[UPDATED JUNE 21 (& happy summer solstice) & JUNE 22]. Something Donald Trump tweeted this past Monday morning illustrates one of the many things wrong with his view of the real world I live in. In Mr. Trump’s own words : “The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the […]
The thing to remember about the United States of America when it intermittently seems on the verge of civil war (metaphorically at least?) is that it is in the end a very complex place, full of many different real-world human beings. For every “Ugly American” there are at least a few and often enough many […]
[UPDATED OCTOBER 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21]. Just when I start to conclude that the younger generation running things these days has lost all interest in the literary graces that disciplined my own heyday, I come across a headline like : “Fall features fail to fully unfurl” – in the free metro news tabloid […]
TORONTO. AUGUST 22, 2017. It has been a strange-weather summer in the city this year. Right now we’re waiting for yet more rain. (I spoke too soon. It has just come. And now the question is : when will it come again? Can we go for coffee later, across from the park?) Meanwhile, it is […]
One thing I’ve done today (well … yesterday really) is finish reading Jeff Madrick’s review of two recent books on poverty in the USA, Â in the June 22, 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books. (The two books are : Â The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty, by […]
[UPDATED APRIL 3 – DORIS DAY’S BIRTHDAY]. Someone has sent this issue to me for comment. I’m not quite sure why. I have never lived in Quebec myself. (I am, for better or worse, a born and raised Torontonian.) I do have a son who spent four years at McGill University in Montreal. And my […]
I woke up yesterday morning to a brief but provocative text statement, at the bottom of the screen on Toronto’s cp24 cable TV channel. It read something like  : “UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, born in New York City, renounces US citizenship.” Like perhaps millions of others around the world, I wondered. Is even the […]
I’m told that for a few weeks now the statistics for this site have been showing fresh interest in a post of mine from exactly five years ago, on “Splendor at the Hollywood theatre : remembering the Natalie Wood who would be 73 years old.” The occasion back then was the 30th anniversary of the […]
You’ve of course already heard of “Brexit” – Britain leaves (exits) the European Union. (And this is something that’s already happening, in one degree or another. See, eg, the excellent Scottish journalist and writer Neal Ascherson on “England prepares to leave the world.”) If you live north of the “unfortified” northern US border, you may […]
Letting the sovereign voters decide complex public policy questions has been given something of a bad name lately by the still quite puzzling Brexit experience in the United Kingdom. And in a Canadian city like Toronto (Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, etc) you are still slightly closer to news from the UK (and/or France) than […]
