Two apparently widely read columns from the New York Times this past weekend finally brought home, for me at any rate, some new hard truths about the changing mood in the USA today: “There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’” by Frank Rich, and Maureen Dowd’s “You’ll Never Believe What This White House […]
[UPDATED AUGUST 6: SEE BELOW]. Our first thought was just a very short post on “Conrad Black released from jail on $2-million bail.” No more than two sentences say – to underline the point that this news is not important, even in Canada where Mr. Black was born. But part of the trouble with Conrad […]
I rarely agree with Peter Worthington, the right-wing militarist journalist who has done so much for the Toronto Sun. But I think he is onto something in the case of Captain Robert Semrau. A native of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Captain Semrau was granted an “exemplary discharge” from the British army before joining the Canadian forces. […]
“Why are you keeping these things if you’re never going to look at them again?” It’s a good question. So I recently re-read Jonathan Raban’s review of The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by the estimable William Langewiesche, in the August 12, 2004 issue of the New York Review of Books. […]
[UPDATED JULY 10, 13]. It is a sign of the strange waters Canadian federal politics are in these days that the Harper minority government’s current omnibus budget bill may be stuck in the still unreformed Senate of Canada. The Canadian Press reports: “The Tories are threatening a fall election after opposition senators stripped contentious provisions […]
Is it just me? Or are there others out there somewhere, who find it unbelievable, to say the least, that the 24-year-old Hollywood actress Lindsay Lohan has just been sentenced to 90 days in jail? Several years ago the excellent American journalist William Langewiesche (who now “resides in California and France”) wrote about a Washington […]
TORONTO. TUESDAY 6 JULY 2010. 4:00 PM ET. If you have any feeling at all for the way Old Ontariario used to be, even just back in the dark ages of the 1950s, say, you may have found it difficult to resist some nostalgia over Queen Elizabeth II’s farewell perambulation around Queen’s Park in this […]
In what at least ought to be his classic late 1940s essay, “Great Britain, the United States and Canada,” Canada’s one near-great historian Harold Innis wrote: “The United States has been described by John Gunther as ‘the greatest, craziest, most dangerous, least stable, most spectacular, least grown up and most powerful and magnificent nation ever […]
It is a tribute to the respect Queen Elizabeth II still enjoys in Canadian public life that even those Canadians who believe the British monarchy has no long-term future in Canada tend to think the institution will await the end of her reign before it fades into the sunset on which the old empire never […]
TORONTO. JUNE 30, 2010. 10:30 PM ET. Everything is clearer in retrospect. And only a few days after the latest G20 congregation has left this blandly civilized city with the secret heart of a loan shark, various fresh possibilities for judging the event a failure are blowing in the summer breeze. Two possibilities deserve particular […]
