A Deeper Defeat
Synopsis: The Democratic sweep in the US mid-term elections is being widely read as a rebuke to one president.
Theme archive
Musings on Leadership and Governance
Leadership, authority, democracy, institutional legitimacy, public decision-making, and the failures of rule.
Fractures in The Lie
Every awakening begins with ruptures in the lie
A Mandate for Life
Synopsis: Three people must be persuaded before any democracy changes how it explains and governs itself: the expert adviser who seeks only to please the client, the politician whose seat depends on present...
Too Gentle by Half
Synopsis: Why do societies mock the tenderness they claim to admire?
Advice Without a Passport
Why ethical principles cross borders while campaign tactics stay at home
Leaving Normal
Helping leaders feel what they already know
Where the Births Were Written
Synopsis: The fire that gutted Limoges town hall on 17 October 2026 destroyed the office where the city recorded its births and marriages.
Twenty Naza
A documentary, a word for the dead, and the distance between knowing and stopping
Dilemma of the Scriptwriters
Synopsis: Iran’s president spent some of his scarcest hours in New York with the analysts and journalists who draft Washington’s options, rather than with the officials who choose between them.
The Man Who Brings The Future
I have spent twenty years watching a certain kind of man arrive in this part of the world, and I have never once managed to like him.
Coffee Port
Before it was ever a front line, Mokha was just an aroma.
What The Borrowing Buys
Reflections on Debt in Australia and Elsewhere
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
Everything Except Their Names
The accusation arrives early in the Bishkek Declaration, and it arrives with full force: strikes on Iranian territory violated the UN Charter, damaged international law, and put regional peace and stability at risk.
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The Hames Report
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