“Today,” my wife remarked as we were getting up, “is the original ‘great day for Canada.’” Having acquired much familiarity with our nuclear family legends, I knew what she meant. But I asked the obvious dumb question anyway: “You mean,” I said, “that this is your grandfather’s birthday?” (My knowledge of the legends  does not […]

As best as I can make out, this is the fourth installment in a series of pleas on this website, written on or about the third Monday in February. Like its predecessors it argues that Manitoba’s inspired moniker for this (in some provinces) newish Canadian public holiday of sorts – Louis Riel Day – should […]

Jackson Lears “teaches history at Rutgers University, is the editor of Raritan and author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.” In the 5 January 2012 issue of the London Review of Books, he reviews two recent biographies of US President Barack Obama’s father and mother –  The Other Barack by […]

We are of course far from alone in our view of 2011 as a hinge of fate. Here, eg, is Bloomberg Business Week on the subject: “Rampaging natural catastrophes, global financial calamities, the deaths of despots and desperados, the passing of America’s greatest modern technical innovator and roiling protests that shook the Arab world and […]

This is our second “best of counterweights 2011” list, as promised (or threatened may be the better word?) – compiled by X and I, as we recurrently toast the season in this otherwise deserted office, complete with a fake holiday tree, and several boxes of excellent seasonal cookies, left behind by the den mother by […]

On various scores 2011 seems to at least most of us here to have been one of those years that actually can be seriously described as a hinge of fate (well … more or less). And so over the past few weeks everyone in the office or otherwise attached to this somewhat crazed but still […]

[UPDATED WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11,  AUGUST 22, 2012 ; TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2016 : scroll to bottom of page]. Tuesday, November 29, 2011 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Natalie Wood, aka Natalia Zakharenko, aka Natasha Gurdin, aka Natalie Wood Wagner – “a movie star, from probably the last period when stars were still […]

[UPDATED MARCH 17, 2012] : At first I wasn’t sure just what to make of our autumn 2011 holiday trip to Silicon Valley, in the (despite everything else) still aptly named Golden State of the USA today. Then I bumped into two recent articles in the online edition of Foreign Policy magazine: “The Myth of […]

A little too unhappily, this week began with reports from our Canadian banks on slower growth prospects for the domestic economy. See, eg, on Monday, September 12: “Canada’s growth to slow, RBC says” ; and then, just one day later: “Canada could be 1st into recession, bank warns.” At the bottom of these prognostications were […]

[UPDATED JULY 12, 2011]. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) is apparently abandoning “effort for $4 trillion in deficit reductions … in the face of stiff GOP opposition to any plan that would increase taxes as part of the deal.” But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R – Kentucky) has nonetheless declared that “Nobody is […]