Latest Story
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Final BESS edition released
Peter Fritz | March 9, 2026The final double issue of the Journal of Behavioural Economics and Social Systems (BESS) examines democracy, wellbeing and accountability in a period of institutional, economic and technological transition, with particular attention to human-AI collaboration.
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A history of innovation
Martie-Louise Verreynne | March 9, 2026A new book by Andrew Leigh maps the drivers of history’s big breakthroughs and why they still matter in an age when AI threatens to rewrite the rule book of human progress, and perhaps replace it altogether.
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Forever Jung
Nick Haslam | March 9, 2026Where Freud reduced the human psyche to repressed drives, Jung expanded it into something vast and mythic. Indeed, his concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes and individuation were an audacious attempt to map what it means to be human in an age before biological neuroscience.
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The cracked bowl is more beautiful
Trevor Mazzucchelli | March 9, 2026The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi draws attention to the meaning and value of imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness in life.
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Designing for disruption
Hamed Zakikhani | March 9, 2026Designing for disruption is not about predicting the next crisis. It is about ensuring that when disruption arrives—as it increasingly does—Australia’s food and energy systems have room to manoeuvre.
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AI anxiety
Grant Blashki | March 8, 2026Nobody asked for a world in which human creativity is stolen wholesale to be replaced with auto-generated slop, the job market is decimated and a handful of tech barons own the whole planet, but that’s the future we have and we’re right to be anxious about it.
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Israel’s “Iron Beam”
James Dwyer | March 8, 2026War lasers may still sound like science fiction but Israel and other nations are developing them to counter swarms of crude enemy drones and missiles in a cost-effective manner.
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The decline of the dollar
John West | March 8, 2026A number of factors have been eating away at the dominance of the American dollar over the past decade and will continue to do so.
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Reading Camus
Matthew Sharpe | March 7, 2026Author and philosopher Albert Camus died in a car crash in 1960, aged just 46 but the existential, moral and political issues Camus’ writings address still trouble us today.
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Hard power matters too
Malcolm Davis | March 7, 2026The United States’ and Israel’s military operations against Iran highlight the importance of the Australian Defence Force’s long-range strike and power projection capabilities.
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Social cohesion in contested times
Justin Bassi | March 6, 2026A new report reframes social cohesion as a shared governance challenge rather than a culture war, arguing that responsibility for holding an increasingly diverse nation together is distributed across government, platforms, civil society, media and communities.
