(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…