Commentary
Growing old has its compensations. One is institutional memory. Having been educated in an era when “Western civilization” was not a trope to be spat out like a bad oyster, I w...
Commentary
Last month, the jury of a special coroner’s inquest into three women’s deaths in 2015, all related to intimate partner violence (IPV), made a recommendation that &ldquo...
Commentary
Eco-warriors neither slumber nor sleep in their pursuit of universal sustainability. Plastic looms large on their enemies list because of its non-biodegradability. Three years ago,...
Commentary
The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee was both joyous and poignant. At 96, though still in general good health, the occasion’s honouree was herself unable to partake in some of ...
Commentary
The United States is a gun culture, and too often children pay for that obsession with their lives. About 1,000 children in the United States die every year as collateral damage to gang vi...
Commentary
In the 1960s, they were called the “days of rage.” They are back, but the rage isn’t contained within a rebellious cadre of American anti-war, anti-establishment students...
Commentary
A 2021 report on Canadian women and girls in sport found that one in four girls who had participated at least once a week in sport before COVID-19 had not returned when restrictions ...
Commentary
Misleading language is a friend to tyrants, for whom it works as a placebo against public unrest. In Russia, the charged words “war against Ukraine” are forbidden. Russians mus...
Commentary
In March, West Virginia passed legislation entrenching a “rebuttable presumption” that, following separation, parents will enjoy equal time with their child(ren). Tha...
Commentary
Canadian commentators have been scathing in their assessment of the disparity between Justin Trudeau’s lofty Ukraine-related rhetoric—“unwavering and steadfast support&rd...
Commentary
Critical race theory (CRT) is a divisive cluster of notions that reduces human beings to cogs in an identity wheel, segregates them according to DNA, and strips them of individual agency a...
Commentary
There are approximately 3,000 Jews in China. In a population of a billion people, that’s a statistical rounding error. The overwhelming majority of Chinese people will neve...
Commentary
The Winter Olympics, or as some prefer, “the Genocide Games,” are in progress in Beijing, with participation from 91 countries. I generally eschew hyperbole, but my mind ...
Commentary
A mid-January Maru Public Opinion poll finds that a significant number of Canadians favour sternly punitive measures for the unvaccinated. Of the poll’s online 1,506 panel,...
Commentary
Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace prize and a central figure in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, died at age 90 on Dec. 26. As befitted his h...
Commentary
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell’s frequently cited dictum encapsulates the contested terrain at issue be...
Commentary
Three years ago, my family resigned our membership in the non-traditional synagogue that had been our religious home for more than 40 years. The end came suddenly after I published ...
Commentary
Throughout history, to avoid material harm, or to gain social acceptance from an oppressor group, many people have suppressed a stigmatizing identity and “passed.” Jews have pas...
Commentary
For most of us in the West, the image we instinctively associate with women under Taliban rule in Afghanistan is the animated shroud known as the burqa, the only clue to their human...
Commentary
Now that the federal election is over, we Montrealers are turning our attention to the city’s mayoralty elections, scheduled for Nov 7. The two viable candidates are incumbent Val...