozen a day, according to shipping trackers — even as strikes resume somewhere over Iran and a ceasefire that was...
The Weight a Beach Cannot Hold
On the evening of 14 December 2025, an Islamic State–inspired gunman opened fire on roughly a thousand people gathered at Bondi Beach to light candles for Hanukkah.
Source networks
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The Hames Report
Long-form essays and reflections on the future of everything. Read and support on SubstackPatreon / Published daily