The Toronto Star reported last week that 40 percent of municipal voters prefer the now-former mayor in the now-forthcoming byelection to replace him on 26 June.

Lest that sound significant, note that said former mayor is not a candidate and that voter turnout in the last election was 29 percent. Living here is pleasant, provided you’re willing to endure vague layers of abstraction that no one wants to talk about.

The most remarkable thing I read all week was Katy Balls’s Spectator feature about the quiet but comprehensive reorganization of the UK Labour Party (“The Starmtroopers: how Labour’s centrists took back control”)—not least of which because it feels outright impossible, for all the entrenchment, in any other context.

Richard Russo’s exceptional novel, Straight Man (1997), is a gentle sendup of academia through “the lens” (to pile on) of a bitterly divided English Literature department (that’s redundant—to pile on, again). It’s also the source material for the new AMC+ television series, Lucky Hank. I re-read the book last week ahead of diving into the series, which concludes this week.

I am generally agnostic about adaptations. First, they are as likely to disappoint as they are to further appreciation of the source material. Second, they cannot, despite what nostalgic literalists will tell you, actually threaten the source material. With any luck, interest in one raises interest in another.

Straight Man is not a polemic, the following is a throwaway observation, but I thought, since it’s aged extremely well, it offers an ideal “I’ll just leave this here” opportunity (and to also pile one last time):

Students…have learned from their professors that persuasion—reasoned argument—no longer holds a favored position in university life. If their professors—feminists, Marxists, historicists, other assorted theorists—belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.