Questions have been raised about the Confederate flag still flying over the South Carolina state capitol, even after the appalling terrorist prayer-meeting murders in Charleston this past Wednesday night. They may remind some of us north of the Great Lakes that a few much milder questions were raised about the current Ontario provincial flag last […]

Up here in the land of the Canadian Sunset a George Soros article in the July 9, 2015 issue of the New York Review of Books offers evidence that the Harper government’s ongoing harassment of Ontario’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and International Trade, Michael Chan, is not just “a flourish of 1950s-era McCarthyism – call […]

Sadly, Ornette Coleman – “American jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer … one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s” – died in Manhattan of a heart attack this past Thursday, June 11, at the ripe old age of 85. He came on stream in the late 1950s and early […]

Until recently Toronto’s new mayor, John Tory, was widely loved in opinion polls.  As in “Tory’s approval rating remains strong” (April 13), and “Still in the honeymoon stage … Mayor John Tory continues to enjoy a soaring approval rate” (May 8). Yet it seems that the worm has now started to turn, as it inevitably […]

It seems only somewhat odd that the two big Canadian news events of yesterday – Tuesday, June 2, 2015 – should at least vaguely recall the earliest origins of the modern country of Canada, back in the 16th, 17th, and (first half of the) 18th centuries. In any case, in the old pays d’en haut […]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ONTARIO. MONDAY, JUNE 1, 2015. 1:20 AM ET. The trial of suspended Canadian Senator Mike Duffy resumes today in Ottawa, some four and a half months before the much anticipated Canadian federal election of 2015. Mr. Duffy faces 28 charges involving fraud and breach of trust in various claimed expenses as a Senator, and […]

Freeman Dyson’s recent interesting note on Albert Einstein and the old  “dualistic philosophy” of quantum mechanics – masquerading as a New York review of Stephen Gimbel’s Einstein: His Space and Times – has also made some of us think about what ought to be another big issue in this year’s Canadian federal election. (Believe it […]

I don’t believe in “types” of human beings. But if I did, the new Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown would remind me of a certain type of hard-working grass-roots activist, outside the established political party system. Yet it also seems that Mr. Brown has spent almost his entire life since the middle of high school […]

Six days ago under the heading “British election” I wrote “I’m waiting for John Lanchester to tell me what is finally going to happen here in the LRB blog …” I also noted that “even though the Scottish independence referendum lost last September, the UK is nonetheless changing …  So far at least this 2015 […]

[UPDATED MAY 8.] Tonight (Sunday, May 3, 2015 at 10 PM ET) will bring what the on-air promo somewhat confusingly calls the second-last episode “before the finale” of Matthew Weiner’s still quite excellent US TV series Mad Men. In plainer language it’s the third-last episode. The last one will air on Sunday, May 17. And […]