Saturday, September 20, 2025

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

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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 als...
Saturday, September 13, 2025

Portentousness Itself

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We’ve all read sentences such as these, that reference “life itself,” or “time itself,” or “democracy itself”: The author leads us to refl...
Sunday, August 3, 2025

Imagined Reality -- Fiction, Painting, Pittsburgh

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In Danzy Senna’s recent novel Colored Television there’s a passage about the advice that the protagonist (a fiction writer, and also a crea...
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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Anger at Trump, Anger at Americans

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On CBC radio on Canada Day, the co-host of the “Canada Day in the Capital” special from Ottawa interviewed Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s Gove...

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

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A few months ago we at Broadview Press published Katharina Rout's extraordinary edition of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the W...

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

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Back in late January I sent the following letter to The New York Times : Charles Piller (“The Devastating Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer’s Sci...

Letter to the Globe: Elephants and Dairy Cattle

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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...

Letter to the Globe: Leaders' Debate Eligibility

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There was a bit of a fuss during Canada's recent election campaign over the decision to exclude the Green Party from the leaders' de...

Letters to the Globe: Supply Management

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Canada's system of supply management, which protects farmers and smooths out prices in the egg, dairy, and poultry industries, has been ...
Tuesday, July 15, 2025

Less Heat, More Light

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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” ...
Tuesday, April 8, 2025

Cutting Out the Good Bits: Sex Scenes, Sally Rooney, and The New Yorker

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Not a few of those who read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo when the book was published last year had already read a substantial excerpt; “Openin...
Sunday, March 30, 2025

Did we ever have a "deal" that "you get a job, you get a house, by your 20s"?

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One of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre’s ads in the current election campaign shows him on Shawnessy Drive in Calgary’s suburbs, ...

Letter to the Globe and Mail: Lessons from the Pandemic

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On the 5th anniversary of the onset of the pandemic lockdowns, many pieces looking back appeared in the media. I wrote the following letter ...

Letter to the Globe and Mail: CEO Compensation

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[I've written several letters to the editor the past month. None has been published; I'll post three of them here.] Re “RBC paid C...
Saturday, February 8, 2025

Generosity Should Not Have to be Justified Purely by Appeals to Self Interest

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Of all the horrors that the Trump administration has set into motion during its first two weeks, the effort to shut down the US Agency for I...
Wednesday, January 1, 2025

The Horrific Attack on Bourbon Street

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Relatively little is known about the horrific attack last night in New Orleans, but it seems that the attacker was a US Army veteran inspire...

Letter to the Globe: The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Tate

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For years the VAG planned to move out of its current quarters into a much larger new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, a prestigi...

Letter to the Globe: The American Election and the Average American Worker

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Quite a number of commentators on the American election have suggested that the average American has been doing better economically under th...

Letter to Alberta Views Magazine: Rodeos

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One of the best things about Alberta Views magazine is the monthly “Dialogue” feature they run, in which two people on opposing sides of an...

Letter to The Economist: Diet and Health

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The Economist is a great publication in so may ways, and open- and fair-minded on almost every topic. A long-standing exception has been an...