The modern city is an extraordinary machine whose inhabitants seldom notice the machine until it stops. Turn off the electricity for a few minutes and people complain about the inconvenience. Turn it off for a day and supermarkets, petrol stations, communications networks, traffic systems and businesses begin to struggle. Turn it off across a large...

Gloria Steinem died at age 92, and the obituaries are doing what obituaries do: sandblasting the edges off a figure whose legacy is sharp enough to cut yourself on. But the Spectator piece lands on the thing that matters: not the Bunny Girl stunt, not the CIA money, not the internecine feminist spats. The phrase. "Reproductive freedom." Three sylla...

Western intellectuals cannot finish with Mao because the Cultural Revolution is the last respectable dream of unlimited political will. Not the grain statistics. Not the backyard furnaces. The image: a leader points at the universities, the party elders, the old plays and the four olds, and a generation of students becomes a weapon. Struggle sessio...

Japan is not Greece. It prints its own currency, most of its government debt is denominated in yen, it continues to run a current-account surplus and it possesses one of the world's largest net foreign-asset positions. People have been predicting a Japanese sovereign-debt crisis for thirty years and have repeatedly been wrong. What is happening in ...

There is a particular sound that the European political establishment makes when an election result tells it something it does not want to hear, and it is the sound of a thousand think-tankers, commissioners and editorialists suddenly discovering that democracy has an alarming tendency to produce outcomes they did not pre-approve, and that sound ha...

Something has been building in the Australian media over the past few months, and it is worth paying attention to, because the destination of this campaign is not especially mysterious. In August, the University of Melbourne publicised research on misogyny, online radicalisation and youth extremism in Australia, based on surveys of 1,122 teenagers ...

Michael Snyder's September 7 piece is a high-alarm wrap of the last 48 hours in the US–Iran maritime standoff: Iranian official Mohsen Rezaei claiming a new anti-ship missile was fired "above" a US warship, a planned Iranian "restricted zone" beyond the Strait of Hormuz, Trump posting AI imagery of Kharg Island being bombed, and Israeli assessments...

"How refreshing to hear a man in power call out the bias baked into our institutions against men. Let alone the "ideological bulls**t" (his words) used to shut down proper action on male suicide. Australia's political class has suddenly discovered that men exist, and new spokesmen are popping up everywhere. But there's one standout in the pack: Lle...

On 28 August 2026 BioNTech killed BNT122-01, a Phase 2 trial of autogene cevumeran (BNT122 / RO7198457), a personalized mRNA cancer shot built with Genentech. The patients had already had Stage II high-risk or Stage III colorectal tumours cut out. They still had circulating tumour DNA, leftover disease you can measure in blood. The trial asked whet...

Note: This piece was submitted by an Adelaide-based early-career machine learning engineer who works with models and datasets on platforms like Hugging Face. Hugging Face is the open repository where the machine-learning world shares models and datasets.While a bit technical the wider issue is important. The first write-ups treated July as a single...

There were two trials happening in Massachusetts, and only one of them was being conducted in a courtroom. The first is a murder trial, over which a labour-and-delivery nurse named Lindsay Clancy stood accused of killing her three children in 2023, with a defense built not on mystery but on criminal responsibility, on bipolar illness and postpartum...

The Australian Constitution was sold as a bargain between a new national government and the colonies that became states. Canberra would handle defence, customs, currency, and relations with the outside world. Almost everything else: land, rivers, energy, schools, hospitals, the ordinary police power, would stay closer to the people who lived with t...

US Vice President J. D. Vance recently reached for language that one does not normally hear in discussions about artificial intelligence. Speaking on Bryce Crawford's podcast, Vance described a kind of "weird spiritual dark energy" surrounding some developments in AI. He spoke about people holding what amounted to a funeral for a discontinued AI mo...

The pattern is no longer a rumour circulating in social media comment sections. It shows up in survey after survey, and it is specific enough that treating it as a generic "women's mental health crisis" misses the point. White liberal women, especially the young, report the highest rates of anxiety, depression, psychiatric diagnosis, and low life s...

There was a time when global warming arrived dressed for the Apocalypse. The poles would melt, the seas would rise, the forests would burn, crops would fail and humanity would discover that the four horsemen had traded their horses for sport utility vehicles. Every unusually hot day was a preview of the inferno, every cyclone a warning from the fut...

 The argument has travelled a long way from 2020. What used to be dismissed as speculation now sits closer to how a large part of the public reconstructs 2020–2022: not as a single blunder, but as a sequence in which official story and institutional behaviour pulled in opposite directions. The core claim is simple and harsh. Lockdowns were sol...

Doug Casey (link below), has been making this argument since the 1970s, which is why the essay still relevant. The phrase "Deep State" is newer than the thing it names. What he is describing is an informal but durable network that uses the official State as both weapon and camouflage, and that network is structurally hostile to individual liberty b...

There is a comforting story that ordinary citizens rule themselves. Every few years we walk into polling booths, mark pieces of paper and thereby determine the direction of the country. Politicians repeatedly tell us that they are our servants. Governments speak reverently of the will of the people. If the public becomes dissatisfied, another elect...

There is something wonderfully impressive about the word "theory." A theory sounds considerably grander than an observation, an argument or even an explanation. Nobody wins academic prestige by announcing that he has looked carefully at some evidence and reached a sensible conclusion. Say instead that you have "theorised" the phenomenon, preferably...

       Australia may keep elections while losing the freedom to decide which political organisations are allowed to contest them. Last Sunday, March for Australia held rallies around the country explicitly billed as demonstrations for free speech and against the federal government's hate laws. The rallies drew a mixture of natio...