Full Essay
The Warrior in the Winter Sky: Orion's Myth and Its Machinery
Orion's seasonal rise and fall is Earth's own orbit, read as a story — the hunter and the scorpion arranged so they can never meet, from Homer's shield of Achilles to Douglas Adams's Betelgeuse, and the real physics hiding inside the same ten stars.
Read
In Other Words
The Warrior Who Forever Defends Against the Monster
The same myth and physics, plain-speak register — why the sky arranges Orion and the scorpion so they can never meet, and why that permanent stand-off might be the point of the story.
Read
Full Essay
How the Irrational Persists
Astrology and astronomy were never rival disciplines but one activity split apart only a few centuries ago — the psychology of pattern-detection and personal validation that explains why the astrology still feels true today.
Read
In Other Words
Why Do People Believe Their Star Sign Knows Them?
The newspaper horoscope's century-long rise and quiet decline, and the 1948 experiment that fooled a classroom with an identical horoscope — plus why the disease cancer and the star sign Cancer share a name by pure coincidence.
Read
Full Essay
Why Ancient Greek Philosophers Still Run the Show in Academia
The naked bathtub genius, the man executed for asking questions, and the astronomer nobody believed for 1,700 years — nine ancient Greeks who still quietly run law, medicine, psychology, maths, and physics today.
Read
In Other Words
Why Ancient Greek Philosophers Still Run the Show in Academia
The same nine Greeks, same stories, plain-speak register — the naked bathtub run and the astronomer nobody believed, without the full academic depth.
Read
Britain's Quiet Caste That Resists Meritocracy
Does achievement dissolve disadvantage, or does the boundary hold anyway? Using a classic sociological test for caste versus class, this essay argues Britain has built a boundary that study and accreditation don't reliably dissolve.
Read
Bureaucratic Incentives and the Limits of New Public Management
Why government feels inefficient, from a 1955 joke about the Colonial Office to Niskanen's serious theory of it, New Zealand's radical experiment in fixing it, and fifty years of argument about whether the fix worked.
Read
The Public Sector's Shift from Discretionary Contracting to Competitive Tendering
Samuel Pepys fighting Navy corruption in the 1660s, three centuries of "Old Corruption," and a law younger than the Beatles' final album — the actual history of how Britain stopped handing out public contracts on personal relationship.
Read
Lowest-Price Procurement and Supplier Failure: The Carillion Case
Carillion won government work by underbidding everyone else, then collapsed owing nearly £7 billion. The rise, the warning signs, the collapse, who actually paid for it, and why the same incentives survived the lesson.
Read
Price Positioning and Business Failure on the UK High Street
Woolworths, BHS and Wilko all collapsed — cheapness didn't kill any of them. Woolworths' own 99-year history proves it at both ends, from “Nothing Over Sixpence” in 1909 to seventy years of drift after the discipline was gone.
Read
Public Financing Models and Cost Outcomes: Crossrail, HS2 and the Shadow-Toll Roads
Four ways Britain has paid for infrastructure it couldn't fund from a single budget line, from an absorbed overrun to a cancelled railway to a toll gantry Carillion itself once helped build.
Read
Music Has Fallen
Where the oak falls, evolution finds the light — on the democratic legacy of recorded music and what its collapse is opening up.
Read
Today’s Gen Zs Should Grow Up — A Public Debate
Three psychological traditions walk into an argument about a generation. What Freud, Jung, and Assagioli would actually say.
Read
Brothers in Contrasts: The Hitchens Legacy
Christopher and Peter Hitchens — two brothers, radically opposed positions, and what their dynamic reveals about intellectual independence.
Read
Killing, Killers and Cancelling
The quiet disquiet — a philosophical inquiry into moral complexity, cancellation culture, and the positions we take on the worst of human acts.
Read
Why Hampstead? — of all places?
A psychogeography of one London neighbourhood — what Hampstead Heath has meant to psychoanalysis, literature, and a certain kind of English thinking.
Read
A Funny Weapon
Humour, laughter, and the weaponisation of biology — what comedy is actually doing in the brain, and why it evolved at all.
Read