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Derek Francis (ex-chief economist, NSW Parliamentary Budget Office) argues Treasury's modelling of the CGT discount removal contains a basic error, and that applying the change to shares and business investment (not just property) produces effective rates near 70%, the highest in the world. He supports the housing-side changes but says nobody was asking for the productive economy to be taxed harder.

This is a review of The Promise of America, a new National Constitution Center collection of seventeen essays on the Declaration for the semiquincentennial, with contributors including Gordon Wood, Akhil Amar, Walter Isaacson, and Justices Breyer and Gorsuch. It traces how phrases like "self-evident," "consent of the governed," and "the pursuit of happiness" were understood in 1776 — including Franklin's Hume-inspired edit that replaced "sacred and undeniable" — and how the document became a template for declarations from Greece in 1822 to Israel in 1948. Which of the Declaration's promises do you think took longest to be kept?

John Aziz argues that the Mamdani-aligned wing of NYC politics — including recent primary winners like Darializa Avila Chevalier — has shifted from reformism to what he calls "destructivism": abolish police, prisons, borders, and capitalism, with no articulated replacement. His central question is that a society without those institutions still needs to enforce order, handle dangerous people, and allocate resources — so who gets that power instead? Is "abolition" politics better understood as a serious governing program or as a moral signal, and should candidates be held to answering the "replace it with what" question?

Quillette editor Jonathan Kay has a new investigative piece looking at Natasha Johnson, the newly appointed president of the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS), and the organization's ongoing commitment to gender-affirming care (GAC) for trans-identified minors.

The piece traces Johnson's academic background and public statements, examines the CPS's 2023 position statement on GAC in light of the UK's Cass Review, and includes interviews with two detransitioned women who were treated at Johnson's clinic as teenagers. It also covers a since-restricted Children's Healthcare Canada webinar by paediatric endocrinologist Daniel Metzger, and the 2025 controversy over a McMaster research team's systematic reviews of GAC evidence.

Worth a read if you're following the international debate over pediatric gender medicine and how it's playing out in Canadian institutions specifically.

The review compares the film's fantasy version of disclosure to two real ones from this year: the Pentagon's UAP archive dump (which turned out to include a hobby balloon as its clearest "evidence") and the redacted Epstein files, where nobody could tell which blackouts were protecting victims and which were protecting the powerful. In both cases, releasing the raw material didn't produce clarity, it produced a vacuum that got filled by whoever shouted the loudest interpretation first.