There's a better way to do politics
When you lose sight of first principles, you lose the means to shape politics. You are stuck with a constrained choice between whatever options land on your desk. That is choosing, not governing.
The unimportance of being earnest
Intentionally or not, the play succeeds in showing why Clark failed as prime minister. This Clark simply doesn’t understand the qualities that make a good leader.
Lessons from Edinburgh
Canadian cities could learn from Edinburgh that, when it comes to monuments, more is better, and even more is even better. In the end, a country is what and who it celebrates.
The birds and the bees and St. Valentine
Saintly patronage can be a funny thing. By a series of medieval confusions, St. Balthasar became the patron saint of card players, and now by extension blackjack dealers. And St.…
Where love and hate intersect
Page after page, Gaius Valerius Catullus’s all-too-human love is all too familiar to the contemporary reader. As modern as Shakespeare’s or Camoes’s sixteenth-century sonnets feel, Catullus’s poems from sixteen centuries earlier do not feel a day older.
Jon Stewart is back in the big chair. But what about his courage?
Comedy Central is betting that Stewart plus Trump will equal ratings, but his old fans have loftier ambitions for him. They hope that Stewart will provide the kind of opposition to Donald Trump that neither Kamala Harris nor Joe Biden can. But will the 60-year-old comedian play along? Or will his conscience get the better of him?
What's in and what's out in 2024
From bullfighting to Olympic basketball, from vapes to Georgian orange wine, here is the definitive but definitely not serious list of what’s in and what’s out for 2024
It's ok to draw the line at statues of Satan
If our society can’t draw a principled distinction between benign expressions of religious pluralism and the literal embodiment of evil, then we might as well pack it up.
The ten best things I put in my mouth in 2023
Each entry is an honest reaction to something that soothed, stroked, or smacked the palate, as the occasion demanded. Some would have been extraordinary under any circumstances, while others were (as true delights usually are) a matter of the right time and place.
Unlike in Ireland, the government's online harms legislation appears to be stuck—and that's a good thing
The Liberal government has so far failed to follow through on its own promise to introduce a law restricting online speech in Canada. It appears to be stuck, and long may it remain so.