(John and Ida Chilembwe and daughter Emma. John led the 1915 uprising against chibaro in what is now Malawi. Wikipedia). Reading through the recent deluge of horrifying and possibly alarmist accoun…

The University of Alberta is proposing to eliminate Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) from its hiring policy, a year after the school initially said it was moving away from the term.

The killings in Minneapolis are all over my mind right now, mainly because I lived in Minneapolis/St Paul for six years in the 1990s, and I know the neighbourhoods, the streets, where they happened…

1. Way back at the beginning of covid, I often saw the assertion (attributed to various therapists and self-help mavens) that while the pandemic made everyone anxious and depressed, people who actu…

In the past few years, the world of middlebrow opinion has been rife with talk of loneliness and alienation among young men in wealthy countries, backed up by quite a bit of good data. Alarms are r…

I was born in the late 1960s, which means that I’m part of the last birth cohort in North America who were told from their earliest years that the worst thing you could possibly be was a Nazi or a …

In the winter of 2020, just before covid first hit, I got on a toboggan on a glassy, steep and ice-covered hill in the west end of Edmonton and pushed off, first picking up speed and then losing co…

(Apocalypse Guns and Ammo, a business near Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. Taken from the business’ Facebook page).  The day that Charlie Kirk was killed, I listened to a podcast about high-con…

@AirCanada: you owe me a refund & public complaints are the only way to get it done. A thread: On August 17 you cancelled my YEG-YUL itinerary. Cancellation email said: …

The majority of Edmonton city council approved the $400 million master agreement plan after contentious deliberations on Monday. The vote came down 9 to 4.

Yes, Alberta really is like The Handmaid’s Tale and here is why.  In the forty years since Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, it’s become a cultural touchstone for describing po…

(This is a retake of something I wrote last winter. I was revising it for an anthology when I realized it was becoming a bit skewed out of that anthology’s scope. So here’s version 2.0 …

The Ballad of Fred and Ned.  Yesterday I got an email asking if I would be willing to do something which is not exactly part of my job yet also not very arduous, and which would contribute to a gen…

Are cuts to US health and research budgets a chronicle of a Canadian communicable disease crisis foretold?

A few weeks ago, my employer, a major public university, defunded its affiliated child-care centres, reducing their $300 000 annual commitment to zero dollars. This was announced by an all-points e…

There’s another way in which the question, where do you go back to, is vexed, in addition to its entanglement with co…

The rickety wooden desk on which I write this, here on Treaty Six territory in Edmonton, has an upper shelf with ascatter of objects which I brought home from Scotland in the middle of 2024: two sm…

In Scotland for the month of June, I spent a lot of time on the edge of land and water, head down, bouncing between squatting and standing, looking for scraps to pick up. On the islands of Tiree an…

(Kathie Boudin’s FBI poster from 1970) At the onset of covid, I learned a lot about various self-care and self-soothing rituals for titrating the anxieties and the unknowns, which I turned to…

Having a LLM or another person writing your papers feels like a victory but it is just your own defeat, you felled by your own contempt for your future and anyone who believes in you.   I…