RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2026. While tidying up the office (to escape all the snow still outside), I came across two quotations from eminent Americans, successively posted on my office magazine rack. The first is from Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. It’s in an article dated December […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2026. On the happily less than altogether crazy North American politics in my own backyard, Canadian federal New Democrat MPs have criticized Ontario NDP deputy leader Doly Begum for “announcing she will run federally as a Liberal for the seat vacated by former MP Bill Blair.” […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SATURDAY, JANUARY 24/SUNDAY, JANUARY25, 2026. This is a crazy weekend on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario, at the eastern beginning of the North American Great Lakes. For one thing it’s unusually cold outside, even for late January. (As we look out on a snowy yard from our back boardroom, which […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 2026. In the midst of all the 51st State nonsense on Twitter/X lately, Alice Hunt’s recent piece on King“James VI & I” (1566–1625) in the London Review of Books gave me a fresh (if also crazy) slant on the 250-year-old non-unification of the United States and […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2026. To start with this is the fifth anniversary of the wild and crazy attempt to overturn the 2020 US presidential election in Washington, DC — at and in which President Donald Trump was both present and an involved observer (or much more?). I may not […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MONDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2025. Santa has now come and gone, here as elsewhere. We have a few last moments to contemplate our own record for the fourth and final quarter of the very fateful year 2025. For us here on the northwest shore of the Great Lake Ontario, one very big […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2025. Santa is almost on his way, in these parts of planet earth at least. And late this afternoon of the day before Christmas Eve (which we still do commemorate in these parts, as a cultural if not exactly religious event) we counterweights editors met in the first-floor […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2025. By the start of the second quarter of 2025 here on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in ”northern North America”, the crazy Trump tariffs had set in globally (including 10% on the Heard and Macdonald Islands near Australia, inhabited only by penguins). Meanwhile the second incarnation […]

COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2025. For Canada in some grand existential sense — as for much else in the contemporary global village — the great shadow event of 2025 has without doubt been the arrival of the even wilder and crazier Donald J. Trump II regime in the (alas) no longer great […]

RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2025. Robert Reich’s “Sunday thought” yesterday set the stage for my current further reflections on the USA next door, some 17 days before Christmas 2025. (And I am using my father’s understanding of the universe as I mention this particular holiday in Toronto today. When asked […]