Skyscrapers by Du Blois, Beersman, and Dinkelberg: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

For many decades there were very few women architects, and those who did manage to achieve great things got little or no credit for it. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, for example, was long given sole credit for two iconic Park Avenue skyscrapers, Lever House and the Union Carbide Building; now it’s acknowledged that Natalie Du Blois played at least an equal role in the design of both. And the profession is finally well on the way to acknowledging the contributions of many other previously neglected women architects.

But the architecture profession has barely begun to resolve another long-standing issue in the matter of giving credit for buildings—an issue unrelated to gender. The 1902 Flatiron Building in New York is generally credited to Daniel Burnham (or to his firm—D.H. Burnham and Co.), when in fact it was designed primarily by Frederick Dinkelberg, a young architect working for Burnham & Co. The 1921/1924 Wrigley Building in Chicago is more often than not credited to the firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, when in fact it was designed by Charles Beersman, a young architect at that firm. The Empire State Building is generally credited to the firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, when in fact it was one of those three, William Lamb, who was the building’s principal architect.

Those are historical examples, but the pattern has continued in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. The 1982 Petro-Canada Building in Calgary and the 1989 Scotia Plaza in Toronto, for example, are both credited to the firm WZMH (Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden); who knows who the principal architect was? The Steinway Tower in New York and the Hudson’s Detroit tower are both credited to the firm SHoP; who knows who the principal architect was? Skidmore Owings & Merrill gives credit to architect Bruce Graham for the Sears Tower in Chicago and to architect David Childs for One World Trade Center in New York, but Skidmore, Owings & Merrill buildings such as the 2019 tower at 1865 Broadway and the 2023 Hangzhou Wangchao Center are credited only to the firm.

Imagine if a scholarly article by three Princeton University academics were credited only to “Princeton University.” Imagine if Botticelli’s Birth of Venus were credited only to the “firm” that commissioned it—the Medici family. Yet that is essentially the approach still taken by many architectural firms.

From one angle, it’s a quite defensible approach; for a moment, let’s look at things from that angle.

For my recent book of watercolor paintings, The Skyscraper and the City, I wanted in the long captions to give credit as much as possible to the architects of buildings I particularly admired. One of these was (and is) One King St. West in Toronto, a stunning sliver of a skyscraper that retains at its base the historic façade of the bank building that once occupied the site. It’s credited to Stanford Downey Architects. I emailed the company to ask if they could put me in touch with the principal architect, and they were kind enough to connect me with one of the company’s senior architects, James Rasor. I had anticipated that he would be pleased to be identified in a book as the principal architect of a building that was clearly being given very positive coverage. Not at all: he asked that his name not be used in the book. In his view, notable buildings are always the product of a team effort; giving credit to just one person does not acknowledge that fact.

Fait enough, I thought, and I did as he had asked for the book. An admirable expression of modesty and team spirit, it seemed to me—and still does seem.

And yet.

To name none of the members of the team, but only the company they work for, seems in the end an unsatisfactory way of apportioning credit. Why not do as academics do when it’s a team effort—give credit for an academic article to two, three, four, even six or seven researchers (with the person who has taken the lead always listed first)? That can be long-winded, of course, if one is trying to reel off a list of authors, but it’s not much more long-winded than reeling off “Graham, Anderson, Probst & White” or “Melvin L., Harry A. & Curtis King Architects.” And when crediting the authors of academic research papers, it’s common practice to use “et al.” as appropriate.

But the lead contributor should surely come first; if the Flatiron Building is not to be credited solely to Dinkelberg, then it should be credited to Dinkelberg and Burnham, not Burnham and Dinkelberg.

The cause of giving credit where credit is due is given a welcome and wonderful boost by the research of Robert Sharoff, whose book The Wrigley Building; The Making of an Icon was published earlier this year. Sharoff and his collaborators (Tim Samuelson [Commentary], John Vinci [Introduction], and William Zbaren [Photographer]) have created a marvelous volume—and a book that finally gives full credit to Charles Beersman as the building’s lead architect. Sharoff has uncovered a great deal of information not only about the Wrigley but also about Beersman; it’s a beautiful book and a readable book, but also an important book of architectural history.

I was honored to play a small part in an event last week at the Skyscraper Museum in New York that was held to celebrate the publication of The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon. (Warm thanks to Skyscraper Museum founder and Director Carol Willis as well as Programs and Operations Head Dan Borrero for making the event happen!) Sharoff and his collaborators gave fascinating talks on Beersman, Wrigley, and the building itself, and then Gail Fenske and Tom Leslie gave an excellent presentation comparing the Wrigley with the Woolworth Building and other New York skyscrapers. Fenske’s last slide was an image from John Marin’s great series of watercolors of the Woolworth Building; my short presentation on The Skyscraper and the City, which ended the evening, began with a slide from the same John Marin series. All in all, it made for a quite delightful evening—for me, not least of all because I had a chance to look around the Skyscraper Museum, which I had never visited before. If you're in New York, I strongly encourage you to check it out!

Chicago (1997) [detail]: The Wrigley, Jewelers' and Mather Buildings

I’ll end by recommending two other skyscraper books—Fenske’s The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York and Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers: 1871-1934 – both of which are wonderfully informative and wonderfully well illustrated.



* * * * * *

As a postscript, I’ll paste in below two of the short skyscraper stories that are appended to my 2016 novel, Rising Stories—-two stories in which young Robin Smith learns something of Beersman and of Dinkelberg from the aging K.P. Sandwell. What Sandwell says of Beersman was correct in 2016; the world knew “almost nothing” about him. Thanks to Sharoff, that’s no longer true.

The Wrigley Building

“If you’re going to learn about the Wrigley Building,” K.P. began, there are two people you should know about first. The strange and rather sad thing is that I can only tell you about one of them.”

“One of them was called Wrigley. Did I guess it?”

K.P. smiled. “You are not quite as clever as you think, you know, Robin. But yes. One of them was called Wrigley. William Wrigley Jr., he was. He grew up in Philadelphia, where William Wrigley Sr. made soap. No, that’s putting it wrongly. Where William Sr. owned a soap company—I very much doubt he did any of the actual making of the stuff. Little William was evidently something of a trouble maker; he kept getting expelled from school—he once threw a pie at the principal, I believe. When he was ten he ran away from home. He made his way from Philadelphia to New York and stayed there for a whole summer; he worked as a newsboy and he slept on the street, or so the story goes. He did go to work in the soap business by and by, but a sort of restlessness must have always stayed inside him. He ran away again when he was nineteen, but lost his railway ticket in Kansas City and came back to Philadelphia, broke. By the time he moved to Chicago he was not yet 30, but he had worked on and off in the soap business for almost 20 years. His big idea in business was to give people something for free—‘for nothing’ was what he called it. ‘Everybody likes something extra, something for nothing,’ that was Wrigley’s motto.

“Little William wasn’t a rich man. He had almost nothing himself; William Sr. thought a man should have to earn his way. The boy—the man, I suppose we must start to call him at this point in the story—had gotten married when he was twenty, and was earning $10 a week. He had gotten himself a wife, and soon he had a daughter too. That’s when he came to Chicago. It was 1890. There were a million people here but there were still no skyscrapers.”

“Was it in Chicago that he started making gum, then?” Robin paused. “I mean, started a company that made gum?”

“Not at first. At first he was selling soap and he offered baking powder as a premium. There seemed to be more interest in the baking powder than the soap, so he started selling baking powder—offering chewing gum as a premium.”

“That was like a prize?”

“I suppose you could call it that. Only it turned out that people wanted the gum more than they wanted the baking powder. I find that impossible to imagine. Do you like to chew gum, Robin?”

“I do, Granny.”

“You and a billion other children. Unfathomable. But yes, evidently people wanted the gum more than the baking powder. And so he borrowed $5,000 from his uncle. Not from his father, the soap maker—that’s an interesting detail. And with the $5,000 little William started his gum company.”

“And made Juicy Fruit, and made Doublemint, and made the Wrigley Building?”

“One step at a time, Robin, one step at a time. There was no Doublemint at first; what Wrigley’s made at first was called Lotta Gum. That was for children…”

“Makes a lotta sense, Granny.”

“I’m sure it does, child, I’m sure it does. It was also for grownups, apparently—grownup men, supposedly grownup men.”

“Not for women?”

“No, the women were evidently thought not to care so much as the men did about quantity. William wanted classy for the women, and that meant a different name for their gum. ‘Vassar Gum.’ I will tell you another time about Vassar.”

“All right, Granny.” But there was a pause. K.P. had suddenly lost the thread. There was a strange light in the sky. You often got that light over Lake Michigan at this hour, this time of year. Dusk. She could remember…

“The building, Granny. You’re telling me about the Wrigley Building now.”

“So I am, child. So I am. The building, and who made it. A lot of people have written about how wonderful Wrigley was. Larger than life, they say. How he gave his workers Saturdays off when everywhere else people had to work a half day Saturday, a full day sometimes. How he put baseball games on the radio when everyone else thought that would just encourage all the fans to stay home. And he… —no, I am just going to tell you about the building.”

“Yes, Granny. The building, Granny.”

“Wrigley wanted height, wanted graceful height for his gum temple. But with the Wrigley Building, the height is just a small part of it. Sometimes people make it sound as if the design was ersatz—more or less copied from some Spanish cathedral, or from the Woolworth Building in New York. But it isn’t like either of those. Even the tower is only a little bit like that silly Spanish cathedral. And there’s so much more to the whole thing than the tower.”

“The angles are all set at an angle—I remember you said that when I was here before, Granny.”

“And the proportions, child. I trust I told you about the proportions.”

“You told only me a little,” Robin lied. “Who made the angles and the proportions Granny?”

“That’s just what I was getting to, child. No one has ever heard of him. It’s the most famous building in Chicago, and no one has ever heard of the person who made it.”

“Made it, Granny?”

“Who designed it, Robin. Who made the designs. Sometimes people mention the firm—Graham, something, something and something. One of those firms where a lot of people have jostled to have their own name be part of the company name, where everyone wants to be known and remembered. And of course the more names there are, the more forgettable it all is.”

“So Graham and the Somethings had nothing to do with the Wrigley Building?”

“Graham may have done. But none of the Somethings, so far as I know. Mainly it seems to have been a young man named Charles Beersman. And we now almost nothing about him. Oh, there are some basic facts. I said ‘young’—he was just over thirty when he came to Chicago and joined Graham and all those Somethings in 1919. The Wrigley Building must have been just about the first thing he worked on—they broke ground for it in 1920. Beersman came from New York but he went to university in Philadelphia. We know that he won a fellowship there and we have a list of some of the other buildings he designed later. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago may be the best known of them. It’s a design in a certain sort of classical style, Greek pillars slapped onto a very ordinary skyscraper. Nothing hideous about it but nothing very remarkable either. Copying Greeks badly: it’s been done a million times before, and a million times since. And maybe the Wrigley Building began with copying. Copying that cathedral, copying those towers in New York—the Woolworth Building, the Municipal Building, the Metropolitan Life Building. But something magical happened. Maybe Beersman was pushed into genius by the lines of the street and the river. By the way they push together, those strange angles. Whatever it was, it was genius. And then nothing, nothing that he is remembered for. No one remembers what he was like, no one remembers his name. I tried once to look up something about him—there is almost nothing. When I was a toddler he was getting married; that much there is a record of, you can find it in The New York Times:

Mrs. Sarah L. Broffe of 149 Lexington Avenue announces the engagement of her daughter, Miss Beatrice Livingston to Charles G. Beersman, of this city. Mr. Beersman is an architect at 18 West Thirty-fourth Street. He was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and is a member of the Acacia Fraternity.

Who were these people? Were they happy? How did Beatrice take to Chicago? Did they grow rich? Did they…? There are so many questions, and none of them can be answered. Beersman died July 29, 1946, aged 58. A more or less forgotten life, a more or less forgotten man.”

“But you remember things about him, Granny.”

“This evening, perhaps. As a shadow, as a name, a name to give to something that was human and that gave shape to the finest of all the buildings in this city. But a name and a shadow only. And only now: there is no forever to it. Tomorrow morning there may be nothing there.”

“The building will be there, Granny.”

“Yes, child. The building will be there. There will be no earthquakes, and the building will be there in the morning.”



Dinkelberg, the Flatiron, and the Jewelers’

“Frederick Dinkelberg had worked for Daniel Burnham, you see.”

“Who was…”

“Burnham and Root was the top architectural firm in Chicago. They made their money making grand houses for wealthy meat makers, businesssmen who had grown rich by being cruel to cows and to pigs. But then Burnham and Root turned to skycrapers. Root died young, but Burnham went on to greater and greater things. So it was that Dinkelberg became involved in some of the greatest skyscraper projects of the time. He was the main architect for what some still say is the finest of them all, the Flatiron in New York—a building credited not to him but to ‘D. H. Burnham & Co.’ Burnham himself was too senior, too busy—how often that happens in life! That was—” What year had it been? K.P. could not come up with a number. “It was early in the century. The century that’s over now,” she added. “Like Burnham, Dinkelberg never believed in architecture that would break new ground. He…”

“You always have to break the ground to build a building, Granny. You…”

“It’s a metaphor, Robin. A figure of speech. They never believed in architecture that would do anything radically new or different. Burnham and Dinkelberg always wanted a bit of ancient Greece and Rome on the outside, even if the skeleton was modern steel. Nothing revolutionary, they insisted—and yet what an extraordinarily bold thing the Flatiron was! The Fuller Building, I should say. That’s what they called it originally, for the company that had commissioned it. But even before it was finished people called it the Flatiron, for the shape of the space it occupied. Not everybody was happy. Let me read you what Life magazine said.” K.P. fumbled for a few moments amongst all the books until she found the one she wanted, a whole book about the Flatiron. “Here it is—I’ll read it to you:

In this partly civilized age and city, it is proposed to erect on the flatiron at Twenty-third Street an office building more than twenty stories high. New York has no law that restricts the height of buildings, and there is nothing to hinder the consummation of this appalling purpose. Madison Square ought to be one of the beauty spots of the city. It is grievous to think that its fair proportions are to be marred by this outlandish structure.

Of course all that conservative huffing and puffing was soon forgotten. Within a few years everyone loved the Flatiron—the outlandish had become the iconic.”

“Translation?”

“The thing that had been mocked had become revered.” Would the child understand revered any better than iconic? One couldn’t explain everything. “That was the Flatiron. But then Burnham died, and the firm went into decline. Dinkelberg struck out on his own with a colleague, Joachim Gaiver, an engineer. The company they started took on all sorts of work, but they only received one commission to build a skyscraper—that was the Jewelers’ Building. Commissioned in 1924, constructed 1925-27, and for a brief time “the tallest building in the world outside New York City.” The style was old fashioned—Dinkelberg never gave up the fondness for Greek and Roman classicism he had shared with Burnham. But it was very modern in its way; instead of having an airshaft in the middle of the building, Gaiver and Dinkelberg used that space for cars. It was the 1920s, and most everyone wanted an automobile. Mothers especially wanted to have a secure place to park their car so that they could take their valuables straight from the safe in their office to their vehicle and then drive to—well, to wherever they needed to go. That was the idea, anyway, and a clever idea it was. Gaiver and Dinkelberg built 23 floors of garage in the middle of the Jewelers’ Building.”

“But you can’t park there now.”

“When does anything turn out exactly as it has been planned? The Jewelers’ Building had been commissioned on the assumption that jewelers would love to have one building where they could carry out all their transactions—everyone in one convenient place instead of strung out along Wabash Avenue. But for whatever reason the jewelers decided they preferred life on Wabash; almost none of them moved into the new building that had their name on it. And the garage? Well, it wasn’t used by people visiting their jewelers. Pure Oil took over most of the building, and had it renamed, and the executives loved having such a convenient place to park their cars. But their cars quickly got larger, and the tight turns on the ramps of the garage in what was now the Pure Oil building didn’t change their size or their shape at all. By the 1940s Gaiver and Dinkelberg’s wonderful idea wasn’t working anymore. They made all that garage space into storage space and dingy cut-rate office space with no light. Only now, in the twenty-first century, has the Jewelers’ been made elegant and beautiful again.”

Ready to Pounce if you Mispronounce: Smaller Wrongs and Larger Wrongs

The pronunciation of Zohran Mamdani’s last name has become a minor issue in New York’s mayoralty campaign; the name has been widely mispronounced, with by far the most common mistake being the transposition of the M and the N (saying Mandami instead of Mamdani).

Such mispronunciations have been “called out” as racist by a number of voices on the left. In a July 1, 2025 posting about Mamdani on BoingBoing, for example, Jennifer Sandlin condemns the “racial microaggressions of mispronouncing” Mamdani’s name: “one form of racism that seems more subtle but is as destructive as more overt and blatant racism,” she insists, “is mispronouncing a person’s name, a racist microaggression.”

But does this sort of thing in fact constitute a racist microaggression? I think it’s fair to say that mispronunciations can sometimes be microaggressions; if the mispronunciation is repeated again and again, and the speaker is making no effort to get it right, it seems fair to characterize that as a microaggression. (Donald Trump is perhaps the world’s worst repeat offender in this category.) But mispronunciations—even repeated mispronunciations—can also be quite innocent. And, in the case of Mamdani’s name, it’s entirely understandable that English speakers unfamiliar with the name will tend to pronounce it wrongly. A very good October 22 New York Times article (“Why Can’t People Say Zohran Mamdani’s Name Correctly?,” by Emma Fitzsimmons, Benjamin Oreskes, Eden Weingart, and Aliza Aufrichtig) points this out, quoting Professor Laurel MacKenzie, co-director of the NYU Sociolinguistics Lab: “Mamdani has an ‘M’ next to a ‘D’, and that’s hard for English speakers. Our tongues are just not used to making that specific sequence of sounds.”*

In the article MacKenzie is not quoted as having given any explanation for why it should be hard, so I asked another professor (Maureen Okun, who for many years taught linguistics at Vancouver Island University and who is my at-home source for information of an almost infinite variety of types). When we make an “N” sound, she explained, our tongues are right near the front of our mouths, behind our upper teeth—-which is also where our tongues need to be if we’re going to make a “D” sound; the transition from one to the other thus comes very naturally. When we make an “M” sound, on the other hand, our tongues are typically a little farther back, since the sound is articulated by pressing our lips together; it’s thus more difficult for us to transition from an “M” sound to a “D” sound.

The substituting of an “N” sound for an “M” sound in such circumstances is an example of metathesis, a common phenomenon involving the transposition of sounds in order to make a word easier for us to pronounce. Metathesis, it should be emphasized, often occurs without our even being aware of it.

Saying “Mandami” instead of “Mamdani,” then, is an entirely understandable mistake. To be sure, it’s a mistake that we can learn to correct—and a mistake that anyone who is going to be mentioning the name “Mamdani” at all frequently obviously should make an effort to correct. But getting it wrong the first time—even getting it wrong quite a few times—should absolutely not be thought of as a racist microaggression. (It’s worth noting that former mayor Bill Blasio and New York Attorney General Letitia James—-Mamdani supporters both—-are among the many who have referred to him as Mandami instead of Mamdani.)

Mamdani himself has said different things on the subject of people mispronouncing his name. The October 22 New York Times article quotes him as saying, quite reasonably, “I don’t begrudge anyone who tries and gets it wrong. The effort means everything to me.” But he has also sometimes implied that such mispronouncing of names is indeed a racist microaggression. In an October 24 New York Daily News article, Josephine Stratman quotes his words to a “crowd of Muslim men inside the Islamic Cultural Center”: “Raise your hand if you have had to deal with someone mispronouncing your name when you go to work. Raise your hand if someone has looked at you as a Muslim and called you a terrorist.” Mamdani doesn’t ask if the men have had to deal with someone intentionally mispronouncing their names or insistently mispronouncing their names; the mere mispronunciation is what is spoken of in the same breath as the act of calling them terrorist.

Mamdani's campaign logo--focusing on the first name only.

Assuming that the mistake of mispronouncing someone’s name must be a racist microaggression, then, is an unfortunate expression of intolerance. To be sure, it’s a far less egregious example of intolerance than the sorts of outrageous insults that the likes of Trump and Vance and Orban spout daily; throughout most of the world, right-wing intolerance is these days far more widespread, and far more vicious than is left wing intolerance. But the left-wing varieties do nevertheless contribute to a climate of intolerance, and to the increasing polarization of society, and those of us on the left who want to resist that polarization have I think a responsibility to acknowledge and to take issue with the varieties of intolerance that persist on our side of the ideological divide—just as much as we have a responsibility to staunchly oppose the right-wing varieties. If we are to hold out hope of those in the middle concluding that Trump and his ilk are the crazies and that we on the left are reasonable, we had better do our best to be reasonable.

Presuming a mispronunciation of a name to be a microaggression is bad enough. Worse is the tendency to treat real or perceived microaggressions as offenses that are, to quote Jennifer Sandlin again, “as destructive as more overt and blatant racism.” By this line of reasoning, mispronouncing someone’s name is as destructive as levelling a racist insult against someone. It’s as destructive as slavery. It’s as destructive as genocide.

Unfortunately, such illogic has been common in some segments of the progressive left for a generation or more. But the fact that it’s widespread does not make it right. The alleged microaggression of mispronouncing someone’s name is not as destructive as is slavery or genocide. An inappropriate sexist remark is not as destructive as is denying women the right to be educated—or as is the violence of a physical sexual assault. Deadnaming** is not as destructive as is taking away the rights of trans people, or as is physically assaulting trans people.

It’s true that a society in which less severe wrongs are permitted to take root can grow into a society in which far more destructive wrongs become common. But much less severe wrongs are not in themselves just as destructive as are great wrongs, and we should stop pretending that they are.

*Certain sounds may not be inherently easy to form in the human mouth, but if we hear those sounds from early childhood they become easy to say—they become habitual. Distinguishing between an “L” sound and an “R” sound—a distinction that native English speakers find natural—feels anything but natural to a native Japanese or Chinese speaker. Pronouncing a name such as “Scott” or “Spock” without a vowel sound preceding it does not feel natural to a Spanish speaker, since Spanish does not allow SC or SP consonant clusters without a preceding vowell. (A Spanish speaker will thus naturally tend to mispronounce “Miss Scott” and “Doctor Spock” as “Miss Escott” and “Dr. Espock.”) Sounding the “c” in “Ncube” with the correct click of the 15 distinct types of click that are part of the Ndebele language comes naturally to anyone who has grown up hearing and speaking Ndebele; to speakers of most other languages, not so much. I spent three years teaching English in rural Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, and I can attest that it took me some time to learn to say “Mr. Ncube” with even an approximation of the sort of click Ndebele speakers use when pronouncing the word.

Above and beyond pronunciation difficulties rooted in the configuration of our mouths and/or difficulties rooted in linguistic and cultural habit, there can be highly individual quirks. As a Canadian who was born in America and has spent a great deal of time there, for example, I find it almost impossible to hear the difference between the way in which Americans pronounce words such as out and about and the way in which Canadians do so. I honestly can’t imagine how I would go about pronouncing such words any differently than I do now.

**The concept of deadnaming is universally understood in the trans community and among those with contacts in the trans community, but it remains a foreign concept to many others. The most egregious forms of deadnaming involve intentionally addressing a trans person by the name they were known by before they transitioned. Less egregious forms include referencing earlier work with a person’s “dead” name (saying, for example, that the film Juno starred Ellen Page, instead of saying that it starred Elliot Page, or saying that it was James Morris who wrote Pax Brittanica, rather than identifying the author as Jan Morris).

OK, Blue Jays? No more than OK, when compared to Cleveland

Over the years Toronto Blue Jays fans have rarely regarded Mark Shapiro (President of Blue Jays since the fall of 2015) as either very likeable or very competent. He began his tenure with the Jays by not doing enough to convince genius-General Manager Alex Antholoulos to remain with the team, and the Blue Jays have enjoyed little playoff success since. Things have finally taken a turn for the better in the 2025 season; the Jays won their division and are currently up 2 games to none over the Yankees in the Divisional Series. It was with that recent success in mind that Globe and Mail sports columnist Cathal Kelly came to Shapiro’s defence a few days ago. That prompted the letter below, comparing the performance of the Blue Jays and the Cleveland Indians/Guardians. (I’ve been a fan of the Guardians since April 2024, when Maureen and I visited Cleveland to see the eclipse, and to watch a couple of baseball games.) I wrote a similar letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, concluding that, if any management team deserves congratulations on their team’s success over the past decade, it is surely Antonetti and Chernoff and Francona and Vogt of the Indians/Guardians.

[The letter was published in a slightly edited version in the 7 October issue of the Globe.]

Re “Shapiro may have the last laugh” (October 3): Of Mark Shapiro and the Toronto Blue Jays, Cathal Kelly writes this: “the only measure of success is success. He has provided it.”

But how much of it? From November 2001 to 2015 Mark Shapiro was at first GM and then President of the Cleveland Indians; the team made the playoffs just three times in those fifteen years. In the ten years since he left Cleveland, the Indians/Guardians have made the playoffs seven times (under President Chris Antonetti, GM Mike Chernoff, and managers Terry Francona and Stephen Vogt). The Blue Jays under Shapiro (together with General manager Ross Atkins and Managers Charlie Montoyo and John Schneider) have made the playoffs just five times over the same period—even though the Toronto payroll is more than double the Cleveland payroll.

And Alex Antholoulos, the GM who Shapiro didn’t manage to retain in 2015? He has since been GM of the Dodgers and Braves; his teams have made the playoffs nine times in those same ten years.

Maureen at Progressive Field, Cleveland, April 2024

Maureen at Progressive Field, Cleveland (2), April 2024

Other Guards fans at Progressive Field, April 2024

Family (Francesco, Blake, Brian, Jenny, Naomi, Nick, Fran, Dominic, me) and others in crowd, Blue Jays vs. Rays at the Skydome, 3 September 2018

Me, holding a Stubby Clapp sign, 3 September 2018 at the Skydome. By September of 2018 it was clear the Blue Jays would not resign John Gibbons as manager for the 2019 season; I was among those who thought that Canadian Stubby Clapp, who had been on Canada’s team several times in the World Baseball Classic and who in 2018 had just managed the Triple A Memphis Redbirds to consecutive Pacific Coast League championships, should get the Blue Jays’ manager’s job. (Instead, the job went to Charlie Montoya; Clapp was hired as first-base coach by the St. Louis Cardinals.)

“Consistently vibrant”: Kirkus Reviews on The Skyscraper and the City

A nice advance review came the other day for The Skyscraper and the City from Kirkus Reviews, a leading book review service that many librarians and booksellers rely on. Kirkus publishes reviews of a vast number of books, but most of them simply appear with little fanfare online. Someone from Kirkus phoned this morning to let me know that this review will appear in the 15 November issue of Kirkus Reviews Magazine, which goes out every two weeks to about 15,000 libraries, bookstores and other subscribers.

The reviewer isn’t keen on much of the content of the long captions I wrote to accompany many of the images. (I steer clear almost entirely of theorizing the paintings, and instead tend to say something about the subject matter, or about my own life when I was creating the work.) But the book’s main focus is the paintings themselves, and the reviewer likes those very much. The full review can be found online (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/don-lepan-2/the-skyscraper-and-the-city/). Here’s an excerpt:

LePan presents a collection of charming watercolor cityscapes accompanied by commentary, in this retrospective of his three-decade career. … [The book] features dynamic urban scenes in which light operates without conventional logic: “Broad swaths of light sweep and swoop down and across and up and away,” lending skyscrapers, bridges, and monuments a “friendly but fierce and almost otherworldly energy.” The artist’s loose, gestural approach offers a refreshing departure from the rigid linear representations that typically characterize urban landscapes. LePan’s “mind’s-eye painting” … approach yields consistently vibrant results; outstanding examples include his breakthrough Chicago (1994), in which the Sears Tower and Merchandise Mart pulse with raw metropolitan energy, and New Orleans (2007), which captures both post-Katrina devastation and the city’s irrepressible vitality through bold color contrasts and flowing forms.

PS I will paste in below details from the two paintings the reviewer singles out--Chicago (1994) and New Orleans (2007)

Introducing the Budge-not: Proof that Great Inventions Can Still Happen Outside Corporate Research Labs, and with No Government Assistance

One of the claims made by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their excellent book Abundance is that the end of the nineteenth century was also the end of the era in which “science and invention [were] largely a job for solo entrepreneurs, … individual thinkers who, through trial and error, cobbled their way toward a product that—initially, barely—worked.” According to Klein and Thompon, Thomas Edison’s corporate research lab—and, eventually, the advent of government funding to encourage new research—became the new model.

I'm sure that's largely true, but various exceptions are worthy of note.

The post-it note? Famously, that was the result of Art Fry thinking of a way to take advantage of his colleague Spencer Silver’s mistake (an adhesive that was a lot less strong than Silver had wanted); Fry fashioned reusable sticky bookmarks for his hymn book. But the two men both worked for 3M and Silver’s mistake came out of 3M-funded research, so I suppose one could claim that the example still adheres to the “corporate research lab” model.

Not so for the modern veggie burger, which apparently was invented in 1982 by Gregory Sams, who together with his brother ran a macrobiotic natural foods restaurant in London. Not so for the invention of vertical farming in 1999 (by Dickson Despommier of Columbia University). Not so for the invention of the paint roller—around 1940, by Norman Breakey, who never patented his invention. Not so for actress Hedy Lamarr's invention in the 1940s of a frequency-shifting device that's an ancestor of modern wi-fi and GPS technology.

And not so for the budge-not, invented around 2015—by me!

The phrase "budge not," of course, was invented not by me but by William Shakespeare; I can take no credit whatsoever for that. It’s from The Merchant of Venice; Shylock’s amusing servant, Lancelet Gobbo (“good Gobbo, good Lancelet Gobbo”) is debating with himself as to whether or not he should remain in Shylock’s service or run away:

GOBBO: … my conscience says “Lancelet, budge not.” “Budge,” says the fiend. “Budge not,” says my conscience. “Conscience,” say I, “you counsel well.” “Fiend,” say I, “you counsel well.” To be ruled by my conscience, I should stay with the Jew …

The budge-not as an invention is designed as a safety device. What to do when you need to work on a ladder but the ground slopes? The old way was to put a shim under one side of the ladder. Or two shims, or three, depending on how much the ground sloped. But that’s inherently unstable; the slightest wobble and everything may give way. For years I followed this approach, and had numerous near escapes. Then, about ten years ago, the light went on, and soon after I had hammered together the world’s first budge-not.

The budge-not brings stability to laddering on a slope; the bottom of the budge-not is angled to match the angle of the slope, while the top is flat—with a 2x6 nailed on, to brace the ladder against. That ladder’s not going nowhere! For added stability an optional boulder may be added to the budge-not (see photos).

Me, on ladder supported by budge-not. Note the boulder. (Photo by Maureen)

Close-up of budge-not. (Photo by Maureen)
















Note that there is a 2x6 mailed to each side of the budge-not; this enables the budge-not to be used on either side of our house (or, indeed, on either side of any house built on sloping ground).

Notice as well the shim inserted under the budge-not, to make the angle just right; with the full weight of the budge-not pressing down on it, that shim’s not budging one bit!

Like Norman Breakey with his paint roller, I have decided not to patent the budge-not; anyone anywhere may build their own budge-not, and profit by it, cutting the wood at whatever angle is appropriate to the slope on which their house is built. Or, indeed, any enterprising soul can start their own budge-not factory, making adjustable-angle budge-nots for the masses—adjustable for any angle of slope.

One can imagine a thriving budge-not factory, and budge-not variants too. You'd of course want a basic model--the Budget Budge-not, you would have to call it--but you'd want some premium and luxury models too. The Good Gobbo, for example, might be available in different colors and come with a lifetime guarantee.

It’s easy as well to imagine marketing opportunities for budge-not add-ons; be bolder with a boulder for your budge-not, and so on and so forth. For now, though, the concept of the budge-not—and the opportunity to build one yourself—will have to suffice.

Portentousness Itself

We’ve all read sentences such as these, that reference “life itself,” or “time itself,” or “democracy itself”:

The author leads us to reflect not just on the ways in which the lives of these characters have unfolded over time, but also on the unfolding of time itself.

This memoir has a lot to say not only about the author’s life, but about life itself.

Here's another example--from the New York Times's description of Ian MacEwan's forthcoming novel, What We Can Know:

In a tale spanning a full century, the professor chases down the poem's origin, the dark secret that cast it into obscurity, and the slippery nature of knowledge itself.

The word "itself” adds virtually nothing meaningful to such sentences. One could I suppose argue that it adds emphasis, but the fundamental work it is asked to do is not to lend emphasis but rather to lend a sense of portentousness to what one is saying. Compare these two:

I’m not talking about just a few of us. I’m talking about humanity.

I’m not talking about just a few of us. I’m talking about humanity itself.

The first sounds a bit melodramatic, and a bit self-important. The second sounds somehow more intellectual—and more like a thought that might start to verge on the profound.

Any association with genuine profundity is of course entirely spurious. The word “itself” adds nothing meaningful in itself.

It’s interesting to look at the history of the word itself being used in this way. We often tend these days to think of the Victorian era as the height of portentousness. But according to Google Ngram, this sort of portentous use of itself declined steadily through the Victorian era (after peaking in the late eighteenth century and then plateauing through to about 1840). It remained low through most of the twentieth century, before starting to rise in the 1990s, reaching another peak around 2020.

Are we in the height of a new age of portentousness? The history of this use of itself constitutes only one small piece of evidence; it’s surely not conclusive. But it is suggestive.

Imagined Reality -- Fiction, Painting, Pittsburgh

In Danzy Senna’s recent novel Colored Television there’s a passage about the advice that the protagonist (a fiction writer, and also a creative writing instructor) gives to her students:

There was a lecture she gave her students every term on how to transform reality into fiction…. She told them you shouldn’t know too much reality if you were to invent something fully on the page. She always used the example of Henry James—how he came up with the concept of his masterpiece, What Maisie Knew. He had been sitting next to a gossipy old woman at a dinner party one night and she told him she had an idea for a novel he should write. She began to tell him a story about a family she knew—two awful, greedy parents who were divorcing and the child caught in the middle, their pawn—when James interrupted her and said he didn’t want to know any more. He only wanted the briefest of details; then he was off and running.

That advice strikes me as being very good indeed. Certainly it rings true in relation to what I’ve found works for me in writing fiction—and not just in connection with story material. It can be better to have just the wisp of a story from the real world rather than the whole thing; in similar fashion, it can be better to set stories in real-world places that you have only wisps of familiarity with, rather than in places you know intimately. With place as with story material, it can help if the imagination is allowed plenty of room to create its own reality.

When I read that passage of Senna’s, I thought of my experience in writing Leaving Pittsburgh, a book of linked short stories, many of them set—just as the title suggests—in Pittsburgh. (It’s a book I hope will be published some time in 2026). When I embarked on the project, I had spent only a small amount of time in the city—a very memorable period of time, to be sure, but a very short one. When I asked a couple of people who know Pittsburgh intimately to read parts of the manuscript, the first thing one of them said was, “Well, you obviously know the city very well.”

With Google Maps street view, of course, one has a sort-of access to actual views of almost anywhere in the world, and I certainly made use of Google Maps street view. But I also let my imagination fill in a great many spaces.

There are seven places I have lived for reasonably long periods of my life: Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto, Brighton/Lewes in the UK, Murewa in Zimbabwe, Calgary, and Nanaimo. With the partial exception of some scenes in Lucy and Bonbon, I haven’t yet set a piece of fiction in any of them, and perhaps I never will. Places I have merely visited, or lived in for only a few months—places such as Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Pittsburgh—those are somehow far more imaginatively rich for me. And if a place feels imaginatively rich to the writer, chances are that the writer will be able to make it feel real to the reader.

The same is I think largely true of painting, for me at least. The Skyscraper and the City, a book of my city paintings, will be published later this year. As I look through those images, I find it striking that the cities that have most inspired me have tended to be cities that I have only visited or lived in for brief periods. Chicago, New York, and New Orleans, all repeatedly, but also Phoenix, Sydney, Columbus—and Pittsburgh.

Anger at Trump, Anger at Americans

On CBC radio on Canada Day, the co-host of the “Canada Day in the Capital” special from Ottawa interviewed Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s Governor-General from 2000 to 2005, introducing her as someone who embodied the essence of Canada perhaps better than any other individual. Most of what Clarkson said was the sort of bland platitude one expects on such occasions. There was one notable exception—when Clarkson was asked to comment on America, and Americans. You could hear an edge come into her voice as she asserted that Americans are “too dumb” to even try to understand Canada.

She didn’t say that Trump is “too dumb….,” or even that “Trump voters are too dumb….” She said “Americans.”

The interviewer seemed to take that comment as unexceptionable—all in the spirit of Canada being “elbows up” against Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats.

Imagine the reaction if Clarkson had said that Chinese people are too dumb to even try to understand Canada. Or if she’d said that Nigerians are too dumb to even try to understand Canada. She would have been met with appropriate outrage.

At the moment in Canada, it seems that almost any level of anti-Americanism is given a pass.

A new Pew survey reports that 34% of Canadians have “a favorable opinion of” China, while exactly the same percentage have “a favorable opinion of” the US. When Canadians were asked the same question in 2024, only 21% had a favorable opinion of China, while 54% had a favorable opinion of the US.

Does the US deserve to be regarded so unfavorably? Even those who are staunch opponents of the Trump regime and all it stands for—as I certainly am*—should surely recognize that the United States remains a democracy. It’s a democracy under very serious threat, to be sure, but a democracy it remains.

Compare it with China, which has never had free and fair elections, which tightly controls almost all aspects of its citizens’ lives, which flouts international law with impunity, and which has confined over one million of its people in internment camps. Or compare it to Russia under Putin.

A just-released Nanos Research poll reports that, when asked “Which of the following feelings best describes your views towards Americans?”, 24% of Canadians chose “anger.” Again, this is not Canadians' feelings towards Donald Trump or towards the Trump administration; it’s Canadians’ feelings towards Americans.

It’s worth doing the math here. In the 2024 American election, 65.3% of the voting-age population actually voted. Of these, 49.81% voted for Trump. That means that 67.5% of voting-age Americans did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election.

A very great many of those 67.5% feel as much anger towards the Trump administration as do Canadians.

I would argue that, much as anger towards Trump and his administration is appropriate, we should do everything we can to rein in feelings of anger towards those who voted for him; in the long run, I think we’re well advised to try to keep open the lines of communication with the United States—and with Americans of all stripes—even when the American administration is as antagonistic as is that of Donald Trump. (I’m buying far less that’s “made in America” these days, but I haven’t given up travelling to the US and talking to Americans.) But even those Canadians who don’t want any contact with anyone who voted for Trump and/or who have decided to protest what the Trump administration is doing by renouncing travel to the US should surely recognize that all Americans do not deserve our condemnation.

*I realize as I write this that I've in fact written very little on this blog about Trump--the exception being posts about his draconian dutbacks in foreign aid. But the fact I haven't written much about him is not because I'm inclined to go light in comdemning all the horrific things he's done; it's rather an implicit acknowledgement of so many others having written so well in condemnation of him. If I can think of anything to add that hasn't been written a thousand times before, I will certainly do so.

Katharina Rout's edition of All Quiet on the Western Front

A few months ago we at Broadview Press published Katharina Rout's extraordinary edition of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front--a new translation that's been described as "informed, gritty, and evocative" and as "far more accessible" than earlier translations. Rout's translation seems to me to be far better not only than the decades-old competitors but also than the one other new translation--and the Rout edition includes a superb introduction and over 100 pages of fascinating historical documents. I put the case for the Rout edition forward early this year in a letter to The Atlantic responding to their review of a competitor--a review that did not mention the new Broadview edition.

In his article on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (“The Warrior’s Anti-War Novel”), George Packer compares the new Kurt Beals translation from Liveright with the “frequently stilted and labored” A.H. Wheen translation from 1929, using a passage from just after the Kaiser has inspected the troops as an example. He gives the Wheen first:

Tjaden is quite fascinated. His otherwise prosy fancy is blowing bubbles. “But look,” he announces, “I simply can’t believe that an emperor has to go to the latrine the same as I have.”

Here is Beals’ translation:

Tjaden is completely fascinated. His mind isn’t usually so lively, but now it’s bubbling over. “Look here,” he announces, “I just can’t fathom that a kaiser has to go to the latrine just like I do.”

Packer is on solid ground in rating Beals’ translation over that of Wheen. But he may not have known when he was writing the article that there is another brand-new translation of Remarque’s great novel; Katharina Rout’s translation was published in a Broadview Press edition 9 October 2024 in Canada, and 1 January 2025 in the United States—the day on which the German original entered the public domain in America. Rout’s (already widely praised) translation aims to be “blunter and more pared down” as well as more accurate than earlier translations. Here is how she renders the same passage—using just 30 words, compared to Beals’ 36 and Wheen’s 33:

But Tjaden remains enthralled. His usually barren imagination is getting all worked up. “Look,” he announces, “I really can’t believe that the Kaiser must use the latrine just like me.”

Rout includes in her edition over 100 pages of historical background materials—among them a number of documents that have never before been available in English.

Our marketing team at Broadview has had a frustrating time getting the word out to the general Trade market about Rout's great new edition. The Atlantic was not the only major publication to have been fully informed about the book, only to ignore it in a review; a reviewer for the Wall Street Journal asked for a review copy after he'd been informed of the publication of the Rout translation--and then wrote a review of the competitor without ever mentioning the existence of the Rout translation. And Amazon, which is almost always bad at listing new editions of classic works correctly, has in this case been even worse than usual. At first Amazon didn't list the edition at all, and then, after endless efforts by our marketing team, they listed only the kindle edition--https://www.amazon.com/All-Quiet-Western-Front-Broadview-ebook/dp/B0DM9R7LDC. If you'd like a copy of the book, I'd highly recomend you order through your local bookstore--or direct from Broadview (https://broadviewpress.com/product/all-quiet-on-the-western-front/#tab-description). Broadview has published over 1,000 books in its 40 years; I don't think there's any question that this is one of the best--as well as one of the most important.

Letter to the New York Times: Alzhiemer's and a Whole-Foods, Plant-Based Diet

Back in late January I sent the following letter to The New York Times:

Charles Piller (“The Devastating Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer’s Science,” Jan. 24) writes that “despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it.” The key word here is “created”; it’s quite true that researchers have not succeeded in creating new drugs that make a substantial difference. But a growing body of research suggests that lifestyle changes—in particular, adopting a whole-foods, plant-based diet—can make a substantial difference, not only in helping to prevent Alzheimer’s but also in many cases to arrest and even to reverse effects of the disease. The pharmaceutical industry has a great deal invested in persuading us that expensive drugs are the answer for health problems; in this area as in many others, lifestyle changes may be far more beneficial than expensive drugs.

The research is not dubious, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-style medical research; it's for real. If you're interested, you can find out more online on sites such as nutritionfacts.org and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine site (https://www.pcrm.org/health-topics/alzheimers). Or, if you'd like to check out some of the original research, here are some places to start:

Dean Ornish et al., “Effects of intensive lifestyle changes on the progression of mild cognitive impairment or early dementia due to Alzheimer's disease: a randomized, controlled clinical trial,” Alzheimer's Research and Therapy, June 2024 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38849944/ (“Comprehensive lifestyle changes may significantly improve cognition and function after 20 weeks in many patients with MCI or early dementia due to Alzheimer’s Disease”)

Alzbeta Katanova et al., “Effect of a Vegan Diet on Alzheimer’s Disease,” International Journal of Molecular Science, November 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9738978/ (“There is evidence indicating that a vegan diet could be beneficial in the prevention of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease”).]

Letter to the Globe: Elephants and Dairy Cattle

Marsha Lederman had written a good column about elephants in zoos. My letter to the Globe made an obvious point following up.

Re “Why are we still keeping elephants in zoos?” (March 22): Marsha Lederman writes movingly and well about “the suffering of animals, particularly from human causes”—and in particular about “a mother and her calf being separated.” “Why are we doing this?” she asks. Why indeed? And why, on so-called “farms,” are we still separating calves from their mothers so that we can drink the milk meant for the calves? Zoos are horrific places for non-human animals; factory farms (including dairy and egg operations) are far, far worse. A whole-foods, plant-based diet is better for our own health and better for the planet as well as infinitely better for other animals.

Separate the babies from the mothers; kill the male babies right away; drink the milk that was meant for the babies. Then advertise: Milk is wholesome, milk is good.

Letter to the Globe: Leaders' Debate Eligibility

There was a bit of a fuss during Canada's recent election campaign over the decision to exclude the Green Party from the leaders' debates. The Party had not met either of the percentage-related criteria set out by the Leaders' Debates Commission--the party's candidates for the most recent general election (2021) had not received at that election at least 4% of the number of valid votes cast; and neither, when the 2025 general election was called, had the party received "a level of national support of at least 4%, determined by voting intention, and as measured by leading national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recently publicly-reported results." But in between those two points in time, the party had often polled above 4%. This was the letter that I sent to the Globe (and that it published April 21, under the heading "Fair Play"):

Re “Green Party says it is being silenced after commission disinvites it from leaders’ debates” (April 17): The current rules take no account of polling fluctuations over time. It would be fairer if parties that have polled over 4% at any time since the previous election be allowed to take part. Under those rules, both the Greens (which have often polled above 4% since the 2021 election) and the People’s Party of Canada (which polled above 4% in the summer of 2022) would have met the polling criterion. Perhaps small parties should be allotted less time than the larger parties to make their case—but allowing them at least some time to make their case surely serves the interests of democracy.

Letters to the Globe: Supply Management

Canada's system of supply management, which protects farmers and smooths out prices in the egg, dairy, and poultry industries, has been the subject of considerable recent controversy. It keeps prices artificially high. It's not equitable; the majority of Canadian farmers do not enjoy the protection of supply management. And, as recent Order of Canada recipient and former civil servant Don Campbell pointed out recently on CBC Radio (The Current, July 10), it's bad for the economy as a whole:

We are a pariah on the international scene. This is not just a United States issue. This is an issue with the Europeans, it's an issue with the Australians, it’s an issue with the New Zealanders, it’s an issue with everyone. And what we are prevented from doing by virtue of our system [is] exporting. Canada should be one of the top three dairy product exporters in the world. Instead, we're comfortable in a declining market in Canada. We're now down to less than 10,000 dairy farmers. There were 140,000 dairy farmers in 1940. I remember a long time ago, the Canadian head of the National Retail Council said, do you realize there are more bureaucrats involved in supply management than there are farmers? And I think there's a certain truth to that.

The main issue here for people like me is of course the way in which the animals who are at the heart of these industries are treated--and to my mind, any solution to the problems must involve addressing the issue of cruelty to animals.

I have long argued that removing supply management and instituting much higher cruelty-to-animals and environmental standards in Canada would lead not just to better conditions for the animals but also to indutries that were economically healthier. Animal-cruelty and environmental legislation for farms in the USA tends to be even more lax than it is in Canada, but there are many consumers in the US who are willing to pay more for eggs, poultry and dairy products that are produced with less cruelty and less harm to the environment. Demand for free-range eggs in the US, for example, far exceeds the supply. If all the egg, poultry, and dairy products produced in Canada had to meet a higher standard, we would surely be able to export more Canadan-produced products, while the US industry would be unable to meet the standards required in Canada, and thus unable to flood our market with cheaper products. The current high prices could be maintained, but the animals as well as the farmers would be receiving some protection. (If it were deemed that abandoning supply management would increase the cost of living for low-income Canadians, a "protein income supplement" could be introduced as an amount added to current payments to low-income Canadians. If so, however, it should be made clear that the supplement could also be used to buy tofu or "Impossible" burgers or vegan "cheeze" or vegan ice "cream" or oat milk. And the change could (and should) be accomoanied by a campaign aiming to make more people aware of the availability of other, reasonably priced protein-rich products (chick peas, lentils, kidney beans, etc.).

In any case, here are the letters on this issue I've been sending recently:

Re “Sacred Cow” (April 4): Gordon Pitts makes it sound as if New Zealand’s dairy industry is largely unregulated, and that climate is the key to the industry’s success: But it’s not climate that ensures New Zealand cows’ welfare. It’s legislation—legislation that sets higher animal welfare standards than anywhere else in the world (among many other things, requiring dairy farms to provide cows with shelter from the elements—yes, even in New Zealand there is inclement weather).

If Canada ever does decide to move away from supply management and encourage an “export mentality” for the dairy industry, we would be wise before doing so to ensure that Canadian cows are treated at least as well as those in New Zealand. People will pay more for dairy products from a country that they know enforces high safety and animal welfare standards.

Re “How to crack open Canada’s egg market” (June 21): No mention is made in this long editorial of the central fact about egg production: the eggs that humans eat are made not by industrial machines but by living creatures—birds that are horrifically treated throughout their short lives in almost all commercial egg operations, in Canada as in the United States. A humane set of policies regarding egg production would require all eggs sold in Canada to come from farms where egg-laying birds are truly treated well. But the notion that cruelty to animals should be addressed seems not to have occurred either to our federal or our provincial governments, any more than it has to the industry.

Re “We must protect supply management from the trade war” (July 16): The authors are appropriately sensitive to the plight of farmers, arguing rightly that, if we do abandon supply management, we should be prepared to help those farmers who find they cannot compete, so that they can “make new lives.” Yet the authors express no sensitivity whatsoever to the plight of the non-human animals involved. Indeed, they do not even acknowledge their animal nature; “each cow,” they write, “is effectively an investment that pays a dividend in milk.” No, it isn’t. Each cow is a living, breathing creature—and, under our current agricultural system, one that endures extraordinary suffering.

Regardless of whether or not we replace supply management, our laws regarding cruelty to animals need to be rewritten so as to include farm animals.

The Globe didn’t print any of these three, but I was pleased to see that it did print in its June 26 issue two responses to the June 21 editorial. In one letter, P.J. Nyman of Toronto writes about how Canada’s supply management system “keeps hens locked in cages by stalling progress on animal welfare. While nearly half the U.S. egg market is now cage-free, Canada is lagging far behind for the tenth year in a row. Canadian grocery retailers once pledged to sell only cage-free eggs by 2025, but our supply management system hinders this progress, keeping hens in outdated cages with no more space than a single sheet of paper each.” In a second letter, Jane Harris of Vancouver points out that the supply management system “was initially devised to protect small farmers but has evolved into one that enables and enriches large industrial operations (which no longer can even be called farms) where millions of birds are crammed into cages, can barely move and never see the light of day. It is the small number of true farmers who humanely raised “free range” laying hens that now deserve to be protected.”

Less Heat, More Light

I sent off this letter to The Globe and Mail last weekend:

Re “There’s no place for politicians in the medical exam rooms of the nation” (July 7): Katharine Smart condemns Alberta’s proposed restrictions on puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and “top surgery” for minors. She argues with the Canadian Medical Association that minors, like other patients, should be allowed “to make the best decisions for their own health,” and asserts that such treatments help young people “thrive.”

Smart does not address the arguments of any of the authoritative recent studies from countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Britain, and Australia that have concluded the opposite: that the potential harms to minors from such treatments outweigh the benefits. In its unquestioning acceptance of “gender affirming care” for minors, Canada is quickly becoming an outlier.

I’m neither a doctor nor a researcher, but I do know that ignoring the case your opponents have made does not make it go away.

It’s a letter I’d like to expand on; I’ll do that now.

To be fair to Smart, her piece is an op ed column, not a full-length article; this is a hugely complicated issue, and she could not possibly have addressed everything that’s in dispute. But she could at least have acknowledged that a great deal is in dispute, and that numerous reputable medical associations and government authorities elsewhere in the world now take a stance that is very different from that taken by most Canadian and American medical associations.

None of the medical authorities elsewhere in the democratic world, thank goodness, has adopted the anti-trans tone of hostility that is the norm among the many Republican lawmakers in the US, who aim to ban outright all these treatments for minors. On the whole, countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Britain, and Australia are taking a nuanced approach--but they are putting legal restrictions in place for patients younger than 18. Sweden, for example, restricts the use of both hormone treatments and puberty blockers for those younger than 18 to very rare circumstances, while banning transition-related surgery* before the age of 18; Britain allows hormone treatments for minors while banning puberty blockers and transition-related surgery before the age of 18. In short, authorities in these nations and others have been significantly restricting access to these treatments for minors. And in these and many other countries, there continues to be a lively debate as to the benefits and/or harms of these treatments.

In their unquestioning acceptance of “gender affirming care” for minors, then, Canadian and American medical associations do indeed seem increasingly to be outliers.

It’s not only the treatments themselves that are under scrutiny; claims that teens are more likely to commit suicide if they are denied these treatments are also now widely disputed.

These studies come from accredited researchers; they’re not the product of anti-trans or anti-science zealots. Nor do the governments that have in recent years restricted such treatments for minors (in ways similar to those proposed by Alberta) in any way resemble the Trump administration, with its appalling willingness to allow anti-trans discrimination in employment, in military recruitment, and in other areas.

You don’t have to go to right-wing media outlets to find out about this research; it’s been widely reported on in centrist or center-left media outlets such as The Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.**

Strikingly, various organizations that unquestioningly support providing these treatments to minors have focused their attacks not on Republican lawmakers or on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets that have clearly provided biased coverage, but rather on The New York Times. GLAAD.org, for example, has run advertisements calling on the Times to “stop questioning trans people’s right to exist and access to medical care.” As you might expect, The New York Times has in fact never questioned trans people’s right to exist, and nor, except where children and teenagers are concerned, has it ever published anything suggesting that adult trans people should ever be denied any of these treatments. Indeed, the Times has been an outspoken defender of transgender Americans (see, for example, the Feb 9, 2025 lead editorial, “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans”). And the Times, it should be added, has also given a considerable amount of space to those who argue that minors’ access to treatments such as hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and transition-related surgery should not be restricted by any laws. (See, for example, Lydia Polgreen’s extended article criticizing Britain’s Cass Report, published in the Times under the headline, “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids” [August 13, 2024].)***

Organizations such as GLAAD seem eager to paint anyone who does not share their position 100% as transphobic; the insults and misrepresentations at the other extreme are even worse. Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, for example, has introduced in Congress a bill titled the “Safeguarding the Overall Protection (STOP) of Minors Act.” Couched in incendiary language (“castration procedures,” “gender mutilation procedures”), it would prohibit all forms of youth gender transition treatment at any stage. Such treatments, Marshall claims, are part of “the Left’s dangerous transgender agenda. Let’s call it exactly what it is: child abuse.”

Let’s set that sort of hysteria to one side and return to the arguments made by Katharine Smart. There are three of these. The first is an appeal to authority; she cites various associations in North America that support such practices. But one can appeal to other associations and other authorities; neither Sweden nor Britain allows transition-related surgery to be performed on patients under the age of 18. Are the North American medical associations right about this, or are Sweden and Britain right? Again, I just don’t know. Smart and the Canadian Medical Association may well be right. But I certainly think it’s possible that Sweden and Britain are right—and that the policies Danielle Smith and her Alberta government have adopted on this issue in Bill 26 may eventually be acknowledged everywhere to make more sense than those recommended by the CMA.

Raising even the possibility that Danielle Smith and her government might eventually be acknowledged to have been right about anything may in itself seem objectionable to some readers. And I can understand that. I’ve disagreed with just about everything Danielle Smith has done and has stood for since she entered politics, from her gung-ho support of the oil and gas industry and her discriminatory policies against solar and wind energy to her recent move to remove books with sexual content from school libraries.

But I think it’s vitally important—at any time, but perhaps more than ever in times as polarized as our own—to be open to the possibility that people whose political orientation is entirely different from our own can sometimes make the right decision, or do the right thing. I disagreed with just about everything George W. Bush stood for when he was the American president, but I thought then and I think now that he deserves considerable credit for launching the Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief in 2003. I disagreed with just about everything Donald Trump stood for during his first term as American president, but I thought then and I think now that he deserves considerable credit for his Operation Warp Speed initiative to develop vaccines quickly in 2020.

I disagree as well with the rest of what’s included in the Smith government’s Bill 26 (the other provisions of which include giving parents a veto on whether or not their children receive sex education in school, and giving parents a veto on their 16- and 17-year-old children choosing their own pronouns in school). But when it comes to the bill’s provisions regarding hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and gender-transition-related surgery (provisions that would prohibit hormone therapy and puberty blockers for patients 15 and younger, and prohibit mastectomies and genital surgery for those under 18)--I’m just not sure. Given what I’ve read of the recent research and of the stances taken in countries such as Sweden and Britain, I think there’s at least a chance that the Alberta government--a government whose policies I detest in just about every other area--may have gotten it right in this one area. Certainly Katharine Smart’s argument from authority, citing only those associations that have approved all these “gender affirming treatments” for teenagers and ignoring those that haven’t, fails to convince.

What of Smart’s other arguments? One of these is an argument from personal experience. Smart speaks of how carefully she listens to her patients, and of how she prescribes hormone therapy or puberty blockers to "only a small minority" of her under 18 patients; she attests from her experiences with her own patients that, "for the youth who do receive" those treatments, "it's often transformational." There's no reason to doubt any of this. But one can accept Smart's anecdotal evidence in its entirety and still have doubts as to whether the course she recommends is the best way forward. Even from this one column one can infer that she is an extraordinarily caring, sensitive, and conscientious physician. Reports from other quarters, though, have made clear that Smart's approach is not always followed by others; some teenagers have been put on hormone therapy or puberty blockers with barely any questioning having been conducted. And other reports have made clear that, for some, gender-transition treatments at an early age have not been "transformational"--or at least, not transformational in a positive way. Certainly the personal experience of one physician with her patients--no matter how positive--should not be taken as conclusive.

Smart's third argument is one of overarching principle; she argues that medical matters should be between “the doctor and their patient. Full stop.” She ends by warning of a slippery slope, suggesting that if the Alberta “precedent is left to stand, the care and treatment that you need may be next.”

But do we in fact as a society accept that all medical matters should be entirely left up to the doctor and the patient? For most medical matters, we do indeed accept it. But what of a Jehovah’s Witness teenager who is adamant that they do not want a blood transfusion? In Quebec in 2017, a court decided that a health center should be allowed to give a 14-year-old blood transfusions, against her own wishes; the judge ruled it lawful to protect patients against their own wishes when a decision had the potential to irreversibly alter the patient’s life. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses would I’m sure argue that, when psychological and spiritual health are taken into account, blood transfusions do not have any health benefit—and some doctors who are also Jehovah’s Witnesses would surely support that view. What of the practice of female circumcision (aka “female genital mutilation” or “female genital cutting”)? In Canada and in many other countries of the world we agree that the practice has no health benefits; many in Somalia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would I’m sure disagree—including many doctors and many young women.

I should make clear that I am not defending the Jehovah’s Witness view of blood transfusions or the horrific practice of female genital mutilation. I raise these examples merely to show that our society does not in fact accept that all medical matters “should be between the doctor and the patient. Full stop.”

Why are these issues so important? They’re important, first of all, because they affect the mental and physical health of a significant number of young people. It’s vitally important that we do everything we can to get it right when it comes to the question of what practices are likely to give those young people the greatest benefit and/or cause them the least harm. But it’s also important simply because it’s become such an inflammatory issue in so much of the world—and one that, rightly or wrongly, has become tightly entwined for many people with overall political and ideological orientation. The level of hostility—and the impulse to shut down reasoned debate—is staggering. On the left, it’s become common to label those who advocate any level of caution in gender therapy for minors as transphobic. On the extreme right, it’s worse; people such as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles call for the eradication of “transgenderism”: “For the good of society,” Knowles declared in 223, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”

In such a climate, it’s understandable that many have become scared to voice an opinion—even an opinion as tentative as this sounds like an area in which more research needs to be done. Some conservatives have been scared of being condemned by the likes of Senator Marshall and Michael Knowles if they do not sound off viciously against trans rights generally. Not a few on the progressive left have been scared of being condemned by the likes of GLAAD.org if they raise questions as to the appropriateness of hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or surgery in the context of “gender affirming care” for minors.

Clearly these are difficult issues, and extraordinarily complicated ones; conducting the necessary research is fraught in all sorts of ways. But we need that research to be conducted—and lowering the temperature of public discourse will surely make it easier for that to happen. We need less heat, more light. Much as I may doubt her conclusions, Katharine Smart is clearly one who aims to bring light rather than heat to these controversies; this blog post is written in the same spirit.

*In rejecting Alberta's approach, Smart does not specifically mention transition-related surgery, though that is very much one of the foci of the Alberta legislation. Most defenders of unrestricted "gender affirming care" for minors have little to say about the practice of performing mastectomies on minors who want to transition, other than to say that the practice is very rare. Perhaps so; frustratingly, neither American nor Canadian official statistics are available. In the United States, the news agency Reuters conducted its own study several years ago and reported that in a three-year period, 2019–2021, 776 people younger than 18 had had mastectomies in connection with gender dysphoria. In Canada, the National Post reported in 2023 that over 300 Canadians under the age of 18 had undergone such treatment. No one knows the totals in 2025—but no one denies that such surgery has been legally unrestricted in most North American jurisdictions, and that it does continue to be performed on minors. Given that some at least who have transitioned as teenagers later come to regret their decision and want to detransition, and given that a double mastectomy is not reversible, it is hardly surprising that such surgery has become highly controversial.

**See, for example, these articles: Emily Bazelon, "The Battle Over Gender Therapy: More teenagers than ever are seeking transitions, but the medical community that treats them is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them," The New York Times, March 17, 2023; Pamela Paul, “As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do,” The New York Times, Feb 22, 2024; Nicholas Confessore, How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost, The New York Times, June 19, 2025; Helen Lewis, “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine: How the left ended up disbelieving the science,” The Atlantic, June 29, 2025; Robyn Urback, “Trans youth deserve better,” The Globe and Mail, April 26, 2024; “America should follow England’s lead on transgender care for kids,” The Economist, April 10, 2024; Alex Byrne, “I co-wrote the anonymous HHS report on pediatric gender medicine: The hostile reaction to our work shows why we needed to do it in the first place,” The Washington Post, June 26, 2025; “A landmark study of gender medicine is caught in an ethics row,” The Economist, 30 April, 2025.

***The Times also ran a selection of letters responding to the article ("The Cass Report: Biased or Balanced?", Sept. 1, 2024), and published over 800 comments on its website. To me, a letter from Gerald Ryan, of Madison, Wisconsin, was among the most persuasive. Let me quote from it here:

I am a retired physician who, as the medical director of a major university, instituted the provision of gender-affirming medications at our health facility, so I hold no bias against the appropriate use of these treatments. I found Dr. Hilary Cass’s report to be informative, well researched and balanced.

I think many would be surprised to learn that the movement toward expanding gender-affirming medication for children is based largely upon a couple of small studies by researchers in the Netherlands that utilized strict inclusion criteria for their cohorts.

Most current treatment guidelines on the use of these interventions stem from the collective opinion of experts in the field. This opinion alone, though helpful, is a shaky foundation for the initiation of sometimes irreversible procedures.

Dr. Cass is simply stating that the science of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents is very much in its infancy and its usage requires thoughtful deliberation until we know enough to make conclusive recommendations.

**** Appallingly, anti-trans extremists such as Senator Marshall conflate surgery to address gender dysphoria with the practice of surgically suppressing female sexuality through surgery; they use the term “female genital mutilation” to refer to gender-identity-related breast and genital surgery.