2024-06-10

This past Thursday marked the eightieth anniversary of D-Day—what we have since come to know as the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe but, at the time, far from a foregone conclusion. Remember, it is possible to reflect on that sacrifice, and the world we’ve been able to make for it, without also being a hawk or even having an interest in military history.

To repeat: Do not let your boss make a potentially career-ending announcement alone in the pouring raining—and, definitely do not let him leave the Normandy anniversary service early. There will be no coming back from that “he left them on the beaches” campaign advert.

Wesley Wark is right to call the recent allegations about Canadian politicians what they are. The problem now, aside from affirming the validity of the intelligence (never a given) and the subsequent prosecution of any crimes committed, is for parliament to safeguard its own institutional integrity.

The more I think about it, the only comprehensive and conclusive way to do that is this: the government must resign, form a unity coalition with all parties, exclude any member named in the report, investigate fully and transparently, formally expel any member eligible for prosecution, establish a bipartisan framework for the next parliament to manage such issues effectively, and then call a general election.

It’ll never happen but it’s the right thing to do.

Farewell to astronaut Bill Anders, he of the eternally humbling 1968 “earthrise” photograph.

2024-06-03

We would benefit from something of a Hippocratic Oath for institutional reform—that is, where one may freely prescribe a remedy, one should not do so at the risk of damaging the faith in, or function of, any given institution.

Consider this recent example, from the Globe and Mail, about potential conflict between the Senate of Canada and the next presumptive government:

There is simply no basis in a democratic society for a group of 53 or more senators to be substituting their views for that of elected MPs, and the millions of Canadians they represent. It’s wrong when Liberals do it to Conservative governments, and it’s wrong when Conservatives do it to Liberals. It may be legal, but it is not legitimate.

Senators draw their legitimacy, apart from the chamber’s general role in regional representation, from appointment on the advice of the prime minister—a similarly unelected position which, in turn, draws its own legitimacy from the House of Commons. Our institutional framework is functional and quite elegant, even if it does not lend well to expedient punditry.

We can openly debate the merits of populating the Senate by other means, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of questioning the validity of the institution itself. Let me invoke the national past-time to make my point: if we grew frustrated with the way that certain hockey players behaved, or the way that the league enforced the rules, would we address those issues accordingly and specifically, or would we question whether the game itself had merit and was worth our time?

There’s a deeper issue here we should also consider. The so-called “Marvel Method” holds that because any given comic could be someone’s first, it should therefore organize itself around conveying essential principles first and foremost. Similarly, since any given political conversation could be someone’s first, and therefore a bridge to participation and developing an interest in our traditions, we ought to strive for decorum over cynicism.

While we’re on the subject, let me also observe a fundamental law of Canadian political punditry: any critique of the Senate, however well-intentioned, is almost always indicative of conversational bankruptcy or exhaustion. Welcome to summer.

I recently finished Lydia Millet’s “anti-memoir” (so sayeth the marketing copy on the dust jacket), We Loved It All (2024). I have always admired her sense of economy, but seeing her usual voice at home in non-fiction made me appreciate just how much it persists in commanding attention, and with ease, in a world where such spans continue to decline. Here’s an example that will haunt you:

Wisdom is harder to define than knowledge is—more qualitative, less quantitative—but broadly might be seen as consistency, over time, of sound judgement. Informed by morality, spirituality, and aesthetics. In the case study of nuclear weapons, for instance, it’s fair to say that, while it was the shared knowledge and industry of a massive group of scientists that brought us the most destructive munitions ever made, it’s only wisdom, along with some fear and some luck, that has kept us—so far—from the annihilation of a nuclear exchange. But luck, like hope, is not a plan.

I was similarly enthralled by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s memoir, A Man of Two Faces (2023), a vulnerable yet graceful personal navigation in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous “test of a first-rate intelligence” quote. The thought below, alone, has changed how I understand memory and will navigate my own relationship with it in future:

Through the windows of my sandcastle of memory, I can hear the ocean of amnesia, perpetual, invincible.

2024-05-27

The best quote from last week has to belong to the anonymous former minister cited in Katy Balls’s Spectator feature on the UK prime minister’s surprise election call:

How are we supposed to trust No. 10’s judgement when no one in the group even knows what an umbrella is?

Do not let your boss make a potentially career-ending announcement alone in the pouring rain—never mind what you think of him. The electorate know an omen when they see one. Over in the Economist, Bagehot reviews the prime minister’s penchant for making similarly, say, unique, decisions.

Keeping with the decision-making theme, but moving back home, Andrew Lawton joined Paul Wells for a podcast chat about the subject of his forthcoming book, the man who wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, and it convinced me that this is the only competency we should be focused on going into our own election.

Speaking of lost focus, let us admire Adam Gopnik for his persistent defence of liberalism (here, once again, in his latest New Yorker piece):

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that "share values"—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman's axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently.

When whatever alternative we’re currently flirting with ends in ruin, it will be necessary to reinvent liberalism—less, though, from scratch, for his effort.

2024-05-20

Between product managers and the users that they represent are often a vocal group of independent super-users who formally share their own direct experiences. Ideally, such reviewers value functionality over hype and cannot hide when they dislike something. Last week, Kara Swisher used her personal podcast to bring two of these well-known reviewers together to discuss their shared but solitary art (and meet for the first time): her mentor, Walt Mossberg, and YouTube’s Marques Brownlee.

Perhaps I am betraying the deep degree of my own cynicism in this, our era of algorithmic short-form video, but I was genuinely shocked to see cable news break from their regularly scheduled programming last week to announce the passing of a national writer—especially one synonymous with the short story. I assume literary Canada is taking the time to collect its thoughts because, so far, the only one to offer anything more than perfunctory on the passing of Alice Munro has been Lorrie Moore in the Atlantic.

I am listening to 99% Invisible’s podcast book club of The Power Broker (1974), but have to say that it would be a lot more enjoyable if they made an effort to ensure that every guest had actually finished the book. Counting from episode five, and discounting the author’s appearance on the first episode himself, it’s about half.

2024-05-13

What I admire most about Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation (2024), is that it not only presents a problem, but also spends a significant amount of time recommending a solution. We have let this skill atrophy in our culture. With news as entertainment, engagement comes down to cheering for your side, and we’re typically reduced to complaint. That’s why the kids think everything sucks.

Well, one reason anyway. Here’s another:

Every generation grows up during a disaster or under the threat of an impending disaster, from the Great Depression and World War II through threats of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and ruinous national debt. People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. As I’ll show in later chapters, this is what the Great Rewiring did to Gen Z.

The Spectator’s latest editorial is about the looming UK election, but this line made me rethink how we understand polarization:

The lack of any serious clash of ideals between the main parties has allowed a lazy consensus to thrive, with inevitable results, including economic stagnation and mounting bills.

That is, if the parties are the same, then our tribalism is trivial, and does not rise from some grand ideological rift that we have to either repair or make peace with. There’s hope in that.

I haven’t seen anyone make this comment about the passing of Rex Murphy yet so I’ll include it here for posterity: It’s not about whether you enjoyed his work, or even agreed with him, it’s that we’ve lost the clear voice of someone who understood the country and could speak to how it ought to better become itself.

2024-05-06

Last week brought us a multi-campus lecture series from those who ought to be more occupied with attending them than giving them, PEN America putting the author in authoritarianism, and the man who wants Canadians to call him prime minister ejected from the body he wants to preside over for petty name-calling.

Let’s all review John Perry Barlow’s “25 Principles of Adult Behaviour,” shall we?

On behalf of product managers everywhere, let me express my gratitude to Apoorva Mishra for her recent article in HBR, “The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager,” in which she takes predatory influencers to task for setting up aspirants for failure and degrading the practice more generally.

2024-04-29

This is the first sensible thing that anyone’s said about Canada’s evident economic rut, largely because it does not reek of ambivalent defeatism: “Canada is not broken,” reads a recent guest editorial in the Toronto Star, it’s just “…failing to live up to it’s potential.”

Here’s a serious question from Bill Maher’s Real Time editorial on Friday, that anyone who consumes a high-volume of short-form video on social media should ask themselves: “…is the most important thing in my life something I hadn’t even heard about six months ago?”

Lastly, and not to be too topical, but I’d like to point out that calling a poet “tortured” is the height of redundancy. It’s like saying “track record” in reference to one’s consistency of achievement that does not literally involve track-and-field.

2024-04-22

This is the first time that I have been directly pandered to in a federal budget, and I must confess, that I can see at long last how one could come to take it for granted.

The counterintuitive truism of good governance, that displeasing everyone is a good indicator of having put the right foot forward, perhaps explains the mixed punditry.

Not to defend the government, I honestly can’t tell most of the time whether they maintain confidence of themselves to say nothing of the House, but I could do with hearing less from those who have been ambivalently navigating us to ruin all these years suddenly deciding take issue with their own complacency now.

If Andrew Cohen was right in While Canada Slept (2003), and I think most would now concede that he was, then those who have been comfortably asleep at the wheel can at least relax: all of this is now someone else’s problem.

We’ll handle it. You can go.

The best thing I heard all week belongs to gentleman historian Jon Meacham from his Friday appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher: “…patriotism is allegiance to an idea. It’s not just an allegiance to your own kind. That’s nationalism.”

2024-04-15

While the prospect of the looming US presidential election being anything other than a rematch is remote, and any discussion to the contrary a defeatist fantasy, I can’t help but read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, about LBJ and his legacy (i.e. decision not to run again), in a cheeky “I’ll just leave this here” tone:

One newspaper editorial after another applauded the president’s renunciation. interpreting it as “a magnificent display of patriotism,” “putting principle above personal ambition,” “a stirring, galvanic example of answering JFK’s question: ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” and “his most stunning move in a 37-year career in politics.”

2024-04-01

Here’s a throwaway line from Robert Heinlein’s ambitious but runaway novel, Time Enough for Love (1973), that should capture the current mood, as we start a new week, a new month, a new quarter, and a new season:

Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun—and neither can stop the march of events.

2024-03-25

Do read Matt McDonald on TikTok in the Spectator, Molly Fischer’s profile of Quinta Brunson in the New Yorker, and the Economist’s Bagehot columnist on the veritable pandora’s box of potential parliamentary power available to the UK’s presumptive government in waiting.

The latter, incidentally, includes the best sentence that I read all week: “The principal check on the Tory government has been its own dysfunction: it has been too divided to put the powers it accumulated to effective use.”

2024-03-18

What if the polarization in our politics were driven not so much by tribalism but by perfectionism crowding out pragmatism? Think about it: when is the last time you heard a political position that focused on an actual problem without recourse to comparison or some ideal?

That is, the apparent solution to any given problem isn’t that we need to take these x-number of steps to achieve such-and-such a target, but that, say, so-and-so should have resigned before we lost the majority, or we wish that particular leader hadn’t won, or that the proposed legislation isn’t a complete and total victory—so forget it.

Is it tribalism what ails us or that we spend too much time wishing things were always otherwise? Here’s a clear and present example from the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols (“It’s Time to End the Election Wishcasting”):

…for months now, many voters, including both Democrats and dissident Republicans, have engaged in childlike wishcasting about how the 2024 election might be different.

To paraphrase an unpopular former defence minister: you have to solve the problems you’ve been handed, as you’ve been handed them, not the problems that you wish you’d been handed.

2024-03-11

I’ve been hoping someone might offer a clear thought about why the blind reverence for failure in tech has always felt so deeply suspicious. Here’s Kara Swisher, from her recent Burn Book (2024), an otherwise excellent personal and industry history:

I have never seen a more powerful and rich group of people who saw themselves as the victim so intensely. Which is why, by nature, they insisted on reframing every failure and mistake they made as an asset—even when it was a failure and, sometimes, a very damaging mistake. Of course, they loved quoting Edison’s quaint trope: “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” But this declaration leaves out a lot about who’s responsible when things go terribly awry and real people get hurt.

2024-03-04

Here’s an extraordinary passage from Martin MacInnes’s exceptional and recent novel, In Ascension (2023), that hopefully moves you to pay it the time it deserves:

So many times I had identified errors — in my work and in my relationships — stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there. I noticed this as I got older. Age was, among so many other things, the realisation that you couldn’t correct this, that the pursuit wasn’t meaningful, there was no perfect clean reality on either side. You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors — seeing perfectly and objectively — is neither desirable nor possible.

Wisdom often gets by on a quip or a rhyme—an inwardly revolving cute and all too neat parable—but this, this is a complete thought. It’s devastating—and, it’s true.

2024-02-26

Here’s a remarkable passage from David Guterson’s novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994):

He had indeed achieved a kind of wisdom—if you wanted to call it that—though at the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world. Anyway, the kind of wisdom younger people sought from old age was not to be acquired in this life no matter how many years they lived. He wished he could tell them this without inviting their mockery or pity.

2024-02-19

Welcome back to the Daily Show, Mr. Stewart. Meet met at camera three, everyone, and let’s make a point of taking this, from his first show, to heart:

I’ve learned one thing over these last nine years. And, I was glib at best, and probably dismissive at worst, about this: The work of making this world resemble the one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail fucking job, day in and day out… So, the good news is, I’m not saying you don’t have to worry about who wins the election. I’m saying you have to worry about every day before it, and every day after, forever.

2024-02-12

The Economist reports on a new research paper highlighting the negative productivity feedback loop between private enterprise and the ivory tower:

Why do companies struggle to use ideas produced by universities? The loss of the corporate lab is one part of the answer. […] That cross-cutting expertise is now largely gone. Another part of the answer concerns universities. Free from the demands of corporate overlords, research focuses more on satisfying geeks’ curiosity or boosting citation counts than it does on finding breakthroughs that will change the world or make money. In moderation, research for research’s sake is no bad thing; some breakthrough technologies, such as penicillin, were discovered almost by accident. But if everyone is arguing over how many angels dance on the head of a pin, the economy suffers.

While we’re on campus, here’s Adam Kotsko in Slate on his students’ increasing struggle to engage with even a moderate volume of weekly reading:

Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

And, from Katy Balls’s latest Spectator dispatch about the omnishambles leadership change-curious Tory caucus, here’s the funniest paragraph that I read all week:

To many watching, the whole thing looks very amateurish. ‘If you are working on a plot, you don’t go around telling everyone,’ ventures a Conservative insider. ‘That’s plotting 101.’ Some former party strategists have been approached and said no. Tory MPs – including many Trussites – are making it known they aren’t on board with the plan. But the plotters think time could change that.

2024-02-05

The more that I think about a recent Globe and Mail editorial (“Dear Liberals: It’s never too late to start governing”), and it is difficult not to think about it, for the flood of pre-campaign announcements in the past few weeks, the more I find myself inclined to disagree: actually, it is too late to start governing.

That is, not for the government to save itself—rather, that it’s bad enough for citizens to become cynical about their political process, but the government needs to at least maintain the pretence that it’s operating full-time and doing more than simply hoarding up transactional giveaways right before election day.

I don’t care what your polling says, build a narrative of competence by solving one problem at a time. That’s the way to deliver and win.

2024-01-29

Here’s a lesson on the perils of reflexive reform, in the American federal context, from the Economist’s Lexington columnist last week:

But in taking power from the party establishment [after 1968], reformers unintentionally handed it to activists, who tend to be more extreme than other partisans, let alone the rest of the country. This is particularly true of the Republican Party. Now, relatively small numbers of impassioned voters can end up choosing nominees.

Say what you will about smoke-filled backrooms of party elites and insiders, they’re not much for a circus.

I was surprised to see a profile of Iain M. Banks’s recently published posthumous collection, The Culture: The Drawings (2023), which I was recently gifted, in the Wall Street Journal of all places. It’s nice to see him enjoy continued appreciation.

Speaking of continued appreciation, farewell to Peter H. Russell, Canada’s ranking public constitutional adult-in-the-room. It’s a challenge to imagine the road ahead this year without his reasonable voice.