In my formative years, summer meant Lake Simcoe and long, halcyon summers. But today, if nobody stops them, the usual suspects are going to — as the song warns — pave para...
The novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, much in the news with the release of Lee’s practice-run novel for Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, is America’s favourite book, its ex...
CanLit, our sobriquet for Canadian literature, had not yet been coined when I was an undergrad studying English Language and Literature at the University of Toronto in the early 1960s. To my co...
No Canadian old enough to understand its significance will ever forget the anguished tension of Quebec’s second referendum night in November 1995. The No side won by the slimmest of margins &...
Back in the day, comedians used to love performing on college campuses. Their audiences were young, hip and appreciative of edgy humour. Nowadays, not so much. In fact, alpha comedi...
was quite unnerved this morning to read that a scientist had predicted the earth might be once again coming to an end in a “mass extinction event.”[1] (There have been five previous...
Last Saturday, members and supporters of the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFÉ) marched in a pride parade. Not Toronto Pride, which is coming up June 28. CAFÉ marched in Ric...
In the normal course of events, you would not find the small community of Membertou, a branch of the greater tribal group of the Mi’kmaw nation, located within its tribal district of Cape...
In my column Wednesday I introduced my subject – the dictatorship of political correctness – with what I thought was a joke: “refer to Caitlyn Jenner as ‘he’ on Twitter and wait one hour for...
The Magna Carta, which celebrated its 800th anniversary on Monday, isn’t much to look at: it’s 54 lines of text on a piece of parchment, mostly about property rights and small-beer ...
Towards the end of his new memoir, You’re Going to be Dead One Day, David Horowitz reprises a vividly remembered incident that he had previously recounted in Radical Son (1996), his eloqu...
Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner is the most famous man and woman on the planet. (My software balked at being forced to allow that sentence). She’s a bit of a throwback, Caitlyn, as ...
The toddler — “Chris,” not her real name — was only two years old when she told her parents, “I am a boy.” They weren’t alarmed at first, but...
In 1984 the Mohawk community of Kahnawake came up with a controversial membership law that bans all “mixed race” couples from living on its Montreal-area territory. Violation of the...
The precise nature of words matters. The imprecise use of a word that has a very specific meaning can make the difference between an alleged injustice and a complete waste of newsprint and ever...
Does the Guinness Book of World Records have a category for persistence in carrying a mattress around a university campus? If they did, Emma Sulkowicz, who has just graduated from New York&rsqu...
Didn’t Mad Men end just perfectly? Yet it’s indisputably over. I’m nostalgic already. Mad Men was my formative era. The show brought so much back for me: every...
Alan Borovoy, who died this week at the age of eighty-three, was a great Canadian. As founder and long-time general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, he established himself as Ca...
Our government’s citizenship guide has for four years warned newcomers that “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousa...
Last week Nancy Drew, teen detective, celebrated her series’ 85th anniversary of continuous publication. In the 1950s, Nancy still wore demure dresses, drove a snappy blue convertible an...