Counterweights began as a Canadian website in August 2004. Almost from the start it has had enduring link exchanges with two other excellent Canadian websites:

Canadian Women’s Business Network
Resources and opportunities for women in Canadian business … on the leading edges of all the great causes today.

Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Eliminating government waste and holding politicians accountable to the Canadian people at all levels of government.

The counterweights editors have lately been interested in another two excellent Canadian websites:

Christopher Moore’s Canadian History
If you care about Canada, its history, and its writing, this is a site for you.

Democracy Watch
Cleaning up and making governments and corporations more accountable to you, and making Canada the world’s leading democracy!

We’re interested in Canada and the global village. And we’re based in Toronto — a place, it used to be said, “with one eye on London and the other on New York.” We try to keep this tradition going, a little, by keeping one eye each on the websites for two excellent English language literary magazines:

New York Review of Books
Now “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language,” according to Esquire magazine. Began during the New York publishing strike of 1963, when Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein and their friends decided to create a new kind of periodical to “discuss current books and issues in depth.”

London Review of Books
Dedicated to “carrying on the tradition of the English essay.” Founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at the Times. For the first six months, the LRB appeared as an insert in the New York Review of Books. In May 1980, the London Review of Books jumped out of the parental pouch and became a fully independent literary paper.

We read a host of daily newspapers to keep our blogging and our comment pieces plugged in. Our newspaper reading starts in Canada, but it quickly spills over into the United States next door. And from our start in August 2004 we have had a special relationship with California:

Los Angeles Times
America’s second newspaper of record

San Francisco Chronicle
We left our hearts in San Francisco long ago. And the Chronicle is now being printed by the same Canadian firm that prints the Globe and Mail and La Presse.

The global village nowadays has a lot more global reach than it used to. We also try to pay attention to the world beyond Europe and North America:

The Times of India
Keeping in touch with how the global village looks in the world’s largest democracy today.

crikey
How the global village looks down under, in Australia’s most popular online newsmagazine.

This current set of links has been compiled in July 2009, during our migration to new software and servers. We will be revising and updating these links from time to time. Come back again in a few months, to see if anything has changed. (And if our links editor is earning his quarterly stipend, something ought to be a least a little different.)