The Politics of Literature

My last major assignment for the “Reconstruction to the Present” volume of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature (scheduled for publication in the spring of 2027) has been to draft a 30,000-word overview of America and American literature from 1950 to the present. It struck me the other day that one section of my draft—on the politics of literature since 1950—might be of interest more broadly. The examples cited in the draft are of course all American, but the topics discussed include several that over the past few decades have been live issues throughout much of the world—and that remain so today.

There are a number of interesting parallels between today’s literary politics in the United States and those of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Then, as now, right-wing politicians were railing against a range of books that they argued should be removed from libraries and taken off school curricula. In some cases, there were actual book burnings. In the 1950s, though, the focus was on books that promoted ideals of economic egalitarianism—“Communist” ideals, in the view of McCarthyite right-wingers. A report in the 13 November 1953 issue of the St Louis Post Dispatch makes the hard-line right-wingers’ aims abundantly clear:

Mrs. Thomas J. White of Indianapolis, Republican member of Indiana’s Textbook Commission, said the Robin Hood legend, and all information about the Quaker religion should be removed from schoolbooks because they tend to support Communism. … “There is a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood… because he robbed from the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line.”

In the twenty-first century too, hard-line right-wingers are in a number of states removing books from libraries and school curricula. Their emphasis, though, is not on tales of Robin Hood or histories of Quaker egalitarianism, but rather on books dealing in a positive way with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, and on books that deal with subjects such as slavery in America or America’s treatment of Native Americans—books, in other words, that show America not living up to American ideals of fairness and equality. (Among the 300 books removed from the shelves of Florida’s school libraries in 2022 were Sherman Alexie’s National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queen, and David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing.)

Another difference is that the twenty-first-century movement targets not just libraries and public school curricula, but also books assigned as university course texts. (Texas A&M University Philosophy instructor Martin Peterson, for example, was ordered in January 2026 to remove the excerpts he had chosen from Plato’s Symposium from the syllabus of his Contemporary Moral Issues course, so as to make the course compliant with state policy on classroom discussions on gender and sexual orientation.)

One more difference between right wingers then and right wingers now deserves mention. In the 2020s the Republican administration has made light of the actions of state governments’ restrictions on books: school districts were doing no more than establishing “commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials,” Trump’s Education Department declared. In contrast, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, then President, spoke out loud and clear when he addressed a 1953 university student audience at Dartmouth College: “Don't join the book burners,” he urged. “Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”

So much for the biases of the hard right in the early 1950s and in our own day. What of those on the left?

In the early 1950s, a number of leading writers (among them Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, and Richard Wright) were branded as Communist sympathizers by McCarthy and his followers, and the publishing community as a whole was branded as left-wing. In their wild accusations regarding Communist Party memberships, McCarthy and his sympathizers were off the mark (of Hughes, Miller, and Wright, only Wright had been a member of the Communist Party, and he had publicly broken with it in 1944 in his essay “I Tried to Be a Communist”).

But even many who were appalled by McCarthy’s tactics agreed that the literary world of the late 1940s and early 1950s skewed to the left. To combat this imbalance, Henry Regnery in 1949 founded a publishing house dedicated to publishing conservative authors—and to combat the same imbalance in the magazine world one of Regnery’s authors, William F. Buckley, Jr., founded the magazine National Review in 1955. But the conservative principles that Regnery and his ilk adhered to had little in common with those of Trump and his followers in the 2020s—just as the principles of the liberals of the day had little in common with those of many on the left in the twenty-first century. Conservatives such as Regnery and Buckley advocated a less interventionalist approach to the economy, and spoke up in defence of what they saw as fixed moral truths as opposed to the relativism that they perceived to have permeated society. Among Regnery’s leading authors was Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind (1953), which came to be thought of as the bible of traditionalist (or classical) conservatism. The Regnery Company in general published (according to a columnist in the Bangor Daily Commercial) “books of almost universally high quality, focusing on philosophical works. … that [tend to reflect] one quality that distinguishes the best of modern thinking…, the rejection of the outlook that dominated the whole of the nineteenth century—the idea of infinite progress.”

The liberal consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s, on the other hand, (shared by many Eisenhower Republicans as well as most northern Democrats) took a largely Keynesian, collectivist approach to socio-economic matters, gave a high priority to issues of economic and social class, advocated tolerance towards those with views incompatible with one’s own—and held a devout belief that America was fundamentally good, together with a devout belief that continuing progress should always be a goal.

In some parts of the literary world, though, any sign of progress was difficult to discern. Between 1943 and 1960, not a single woman had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or the National Book Award for Fiction. Not until the late 1960s was any black American—or Native American, or Latino American, or Asian American—awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (Only one person of color—Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man in 1953—had ever been awarded the National Book Award for Fiction.) By the late 1960s many people were belatedly starting to notice that at least 95 percent of the American literary fiction published between 1940 and 1965 had been written by white authors—and that roughly three-quarters of those had been men. And white males occupied the vast majority of editorial and management positions in the publishing industry.

The literary world is looking very different in the 2020s. In 2025 roughly 70 and 80 percent of editorial and management positions in the book publishing industry were occupied by women, and roughly 20 percent were occupied by people of color. In the first 26 years of the twenty-first century, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded eight times to women and five times to writers of color; over the same period, the National Book Award for Fiction has been awarded twelve times to women and eleven times to people of color. Of the 30 finalists for the National Book Award between 2020 and 2025, only five were white men.

As in 1950, the vast majority of 2020s authors of literary fiction (and poetry, and drama) identify as liberal or left-leaning—as do the vast majority of editors, literary agents, and other editorial decision-makers in the literary world (over 95 percent of book editors in the United States report that they normally vote for the Democratic candidate).*

Between the 1990s and the 2020s, though, “left-leaning” had gradually come to mean something very different from what it had meant in 1950. By 2020, many on the left had relatively little interest in issues of social and economic class—but an overriding interest in issues of gender and of sexual orientation, of ethnicity and, especially, of race. Many had come to believe that, far from being fundamentally good, America was fundamentally a land of inequality and of racism. Many had come to doubt that progress was possible—and many had little tolerance towards those with views incompatible with their own (a tendency exacerbated by the rise of social media in the 2010s, and by algorithms that tended to turn social media forums into echo chambers).

Many in the literary community had also become convinced that authors’ behavior in their personal lives was a relevant consideration when it came to deciding whether or not their works should be read.** Starting in 2018, many high school teachers and university professors decided to drop Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian from their assigned reading lists—not because it showed America not living up to American ideals of fairness and equality (the complaint of the Florida school library authorities), but because Alexie had been accused of sexual harassment (and had issued a statement apologizing for having “done things that have harmed other people, including those I love most deeply”).

When it came to literary judgments, many in the literary community also focused largely on numbers—too largely, in the view of some. In a 2016 column, for example, the novelist Charles Finch described the phenomenon in this way:

A plague on our literary culture is this thing about counting. A prize list comes out and people rush to ask how many women are on it, then how many people of color, then how many women of color, then how many queer women of color, and on and on until at last Twitter runs the tally and confers either its approval or censure. It’s absurd, maddening. The trouble is that it’s also incalculably better than the old plague, which was never to count at all. The emergence of identity politics in America was, as Jackson Lears has succinctly observed, a tragic necessity.

Many of the ideological and attitudinal changes in the literary community played out over issues of language. Beginning in the 1960s, people had begun to realize that using he was an inappropriate way to refer to someone whose gender you did not know—and that linguistic matters of this sort made a real difference attitudinally. Over the course of the next sixty years hundreds of sexist, racist, ableist and ageist terms were replaced—most of them, with good reason. But as the twenty-first century wore on, a sense of over-reach began to be widespread. When a California school board member became “personally offended” when someone at a meeting used the word homeless rather than the word unhoused, the incident was fodder for Fox news and other conservative media outlets.

Language, then, is one of the many politically charged topics for the literary community; “staying in your lane” has become another. From the beginnings of American literature through to the mid twentieth century, it was a common practice for white authors to feature non-white protagonists in their fiction; classic examples include Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884). That practice carried on well into the twentieth century. Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), for example, features a black woman as a protagonist, and Oliver La Farge’s The Laughing Boy (1929) a Native American as its protagonist; both books were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Black American authors, it should be noted, have often done the same in reverse. Paul Dunbar’s 1904 story “The Lynching of Jube Benson,” for example, features a white protagonist (one whose thoughts and actions portray the workings of racial prejudice among white people perhaps more persuasively than any character in a piece of fiction written by a white author). By mid century it had become common practice for black American authors to occasionally publish works with white protagonists; in Ann Petry’s 1947 novel Country Place, in Richard Wright’s 1954 novel Savage Holiday, and in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, almost all the characters are white.

As identity politics came to the fore in the twenty-first century, though, many on the left came to believe that writers are best advised to stick to writing about people like themselves.*** When a group is represented in fiction by their “own voices,” (as Shuli de la Fuente-Lau puts it), “they will be seen “not with an observer’s gaze, but with the cultural nuance from being an active member of that culture.” In the other direction, “books not created by ‘own voices’ authors may leave out nuances and may inaccurately capture cultural elements.”

The word “active” here perhaps deserves special mention. The criticism of writers who have written about a culture without being an active member of that culture has sometimes been just as harsh as has criticism of writers who have written about cultures that have no claim to belong to. Jeanine Cummins, for example, has been roundly criticized for the way she writes in her 2020 novel American Dirt about a poor Mexican mother and her child; Cummins has a Puerta Rican grandmother, and thus identifies both as white and as Latina, but she has never lived in a poor Latina community. Critics linked Cummins’s lack of “lived experience” to her allegedly stereotypical portrayals of Latina characters.

But do portrayals of cultures that an author is not a member of necessarily suffer from these sorts of flaws? Are such portrayals bound to be filled with stereotypes, or can authors succeed if they approach the task of writing with care and sensitivity? Must authors always “stay in their own lane”?

The danger, in the view of authors such as Salman Rushdie and Henry Louis Gates,**** occurs when sensible guidelines for writers—that they approach the prospect of writing about members of other groups with care and consideration—harden into a prohibition against their writing about members of other groups. In a powerful 2021 speech to a PEN audience, Gates put the case clearly:

Whenever we treat an identity as something to be fenced off from those of another identity, we sell short the human imagination. … Social identities can connect us in multiple and overlapping ways; they are not protected but betrayed when we turn them into silos with sentries.

In similar fashion, Rushdie argued in a 2023 speech that it would be “the death of the novelist’s art” if writers were restricted to writing only about people of their own race, gender, ethnic or national group, or sexual orientation; he encouraged young writers to find the courage to “step out of their lane” and be willing to write about the lives of a wide range of people.

It may be instructive to look at the experience of American writers who have refused to stay in their lane, and have not been criticized for that choice—writers such Lynn Nottage, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like Gates and Rushdie, Nottage opposes “stay in your lane” strictures, which she sees as limiting cross-cultural empathy, and as particularly confining to writers from marginalized communities. But she emphasises the importance of authors taking care about what they write.

Nottage’s 2017 play Sweat involves an ensemble cast of nine factory workers in Reading, Pennsylvania—four blacks, four whites and one Latino; six men and three women. Three of the nine are in their twenties, the others middle aged. Nottage herself was middle aged when she came to write the play; she is a black woman from an educated middle-class background, and thereby in one or more important ways very different from all nine of the characters portrayed in the play. Of crucial importance: she did not rely only on her imagination in writing the play. She devoted an enormous amount of time to research, including years spent interviewing those who lived and worked in Reading, many of them middle-aged white steelworkers who had long been without work as a result of a company lockout. In such a situation, Nottage has said, one has to “replace judgment with curiosity.”

In some ways Nottage’s approach seems like a throwback to an earlier time. She firmly opposes “stay in your lane” restrictions. Though clearly left-of-center politically, her work engages with issues of class at least as deeply as it does with those of race or gender. And, much as she sees and feels deeply all that is negative about the American experience, she feels deeply too the pull of an America that can be better than it has been. Nottage prefaces Sweat with an eleven-line quotation from Langston Hughes’ 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again”:

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!



Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

If there is to be a peaceful resolution of the twenty-first century battles over the politics of literature (or at least a truce), it may well turn out to have been writers such as Lynn Nottage who have pointed the way forward.

* In a move that paralleled that of Henry Regnery in 1949, several American publishers have in the twenty-first century acknowledged the degree to which their existing publishing programs were not providing an outlet for conservative views, and have set up imprints (such as Penguin’s Sentinel imprint and Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions imprint) dedicated to publishing books with a conservative slant.

**In the mid-century American literary world, controversy had a different focus. In the high profile squabble over the 1949 decision of a jury led by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Robert Lowell to award Ezra Pound the prestigious Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos, for example, those objecting to the decision did not argue that the viciously antisemitic content of The Pisan Cantos should disqualify the book from being read and studied, or that Pound’s treasonous speeches during WWII should disqualify any of his work from being read or studied; their argument was simply that these things should disqualify Pound and The Pisan Cantos from receiving a prestigious award.

***This issue is sometimes conflated with the issue of appropriation of story material—a tangentially related but fundamentally separate question. Until the late twentieth century the literary community too often considered it entirely unproblematic if a white author “borrowed” an Indigenous myth or story as raw material for fiction—and there was rarely or ever any thought given to consulting anyone from the relevant Indigenous group when the “borrowing” occurred. In the twenty-first century, of course, all that has changed—and today’s literary and Indigenous communities are fully in agreement that the change is a positive one.

**** Criticisms of the “stay in your lane” approach to literary writing by writers such as Gates and Rushdie have been mild by comparison with those of some other writers. In 2024, for example, dramatist David Mamet denounced the “stay in your lane” approach as “fascist totalitarianism.” (Mamet’s political views had been liberal in the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote the now classic plays American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross and he still identified as a liberal when he wrote his controversial 1992 play Oleanna (1992). In 2008, however, he broke with his liberal past in an article in The Village Voice entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’” and thereafter he became increasingly intemperate in criticizing the political left.)

Mark Melnick's cover of the Theatre Communications Group edition of Lynn Nottage's Sweat approriately foregrounds a beer glass over a coffee thermos; the play is for the most part set in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Sanora Babb and Tom Kromer: Depression Fiction, Collective and Individual, by Two Writers Who Were Homeless

The publication history of Whose Names Are Unknown, by Sanora Babb (1907–2005), is one of the most extraordinary publishing stories in literary history. And the book itself deserves to be far more widely acknowledged than it has been as a literary classic.

Babb’s life story is remarkable enough. She was largely raised in a tiny Otoe-Missouria community in Oklahoma; the family also lived for periods of time in a dugout home on a failing Colorado farm that had been established by Babb’s grandfather, and in Elkhart, Kansas, before moving back to Oklahoma. Babb received no formal schooling before the age of 11, but in the year she graduated she was chosen as the class valedictorian at the high school in Forgan, Oklahoma. (The award was never given to her; some parents had protested, saying the daughter of an inveterate gambler should not receive such an honor). Babb enrolled at the University of Kansas, but did not have sufficient funds to complete a post secondary education. She worked in Kansas as a journalist, worked in Los Angeles as a secretary at Warner Brothers, wrote a few radio scripts, and spent some time homeless as well.

In 1938 Babb spent eight months volunteering with the federal government’s Farm Security Administration; the FSA was working to set up camps for California’s vast population of itinerant workers, most of them migrants from other parts of the country who had been forced by Depression-era conditions to leave their homes. Babb kept a diary and—at the suggestion of the manager of one of the farm labor camps, Tom Collins—she also began to keep detailed field notes as she travelled from camp to camp and spoke to the workers and their families about their lives. She drew both on the diary and on the field notes as she began to write a novel, several chapters of which she submitted to Random House early in 1939; they were received with enthusiasm by senior editor (and company co-founder) Bennett Cerf, who sent Babb a check and suggested she come to New York to finish the novel. Cerf remained enthusiastic when she submitted the completed manuscript in July, calling it “exceptionally fine.”

As it happened, though, another writer—John Steinbeck—had been working at the same time as Babb, in the same area, on a novel with a similar theme; it is now known that Collins, without asking Babb’s permission, had provided Steinbeck with a copy of Babb’s notes, and that Steinbeck drew on them heavily in writing what would become one of the decade’s most successful novels, The Grapes of Wrath (published by Viking in April 1939). “What rotten luck,” Cerf wrote to Babb in August of 1939, that another novel “should have so swept the country. Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax.”

Although Cerf provided Babb with an advance on another novel, plans to publish Whose Names Are Unknown were cancelled, and when Babb submitted the novel to several other major publishers, it was rejected by all of them. It was not until 1958 that Babb published a book about the Depression years (the autobiographical novel The Lost Traveller), and not until 2004, a year before she died, that the University of Oklahoma Press finally published Whose Names Are Unknown.

The appearance of Babb’s novel sparked re-assessments of Steinbeck’s work, and also prompted a number of critics and literary historians to argue that Whose Names Are Unknown may well have grounds to be considered a better book than The Grapes of Wrath (even setting the issue of appropriation entirely to one side). For “those who have read both books,” suggested Mike Conklin in the Chicago Tribune in October of 2004, Babb’s novel is the better of the two—“leaner, faster paced, and full of details that give a more insightful look at a tragic time in American history.”

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath focuses largely on the Joad family as they are forced to leave their farm in Oklahoma, travel to California to seek a better life, and find new hardships there as migrant laborers; Babb’s Whose Lives Are Unknown focuses largely on the Dunne family as they are forced to leave their farm in Oklahoma, travel to California to seek a better life, and find new hardships there as migrant laborers. But Steinbeck focuses far more than does Babb on a single individual; Tom Joad is very much at the center of the story. In Babb’s novel, on the other hand, the various members of the Dunne family are focused on roughly equally—and the novel frequently adopts a “bird’s eye view” of an entire community as a whole. In the following passages, for example, the operative pronoun is “they,” and it refers not to the Dunne family but to the entire community of migrant farm workers:

They moved on again, into August and September, into Butte County and peaches.

Some of the camps spread their ragtowns along the banks of the Feather River, among the cottonwoods, poplars, and live oaks. Here was the chance to make some money, to be sure of winter. No matter how much they pinched and saved, there was not much money left, perhaps none, when the fruit was picked and they had to move on.

Much more than The Grapes of Wrath—-and, arguably, more than any other American novel,* Whose Lives Are Unknown tells a collective story, not an individual one. And to my mind at least, it tells it extraordinarily well, in plain but vivid and sonorous prose. A good case can be made that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath deserves to be less well known. An even better case can be made that Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown deserves to be far better known.

I'll mention as well one other little-known novel of the Depression--Waiting for Nothing,** an extraordinary 1935 autobiographical novel by Tom Kromer. Kromer was one of the millions in the 1930s who were homeless and hungry and desperate--so desperate in his case that, as he describes, he at one point came very close to attempting armed robbery. Waiting for Nothing is a book of vignettes, really, but every one of them strikes home powerfully--the boy who becomes horribly injured trying to hop a freight train, the streetwalker who Kromer teaches how to get stale bread, the starving mother who abandons her starving baby. Throughout, there is Kromer's endless struggle to find "hots" and "a flop"--hot food and a place to sleep.

Kromer rode the rails across the country. He eventually wrote Waiting for Nothing while staying at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in California--another sort of camp set up by the US government in the Depression, and just as helpful as those set up by the FSA for migrant farm workers.

Kromer's book is not collective writing in the same sense as Whose Names Are Unknown is a collective novel; Kromer's first-person narrative voice remains a powerful presence throughout. But in its way it's arguably just as effective as Babb's novel in giving the reader a sense of the lives of a wide range of people caught up in desperate circumstances. Just as effective too in making the case that those of us who aren't desperate should give, and give generously, to those who are truly in need.

*Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which tells the story of workers in c. 1900 Chicago slaughterhouses, is an obvious point of comparison; Sinclair’s novel does focus largely on collective issues, but throughout the book the character of Jurgis remains at the center of the narrative.

**My thanks to John Marsh for drawing my attention to Kromer's novel.

Family who traveled by freight train, Yakima Valley, 1939. Photo taken by Dorothea Lange. (Farm Security Administration)

How Interested Are Canadians in Canadian Culture?

At a time when Canadians are more enthusiastically "elbows up" than ever in their determination to defend Canada against Donald Trump's threats of annexation, might Canadian interest in Canadian culture actually be in declining?

That seems hard to believe, but it might be true. This post is an exploration of that question, using Canadian Literature as a case in point.

When I began my career in academic book publishing in the mid 1970s, almost every university English Department in Canada offered a Canadian literature survey course. Many offered a two-part survey, with one course devoted to Canadian literature prior to the 1950s, one to the post-1950s explosion of Canadian literature. And many of those survey courses kept adding sections to meet student demand. These were the heady days following the publication of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden in 1971 and Margaret Atwood’s Survival in 1972. There was, in Frye’s words, an “unquenchable desire among the Canadian cultural public to identify itself through its literature.” Everyone was interested in discussing whether Canadian literature had, in Atwood’s words, “a distinct tradition and shape of its own.” Whereas, in 1948, only 10 Canadian universities had offered even a one-semester course in Canadian literature, by 1972 38 Canadian universities offered at least 90 Canadian literature courses (by the count of the Canadian Encyclopedia). And enrollments were expanding everywhere.

In the 1990s, though, interest in identifying a “distinct tradition and shape” to Canadian literature began to wane. English departments began to loosen requirements of all sorts, and fewer and fewer departments required English majors to take a Canadian literature survey—or indeed a Canadian literature course of any kind. Nowadays, courses that survey the full history of Canadian literature aren’t even offered at most Canadian universities.

A decline in the number of Canadian literature courses, however, does not necessarily mean fewer English literature students studying Canadian books. In the other direction, the number of books by Canadian authors that are assigned as texts in courses with no connection to nationality has significantly increased in this century. By 2020 works by Canadian authors such as André Alexis, Esi Edugyan, Yann Martel, Miriam Toews (and Atwood, of course) had become staples both in Introduction to Literature courses and in a variety of upper-year themed courses—Environmental Literature, Children’s Literature, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction, Gender and Sexuality in Literature, and so on.

It’s interesting, though, that many of the Canadian works that have been widely taught in these courses (e.g., Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Martels’ The Life of Pi, Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black, Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing) are largely or entirely set outside Canada, while others (Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Emma Donoghue’s Room, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife and Pick a Colour) feature a setting that is never identified. It’s become commonplace for a majority of the books taught in an introductory or themed course in literature to be incidentally Canadian—written by a Canadian, but having little or nothing Canadian about their subject matter. Such was the case in the list of course texts for a Speculative Fiction class that I spoke with at one point last year. I was surprised both by how few texts were assigned in the course (evidence of the “crisis in reading” that’s become an issue at every university) and by the fact that two of the three novels being taught—Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and my own Animals—were Canadian (though neither references anything Canadian specifically).

In the subject matter of our literature as well as in the diverse backgrounds of Canadian authors, then, we have come a very long way from the days in which the Canadianness of Canadian literature found clear expression in Robertson Davies’ Deptford, High Garner’s Cabbagetown, Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Avonlea, Farley Mowat’s “barrens,” Alice Munro’s Huron County, Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain Street, Tomson Highway’s Wasaychigan—and the Ontario backwoods of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush and Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie. With a few striking exceptions (André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs, Michael Crummey’s The Innocents, and David Chariandy’s novels of Scarborough come immediately to mind), prominent Canadian literary works of the past generation tend not to draw attention to places that are recognizably Canadian.

And we seem to have moved beyond asking what (if anything) is distinctively Canadian about Canadian literature—just as Americans long ago moved beyond asking what was distinctively American about American literature.

But Americans didn’t stop studying the development of their literature when it became extraordinarily diverse and wide-ranging—any more than Britons have ever stopped studying the historical development of British literature. Should we in Canada be giving up, as we appear to have been doing this century, on studying Canadian literature as Canadian literature?

In asking that question, we should also ask if the trend towards offering fewer and fewer courses that focus specifically on Canadian literature is in fact still continuing. Might things have been starting to move in the other direction, in an “elbows up” Canada determined to define itself in opposition to Donald Trump’s America? In the 18 months since Trump launched his “51st state” offensive, might there have been a significant uptick in Canadians’ interest in their literary history, as expressed in the number of students enrolled in Canadian literature courses?

I started to wonder just that a year or so ago—not by coincidence, just as we at Broadview Press were about to publish the first volume of a new edition of Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars’ superb anthology, Canadian Literatures in English. It struck me that it might be fairly easy to obtain a rough measure of whether or not such a change were occurring: simply ask Canadian literature instructors, and/or heads of English departments across Canada whether enrollment levels in Canadian literature courses have been increasing over the past couple of years.

During the past few weeks I’ve finally done just that, emailing more than two dozen academics in Canadian English departments. Seventeen have responded. Several of them have cautioned that raw enrollment numbers are a very rough measure indeed of levels of student interest—that the frequency with which particular courses are offered may change, that Canadian literature specialists may go on sabbatical, and so on. In any particular year, then, changes in enrollment for a particular course may not reflect any underlying trend. Several also cautioned that changes in enrollment for Canadian literature courses can often be driven by changes in departmental requirements; if a department chooses to make a Canadian literature survey course mandatory for English majors (or, in the other direction, to drop such a requirement), the resulting changes in enrollment will be a reflection of changes in perceptions among faculty as to the importance of studying Canadian literature, not a reflection of changes in student attitudes.

Clearly, there are many caveats. Nevertheless, the results of this informal survey are quite striking. The responses I received were from universities across Canada. Four of the respondents reported either that they did not have enough information to hazard any generalization or that the circumstances at their institution made it impossible to identify any pattern of changes in enrollment. Eight of the respondents reported that enrollments in Canadian literature courses had been stable over the past couple of years. And five of the respondents reported that there had been a noticeable decline over that period in the enrollment numbers for Canadian literature courses. Not a single respondent reported that there had been any significant increase in enrollment in these courses since Trump’s assault on Canada and our “elbows up” response took shape in early 2025. A couple of respondents volunteered the information that at their institution it was courses in American literature that had been generating increased interest.

This little survey has been small and unscientific, so it’s certainly possible that it’s inaccurate. It’s also quite possible that these results do not point to any broader pattern—that Canadians might have less interest in enrolling in Canadian literature courses but more interest in, for example, taking courses in Canadian history. Perhaps other cultural indicators may suggest that Canadians’ level of engagement in Canadian culture has been on the increase since Trump’s assault on Canada began. But it seems at least possible that a marked increase in anti-Trump and anti-American feeling has not been accompanied by any broader cultural shift—that Canadians are no more interested in exploring who we are and where we have come from than Canadians were before Trump declared his intention to make Canada the 51st state.

Below: the two volumes of Canadian Literatures in English, second edition, edited by Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars

Generations of Educators Have Called Active Reading a GOOD THING and Passive Reading a BAD THING. Are They Right?

This little essay appears as a postscript to the recently-published How to Read: A Twenty-First-Century Guide.

The preface to this book mentions Mortimer Adler, an American thinker whose How to Read a Book has been for the better part of a century the most successful book on the topic. Adler was a great categorizer and systematizer (he identified four stages of reading readiness, four stages of actual reading, five steps in synoptical reading, and so on), but he was also given to broad generalizations. One of those generalizations has remained extraordinarily influential in education at all levels: that one should aim to become an active reader. Adler declared there to be “one simple prescription for active reading”—that you should “ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.” By the 1970s and 1980s educators had incorporated Adler’s “active reading” into the broader principle of “active learning,” which became universally regarded as a Good Thing, while its opposite, “passive learning,” came to be universally regarded as a Bad Thing. There is a good deal of sense in much of what educators have said along these lines, but in its more simplistic formulations the distinction between active and passive learning suggests a false dichotomy. The contrast between students who take in knowledge in a purely passive fashion, unquestioning, and students who think for themselves, always questioning, always constructing knowledge for themselves, is one that misrepresents the messy process of acquiring knowledge and of thinking critically. Is “active reading” in fact always a Good Thing? It’s easy to think of exceptions. One form of “active reading” that is facilitated by today’s technology but that is usually a Bad Thing is the sort that fixes on a tiny detail, prompts a question such as what’s that little thing about?, and leads to a twenty-minute pursuit of a faintly interesting but irrelevant tangent through the labyrinthine pathways of the internet.

And is “passive reading” always a Bad Thing? As we have touched on more than once in these pages, an essential prerequisite for being able to read and think critically in an effective fashion is acquiring a body of general knowledge—which is fundamentally a passive process. One doesn’t construct for oneself in dynamic fashion one’s knowledge that World War II ended in 1945 or one’s knowledge that a line of poetry written in regular iambic pentameter will have ten syllables. One typically acts as a largely passive receptacle when one learns facts of this sort. Such passive learning should not be disparaged—and nor should the facts themselves be disparaged as “mere” facts; that’s a truth that should surely have been brought home to us more powerfully that ever in an era during which the world’s most powerful leaders are given to making up their own facts about history, about science, about almost anything.

But learning—like reading—is often a complicated process; many different things can happen at the same time in the human brain. At the same time as we passively acquire information and learn facts, we may sometimes be actively asking questions. A large part of learning to be a sophisticated reader and a sophisticated learner is developing good judgement as to when facts should be accepted as facts (yes, World War Two really did end in 1945; yes, Joseph Biden really did win the 2020 election), and when the supposed facts truly don’t stand up to scrutiny.

That sort of judgement is never easy to acquire—and the task is not made easier by the conditions in which we live today. Throughout this book we have looked at the ways in which the digital age—the internet, smart phones, generative AI, all of it—has made it more difficult to concentrate, more difficult to engage in deep reading and deep thinking, more difficult to remember what we have read, and more difficult to be confident as to the truth or falsehood of what we have read. We have touched again and again on the temptations of endless scrolling, of always giving in to generative AI’s seductive invitations to help—and on the importance of struggling stubbornly against these temptations. It’s vitally important that we don’t allow our own reading to be reduced to reading text messages and scrolling, even as we tell our young children how important reading is. What’s true for our children remains true for ourselves—especially in the digital age, especially in an age of misinformation.

The concept of active reading may still have much to be said for it, but there’s no question that it needs updating in the twenty-first century—updating to reflect the messiness of the mental processes involved in reading a well as to reflect the disruptiveness of the digital age. Perhaps a term that suits our own time better is engaged reading. That need not be entirely “active”; we may be engaged in “passive” reading that will expand our fund of general knowledge just as much as we may be engaged in reading critically and in reading analytically. At a not-always-conscious level, we should be engaged almost constantly as we read in the minutiae of reading—picking up cues as to where an argument is headed, for example, and deciding when we can infer the meaning of a word of phrase from its context, and when we are better advised to look it up. And we should be always looking to engage ourselves in non-fiction reading that expands our horizons, that offers practical benefits, and that can better equip us to act as responsible citizens.

In the decades since Adler’s How to Read a Book was first published, very few full books on the topic have appeared, but dozens of books on writing have devoted at least a chapter to reading techniques. Such treatments have tended to be heavy on schemes and systems, and light on real-world examples discussed in detail. This book has taken the opposite approach—light on schemes and systems, but heavy on examples that—we hope at least—will help to illuminate how reading happens, with all its problems and with all its messiness, as readers engage with text in the real world.

Going Vegan--Tasty Goodness

According to a 2026 Harris poll commissioned by the Vegetarian Resource Group, 3% of Americns are vegan--the exact same percentage as a similar Harris poll found were vegan in 2020. In Canada too, the numbers have been flat for the past several years--and the percentage in Canada is lower than in the US--just 600,000 or 1.5% of Canadians identify as vegan. Similar patterns prevail in most Western countries (though both in Italy and in Australia the percentage of vegans increased from 2% to over 3% from 2020 to 2026).

In some other parts of the world the picture is brighter. In Mexico and in India, for example, the percentage is about nine percent--but in those countries too it has remained flat for past several years. (In India, it should be noted, the statistics are widely regarded as suspect.)

Why has progress stalled, when just a few years ago the future for whole foods, plant-based diets seemed so bright?

A large part of the reason is surely that well-funded corporations have pushed back--increasing their advertising and lobbying expenditures while making little or no effort to curtail animal cruelty or reduce carbon emissions. And right-wing administrations have of course been more than happy to lend an ear--and, in many jurisdictions, to pass "ag-gag" legislation.

In the 25 July issue of the Globe and Mail Jessica Scott-Reid provides an excellent overview of how progress has stalled in Canada.

One aspect her article doesn't cover is the complicity of the media--even when they are not hobbled by "ag-gag" legislation. I sent the following letter to the Globe on July 26. (At this point it seems very unlikely that they will publish it--though they did pubish a very good letter from Jennifer Azizi yesterday, responding to the Scott-Reid piece with a call for politicians to "quit pandering to industry and stand up for what is right.")

Re “One Hop Forward, Two Trots Back” (July 25): Hats off to Jessica Scott-Reid for her excellent overview of how Canada is failing non-human animals. And hats off to the Globe for printing the piece.

The Globe deserves to share in the blame, though, for Canada’s U-turn on animal protection. Like other media outlets, the Globe has in recent years cut back considerably on coverage of these issues. A case in point is the “ag-gag” legislation that the Doug Ford government has long been trying to put in place. In January of this year the Ontario Court of Appeal (overturning a lower court ruling) gave them leave to do so—thereby allowing (as Scott-Reid puts it) “the animal-farming industry … to keep conditions on farms largely shielded from media coverage and public scrutiny.” Nowhere in the Globe (or in most other Canadian media outlets) was there any reporting on this.

It's not just cruelty to farm animals that the media have largely given up on reporting; it's also the vast contribution of the animal agriculture industry to global warming (widely estimated at 15% or higher of all carbon emissions).

In so many areas over the past few years, progress has stalled. But the issue of diet is unlike a good many other issues on which progress has stalled. When it comes to what we choose to eat and drink, we don't need to wait for politicians to take action or for corporations to see the light (though pushing governments and corporations on these issues is always worth doing, however much it may seem like an endless uphill battle!). All that any human being needs in order to help bring about at least some progress is to ask themselves two simple questions.

Do I want to eat and drink in ways that contribute hugely to global warnming, contribute hugely to other forms of pollution, are less healthy for me, and and entail great cruelty to non-human animals? Or would I prefer to eat and drink in ways that contribute far less to global warming, contribute far less to other forms of pollution, are healthier for me, and entail no cruelty whatever to animals?

For most people, these are not difficult questions to answer--but I suspect most people are (as I was for so many years) reluctant to pose such questions to themselves, in large part because of a fear that adopting a whole-foods, plant-based diet will mean that they will have to give up a lot of foods that they love the taste of. If that's the case with you, I strongly recommend you try some of the vegan substitutes that have come on the market in recent years. I'm not thinking here just of burgers. The "Nuts for Cheese" versions of Brie and of Blue Cheese, for example, are quite extraordinary--as is the Tofurky Italian Style "sausage," as is Hellman's Vegan "mayonaise," as is Becel Vegan "margarine," as is So Delicious Salted Caramel "ice cream." More so now than ever, it tastes very, very good to do what's right ethically (and what's good for your health).

The Fourth of July, and Ideals Worth Celebrating

As the New York Times’ Ezra Klein put it recently, there has been in our time ”a severing of American history into two visions: one that can only see glory and one that can only see suffering and sin.” The MAGA vision—seeing only glory—is by far the more dangerous, as it seeks quite literally to outlaw the teaching of anything negative about America’s past, no matter how true. But the understandable tendency of many on the left to see in American history nothing more than a betrayal of American ideals, is also unfortunate. That America and Americans have as often as not failed to live up to lofty ideals is fundamentally important. But so are the ideals themselves.

It’s become easier to lose sight of that fundamental truth as the study of intellectual history has lost ground over the past couple of generations.* Yet ideas remain of fundamental importance not only to historical developments, but also to how we live today. Ideas matter, regardless of how flawed the human beings who have advanced those ideas may have been. Notoriously, the man who wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was an enslaver. But Thomas Jefferson’s personal hypocrisy does not detract from the importance of the ideas he put forward.

For whatever reason, Americans have very often been at the forefront when it comes to the putting forward of new ideas that become ideals—that are held up around the world as principles that we should strive to live up to.

That’s not to say that all Americans have always espoused these ideals, of course. In some cases, the ideals have grown from ideas that were long regarded by most Americans as extreme, impractical, or flat-out wacky. Such was certainly the case with the notion that women should be regarded as equal to men (an idea advanced by Judith Sargent Murray in America two years before Mary Wollstonecraft published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman). It’s still the case with the notion promulgated by William Alcott in the 1830s, that we humans should not be cruel to other creatures—meaning, specifically, that we should not kill them and eat them.

To laud America as a font of ideas and ideals in no way implies approval of how America has acted as a nation over its first 250 years. Nor does it require us to adopt a celebratory attitude towards the revolution that Jefferson’s “these truths are self-evident” declaration set in motion. (As historian David A. Wilson argues in today’s Globe and Mail, the American Revolution made things worse for America’s Indigenous peoples and for America’s enslaved peoples, and entailed a civil war that killed tens of thousands, arguably quite unnecessarily.) It is simply to acknowledge that, far more than most parts of the planet, America has been the cradle of great ideals—ideals that continue to inspire humans throughout the world.

* To be fair, there have been encouraging signs of a reversal of this trend in recent years.

The first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson’s original rough draft, with edits by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin as well as Jefferson (June, 1776).

A Sampling of Ideals Expressed by Americans:

On religious tolerance

“There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination or society. It hath fallen out sometimes, that both papists and protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked in one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the liberty of conscience, that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges--that none of the papists, protestants, Jews, or Turks, be forced to come to the ship's prayers of worship, nor compelled from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any.”—Roger Williams, Letter to the Town of Providence, January 1655



On liberty

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”—Thomas Jefferson, first sentence of the second paragraph, the Declaration of Independence, 1776



On equality—between black and white, between man and woman

“Liberty is a jewel which was handed down from the cabinet of heaven…. [It] is equally as precious to a black man as it is to a white one.”—Lemuel Haynes, Liberty Further Extended, 1776 [written in response to the above sentence in the Declaration of Independence]

“… [Y]e haughty sex, our souls are by nature equal to yours; the same breath of god animates, enlivens, and invigorates us.” … I know there are who assert, that as the animal powers of the one sex are superior, of course their mental faculties also must be stronger; thus attributing strength of mind to the transient organization of this earth-born tenement. But if this reasoning is just, man must be intent to yield the palm to many of the brute creation, since by not a few of his brethren of the field, he is far surpassed in bodily strength.”—Judith Sargent Murray, On the Equality of the Sexes, 1790



On killing and eating other animals

“How shocking it must be to the inhabitants of Jupiter, or some other planet, who had never before witnessed these sad effects of the ingress of sin among us, to see the carcasses of animals, either whole or by piece-meal, hoisted upon our very tables before the faces of children of all ages, from the infant at the breast, to the child of ten or twelve, or fourteen; and carved, and swallowed. And this not merely once, but from day to day, through life! What could they—what would they—expect from such an education of the young mind and heart? What, indeed, but mourning, desolation, and woe!”—William Alcott, Vegetable Diet, 1838



On freedom and democracy

“… [W]e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”—Abraham Lincoln, Address Delivered at the Cemetery at Gettysburg, 1863



On being welcoming to immigrants

“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”—Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883



On freedom and justice:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. …

When we allow freedom to ring—when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.”—Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream” speech, 1963



On the basis for gay rights

“All men are created equal. Now matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. That is what America is about.”—Harvey Milk, Interview, c. 1975

The phones are smart--we humans, not so much

The addictive nature of smart phones and the degree to which young people are being damaged by social media are everywhere the subject of increasing concern. Canada is one of quite a number of countries now looking to follow Australia's lead in banning or placing significant restrictions on the use of social media by those under 16.

But many are critical of the Australian approach. In a June 10 column, Globe and Mail columnist Marsha Lederman joined the ranks of those claiming it to be ineffective ("Ban social media for young people? Good luck with that"). The Globe published several letters in response to Lederman's column on the subject; the letter that I sent appeared (in slightly edited form) in the June 15 issue:

Cautioning against following Australia’s lead, Marsha Lederman cites a study suggesting that “only about one-quarter of 14- and 15-year-olds have stopped using banned platforms.” Other studies suggest that 61% of young people have not altered their social media routines since the law came into effect a few months ago.

Should we therefore conclude that social media bans for under-16s should be abandoned? Not at all. If one-quarter have stopped using banned platforms, that already constitutes at least a partial success.

When mandatory seat belt use was introduced in the 1970s and 1980s, compliance in many jurisdictions remained spotty for some time. In New York State in 1986, two years after the state had made seat belts mandatory, the compliance rate was just 46%. Happily, the state did not conclude that the law was a failure and abandon it. Like other jurisdictions, they kept at it—and now compliance rates everywhere are at 90% or above. Let’s take a similar approach in this case.

An interesting detail of the New York State example is the fact that things did not follow a straight line. In the first year after seat belt use became mandatory more than 50% of drivers followed the new law; it was in the second year that compliance dropped to 46%. And there were more ups and downs before compliance rates reached 90%. (The rate is now 94%.)

A recent issue of The Economist ("Going Old School," May 9th) drew my attention to an October 2025 study of school cell-phone bans in Florida--a study providing further evidence that not everything follows a straight line. David Figlio and colleagues published the results of this study in Eduation Next; in the large school district they studied, which had imposed a "bell-to-bell" ban in school snart phone use, the ban itself was highly effective with no lag (among high school students, daily cellphone visits fell by more than 80 percent after the ban was imposed). What didn't follow a straight line was suspensions imposed against those flouting school rules; suspensions jumped by 25 percent in the year immediately after the ban was imposed--but then returned to pre-ban levels the following year. The study also found that student performance both on reading and on math tests improved after the ban was imposed.

Examples of non-addictive devices.

On the Death of Happy—and on How Humans Treat Non-Human Animals

When the 55-year old Asian elephant who had been named “Happy” was euthanized at the Bronx Zoo last month, her death sparked a wide-ranging conversation about many topics, including whether or not humans are justified in confining other animals in zoos, whether or not humans are justified in killing and eating other animals, and the degree to which non-human animals possess high levels of intelligence. I was one of more than two hundred people who weighed in on the New York Times site, commenting on their May 28 article covering Happy’s death. The article noted that Happy had “passed a mirror self-recognition test, touching an X marked on her head with her trunk while looking in a mirror, making her the first elephant to show such a degree of self-awareness,” and reported that “human infants, apes, and dolphins” had been the only others to have passed the test.) My first comment had to do with that self-recognition test:

It's an interesting and informative article, but in one respect it's out of date in the information it provides: the list of species that have had members who passed the mirror self-recognition test is now considerably longer than reported here. In addition to elephants (Happy and two other elephants to a slightly lower degree), humans; all the great apes; and bottle nose dolphins, the list now includes killer whales; the rhesus macaque monkey; some species of fish; and one species of bird (the Eurasian magpie). It's worth noting that the test (which many have criticized as human centric) has thus far been administered to only a small percentage of non-human animal species.

I also commented in response to “Tom” from Moscow Idaho, who made the point that animals such as “hogs are also highly intelligent. Yet we subject them to such cruelty for a cheaper BLT.” Tom wrote that he is “not a vegetarian” but buys “local meat produced as humanely as possible” and “often” chooses “a plant-based substitute.” He added that he realizes “not everyone has the income to do that,” but urged readers to “remember that cattle, sheep, hogs, and chickens are also smarter than we give them credit for.” The following exchange ensued:

Don LePan: Very good point, Tom; they are indeed much smarter than generally given credit for! Pigs and chickens, for example, have both demonstrated an ability to use mirrors in a variety of ways—and “passed” many other intelligence tests too.

The concept of meat produced "as humanely as possible" is deeply problematic, though. Imagine a species from another world coming to earth and farming humans--killing humans and eating them, and rationalizing it by saying that the humans were treated "as decently as possible" until the time came when they had to be killed and eaten. We can get our protein quite easily from so many plant-based sources now; let's let the animals live. (Healthier for us, and for the planet too!)

And the low-income point? Many forms of a plant-based diet are actually very low priced. Lentils, chick peas, kidney beans, soy beans--these legumes are far less expensive than animal-based sources of protein. Instead of ground beef (or plant-based fake "ground beef"), we can put lentils in our spaghetti sauce, and just leave out the carne in our chili.

“Mattson” (responding to Don LePan): Please beware of the little white lie. Legumes are NOT a good source of high quality protein. They are an incomplete source of amino acids. When legumes and grains are combined, then together the amino acids are complete. (Such as rice and beans). Between Celiac Disease, Soy allergies, and a genetic disease involving beans-please get nutritional counseling if you want to go Vegan.

Don LePan (responding to “Mattson”): It's not quite right to say that legumes are an incomplete source of amino acids. Every legume contains all the nine essential amino acids in at least some quantity--though most legumes contain very little methionine and/or tryptophan. It _is_ right to say that combining legumes with grains (rice, bread, pasta, etc.) results in a complete amino acid profile nutritionally--and it's worth pointing out that one need not worry about combining legumes and grains at every meal; if you consume legumes and grains over the course of the day at whatever meal, that should be fine. The one thing that typically does require a supplement when one adopts a vegan diet is vitamin B12.

Nutritional counselling for any diet is probably a good idea. It's unfortunate that such counselling tends to be recommended far more often for those adopting or considering a plant-based diet than it is for those subsisting on an omnivorous diet, when the health harms from the standard North American omnivorous diets (increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes--the list is a long one) are much, much greater.

Justine Marie, from Queens, NYC (responding to Don LePan): Yes! Vegan since 2007 and thriving. Only wish I'd done it sooner. May Happy rest in peace, now that she is finally free, and may all beings be happy and free from harm.

I was pleased to see that, overall, there were far more people commenting on the inherent cruelty of zoos than there were people commenting in defense of zoos.

P.S. My thanks to Maureen for bringing me up to speed on the nutrition facts front!

Happy the elephant (Wikicommons, Nonhumanrights.org.)

The Art That's Hidden Away

The Globe and Mail published the first part of this essay as an opinion piece in their 23 May 2026 issue (I wrote the rest of it after I'd submitted it to them). Some interesting comments were posted online this weekend--including about the Vancouver Art Galley, which I was pleased to hear has just opened a new exhibition of works from its permanent collection. I will echo hazlit64's comment: "Finally. Indeed, it is about the best thing the VAG has done in ages."

The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina has a far more impressive permanent collection than do the public art galleries in many cities its size. As you’d expect, the collection has a range of pieces by Ronald Bloore and other members of the “Regina Five” from the 1960s, and significant paintings by the outstanding Saskatchewan landscape artist Dorothy Knowles. But the collection also includes work by a wide range of outstanding Canadian artists from all eras: Takao Tanabe is included, as are Alex Colville, Joyce Wieland, David Milne, Prudence Heward, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris, and mid-twentieth century abstract artists Jack Bush, Jack Shadbolt, and Agnes Martin. Some of the finest paintings by early Canadian landscape artist Homer Watson are part of the collection. And that’s just the Canadian side of things. Works by Andrea del Sarto, Irene Parenti Duclos, Eugene Delacroix, Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Dégas, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol are all part of the collection too.*

Homer Watson, The River Drivers (1914), part of the permanent collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

And how many of those works were on display when I visited in early March? None. Other than a special exhibition of works (“Death Boat and other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art”), there was nothing whatsoever on display from the permanent collection. The rest of the space was devoted to two large special exhibitions: a selection of photographic and conceptual art by Plains Cree artist Joi T. Arcand, and a selection of work (again, primarily photographic and conceptual) by recipients of the 2025 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

I have no desire to criticize anything in the three exhibits on display. The background to the Arcand exhibit is interesting, and so are some of the pieces; particularly striking is an installation piece of a wooden chair inside a field of wheat inside the bare wooden frame of a farm building. Jin-me Yoon’s images of herself in front of iconic Canadian landscapes (part of the Governor General’s Awards winners exhibition) are striking too and, in the “Death Boat” exhibition of Indigenous art, Ananaisie Alikatuktuk’s 1976 stonecut of the Inuit sea goddess Taleelayu and her family is quite wonderful. The Joe Fafard cows in the outdoor sculpture garden are quite wonderful too. There are good things on display at the Mackenzie.

But a public gallery with a large permanent collection should surely be making an effort to represent the full range of our artistic heritage—and a full range of genres. Like many other public galleries across Canada, the MacKenzie has chosen not to do that. Canada’s Indigenous heritage is of vital importance, and it should always find expression in our public galleries. But so too is our heritage of European art and of art influenced by the traditions the European settlers brought with them. Implicitly, the MacKenzie suggests that the only heritage of great value in Canada is that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

Implicitly, too, the MacKenzie suggests that there is little value to the genres that for centuries were accorded pride of place in our heritage: painting (and in particular, oil painting), works on paper (whether watercolors or prints), and sculpture. Photographic art and video art, together with installations and other forms of conceptual art, now dominate much of the art scene. They should surely be represented in any public gallery, but they are not everything. Bonnard, Gauguin, Munch, Picasso, David Milne, A.Y. Jackson, Dorothy Knowles—to have all that wealth hidden away in your vaults and not show any of it? It’s an extraordinary imbalance.

It’s not as if the MacKenzie is short of exhibition space; a visitor can’t help but be struck by the amount of empty wall space in the foyer, the hallways, and so on. It would be easy to display a modest selection of works from the permanent collection without reducing one bit the amount of exhibition space devoted to the other exhibitions.

I’ve had very similar experiences elsewhere; in public galleries across Canada, our artistic heritage (with the notable exception of Indigenous art) is often all tucked away in the vaults; modern photographic art, video art, and installation and conceptual art are what’s on display. There are some in the art world who might suggest that there is a hint of the philistine, or even of the reactionary in anyone who still wants to see work by the Impressionists, or Alex Colville, or the Group of Seven, or Andrea del Sarto. But most of us who would like to see a broader representation of our art heritage on display do not want to push out the contemporary art and the Indigenous art; we would like to see it on display together with Indigenous works, and together with various sorts of contemporary art.

You can, of course, find work by artists such as Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer and A.Y. Jackson in the MacKenzie Art Gallery, in the same part of the gallery in which they are to be found in every gallery across Canada: reproduced on postcards and teacups in the gallery shop. It seems crazy, but people still buy this stuff, in whatever form. It would be great if they could see the real thing as well as the postcards and the teacups.

* * *

Some may feel (and understandably so) that many of the artists represented in these permanent collections don’t deserve any more time in the limelight, that the Tom Thomsons and David Milnes and Paul Gauguins of the world—the white males who dominated for so long—have had their time in the sun, and deserve now to spend a good long time in the vaults. But it’s not just the long-dead white males that are being hidden away in the vaults; it's living artists too, very much including women artists and non-white artists. Check out the galleries that provide information on what’s in their permanent collection and you’ll find a vast store of works by Canada’s finest living artists—Angela Grossmans, Takao Tanabes, John Hartmans, and many more.

Not every gallery takes the same sort of approach that the MacKenzie does, of course. The National Art Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, and the Art Gallery of Ontario are notable exceptions among our largest public galleries, as is the Beaverbrook in Fredericton, which boasts on its website that its “permanent collection’s core … has remained on view for most of the gallery’s 60-plus year history.” The Glenbow in Calgary promises to again be an exception when it reopens in 2027. And several others are at least partial exceptions; the Art Gallery of Victoria, for example, displays works from its permanent collection in at least two of the gallery’s seven exhibition spaces.** But take a look online at what’s on at the main public galleries in St. John’s, Halifax, Trois Rivières, Kingston, Peterborough, Guelph, London, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Kamloops, Kelowna, Vancouver, Nanaimo. Many of these galleries hold excellent permanent collections. Few if any make available much space to show the works in those permanent collections to the public.

Why not? Gallery curators have a ready answer; they just don’t have enough space.*** And it is indeed true that many galleries across Canada are short both of exhibition space and of storage space—in some cases critically so. But the assumption seems always to be that new, temporary exhibitions must take priority. Is there any good reason for that assumption? Why not look at things the other way round? If you have a truly outstanding permanent collection, why not give priority to that? However large or small your available exhibition space may be, why not devote at least one third of that available space to a permanent display of certain of the most important works from your permanent collection?**** Another third might be devoted to rotating displays of other works in the permanent collection. That still leaves a third for temporary exhibitions. In the United States the majority of public galleries seem to devote over 70% of their exhibition space to works from their permanent collection; in Cleveland and Portland, it’s 90%; in Minneapolis it’s 93%. In Winnipeg, on the other hand, it’s estimated to be less than 60%; in Quebec City, less than 50%. In Victoria, it’s 45%; in Vancouver it’s often less than 10%. In Peterborough, Lethbridge, Nanaimo, and various other Canadian cities, it’s often 0%.

* * *

In closing, I’d like to return to the T.C. Douglas Building in Regina, in which the MacKenzie Gallery is housed. Arguably the most interesting pieces of art on display in the entire building are Miki Mappin’s nine wonderfully evocative sculptures of human figures. They’re on permanent display, positioned on benches in the building’s atrium, which you pass through before you enter the gallery, and again when you leave. Reminiscent of the white plaster sculptures of George Segal, these figures are made of dark concrete; they have apparently been popular among visitors to the building ever since they were installed in 1982. There’s nothing there to identify the sculptor, but an extraordinarily informative attendant at the information desk provided me with a good deal of background information—including a photocopied article from the 18 November 1982 issue of Western People about the installation of the sculptures.

“Thanks so much for the information,” I said to her before I left. “These are really quite extraordinary—better, perhaps, than anything else on display in the gallery.”

“Oh, but these aren’t the gallery’s sculptures,” she said. “They were commissioned by the Ministry of Health.” She pointed to the other side of the atrium. “The Health Ministry occupies that half of the building—nothing to do with the MacKenzie Gallery.”

*A nicely produced 2013 book edited by Timothy Long & Stephen King, The Vaults: Art from the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the University of Regina Collections, provides a wealth of information on what’s hidden from view at the MacKenzie.

**Also on display in Victoria at the moment is an exhibition advertised in the 14 March issue of the Globe and Mail with a detail from Mary Pratt’s Cut Cake: “Historic and Post-War Canadian Art.” But that’s an exhibition at the Madrona Gallery, an outstanding commercial gallery; the works are all for sale. It’s an interesting commentary on the current art world in this part of British Columbia that, when it comes to nineteenth and twentieth-century Canadian painting, there are often far more important works to be seen at commercial galleries and auction houses—Heffel Fine Art in Vancouver as well as Madrona—than there is at any of the public galleries. One of the many ironies of the current art world is that many works of art that have been donated to public galleries in the expectation that they will be thereby be enjoyed by more people than if the works were sold off at auction, end up being seen by no one at all other than the gallery staff.

***A growing number of galleries are nowadays attempting to address their space issues by adopting a “visible storage” approach for much of their permanent collection, and a growing number too are digitizing much or all of their permanent collection. These are both real steps forward—but they are no substitute for having a significant part of one’s permanent collection displayed in proper exhibition galleries.

****Having too few works from their permanent collection permanently on display is a failing of more than a few public galleries. When space is allocated to works from the permanent collection, it’s often only on a temporary basis. That’s fine for most works in most permanent collections, but truly iconic works should always be on display—just as the Glenbow used to always have on display, Frances Anne Hopkins’s Canoes in Fog, Lake Superior and just as the National Gallery always has on display certain works by Monet, Brymer, Carr, Thomson, Wyle, LeMieux, Colville, Borduas, Riopelle, and Mary Pratt.

Genocidal Intent, and the Quiet Deaths of Millions

Donald Trump’s early April statements of genocidal intent in the war he has waged against Iran have rightly received a great deal of attention—though no major news outlets I’m aware of have dared to describe them as “genocidal.” On April 1 Trump made the following statement: “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We are going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.” That was not an offhand remark made in haste through a tweet on Truth Social; the words were part of a prime time address to the nation, and are recorded in the official White House transcript. A few days later (on April 7) he threatened similar action: unless Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz by midnight that night, he declared, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Is it going too far to describe such words as statements of genocidal intent? A good many respected authorities have judged that it is not—among them Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Center for Human Rights: “Trump’s statement,” Risse has written, “is the clearest case of declared genocidal intent in modern international criminal law.”

It’s worth comparing Trump’s words with the words that have been used by others inciting genocide. “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” Hitler declared on 30 January 1939.” All Tutsis should be "erased from human memory" and "wiped from the surface of the earth," blared radio broadcasts in Rwanda in 1993. The similarities are all too clear.

No one suggests that Trump and Hegseth will kill as many in Iran as the 800,000 who were killed in the Rwanda genocide or the 6,000,000 who were killed in Europe in the Holocaust.

Trump’s other actions, though, may result in the quiet deaths of many more. The most heinous action of the Trump administration—among seemingly endless heinous actions—may may be the decision early on to quickly and brutally shut down America’s foreign aid programs. One report—from the Harvard School of Public Health—estimates that the USAID shutdown has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths (https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/); another—from an equally reputable source, the Lancet—estimates that the shutdown may well result in 14,000,000 deaths by 2030. (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o ).

Quiet deaths from starvation or from lack of essential medicines may not have the worldwide emotional impact that deaths associated with the word “genocide” always seem to carry. But the millions of people dying probably won’t care what words are used to describe the horror.

These, of course, are not deaths in places that the likes of Trump have been in the habit of recognizing as “civilizations.” The great civilizations of Benin, or of the Mali empire, or of Great Zimbabwe are ones that Trump and the world of MAGA seem entirely unaware of. Their traditions are the traditions of what Trump, in one of the most horrific statements of his first administration, called “shithole countries.” Who really cares if people in those sorts of places die in record numbers?

If we do care, we should do more than care; we should press rich world governments not to follow Trump in cutting foreign aid—and we should give as generously as we can to every aid agency that is working to save the people that the Trump administration is happy to let die.

Iran, 1953: Eisenhower, Churchill, Mosaddegh

In discussing the history of US-Iran relations in the context of the current war, many media accounts go back as far as the upheavals of 1979—the overthrowing of the Shah, the installation of an Islamist regime, and the American embassy hostage crisis. Few, sad to say, go back as far as upheavals of 1952-53—the nationalization of the oil industry by Iran’s democratically elected government, led by Mohammad Mosaddegh; the attempts by Winston Churchill’s British government to persuade the US to help them overthrow that government; and the overthrow itself. In the October 9, 1953 entry in his diary, American President Dwight Eisenhower reflected on the nature of what his government (together with Churchill’s government) had done:

The things we did were “covert.” If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances [of doing] anything of like nature in the future would almost completely disappear.

Knowledge of what they had done did eventually become public, and historians are nowadays all in agreement as to the basic facts. The summary in Brittanica says it well enough:

In 1951 … the Iranian parliament, led by Mosaddegh’s nationalist and democratically elected government, voted to nationalize the country’s oil industry. Seeing its interests thus threatened, the UK embarked on a secret campaign to weaken and destabilize Mosaddegh. At first the British government tried to convince the shah to remove Mosaddegh from office by engineering a parliamentary decree, a ploy that both failed and enhanced Mosaddegh’s reputation while diminishing the shah’s. When the push to remove Mosaddegh evolved into the idea of a coup to overthrow the government, Britain, reluctant to shoulder the responsibility alone, persuaded the U.S. to join forces by playing on Cold War fears that Mosaddegh, an avowed anticommunist, was aligning himself with Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party.

The United States took the leading role in a covert operation, called Operation Ajax, whereby CIA-funded agents were used to foment unrest inside Iran by way of the harassment of religious and political leaders and a media disinformation campaign. These efforts, formally approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, came to a head in August 1953 when Mosaddegh and his government were overthrown and Mohammad Reza, a pro-Western monarch, was returned to power.

It’s no wonder that resentment of America runs deep in Iran.

An interesting footnote to all this is how Churchill has almost entirely escaped blame for his part in the coup. Notice in the Brittanica summary that Eisenhower is named, but Churchill isn’t; that omission is entirely typical of most accounts of the coup. The American presidents who appear in the standard narrative (Truman, and then Eisenhower) are identified by name, but the British Prime Minister is not. In this as in a number of other respects (notably, the Bengal famine of 1943, in which Churchill withheld relief supplies in a famine that killed millions), Churchill remains history’s Teflon leader, remembered above all for the undeniable greatness of his leadership in 1940, while somehow sloughing off any close association with less flattering episodes.

The Woman Problem at the London Review of Books

I sent this letter to the London Review of Books March 22. I had assumed it wouldn't be published--since the LRB did publish a couple of other letters on Seamus Perry's 19 February article in their 19 March issue. (Interestingly, those letters continue the pattern of Perry's own piece; together they mention or reference eleven male writers, and no women.*) The LRB remains in many ways a wonderful publication, but when it comes to a fair representation of women it sometimes feels fifty years behind the times. Or indeed a hundred years. But I was happy to be surprised when they did in fact pubish a lightly edited version of the letter below in the 23 April issue. They cut my rather-too-snarky last sentence--just as well.

It is an extraordinary irony that, in an article on modern ideas of pluralism and diversity and on the “quality of sheer plenitude” in modern poetry (LRB, 19 February), Seamus Perry devotes twenty-three of his twenty-four paragraphs entirely to the writings of white males, all of them British or American (or, in the case of Auden and Gunn, a bit of both). The exception is the fifteenth of the twenty-four, which is also mostly devoted to the writings of British and American white males (Robert Browning chief among them), but which includes seven-words quoted from Elizabeth Bishop and six-words quoted from Dorothy Parker.

One wishes that Perry had either given a much narrower title to the piece or—better still—taken the time to dip into the work of a much wider range of modern poets. From Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” all the way to Brooks’s “The Lovers of the Poor” and beyond, there’s a wondrous range of “sheer plenitude” to be discovered. Much of it of high quality, and much of it of real interest—possibly even to white male writers at Balliol.**

*An extended quote from Chas and Dave's 1982 song "That's What I Like" is offered by one letter writer as a fine example of verse that evokes the "rich ordinariness of the modern world." They're nice enough lines, but nowehere near as nice as lines from any one of dozens of Carol Ann Duffy poems that evoke the rich ordinariness of the modern world.

**Seamus Perry, a professor of English literature at Oxford, was elected in May 2025 to become Master of Balliol College in July 2026.