Canada shares a birthday with its greatest achievement: Elections Canada.

In our constant catastrophizing about the death of democracy, and in our flippant dismissal of our electoral system—either because we haven’t made an effort to understand how it works or because we resent it for not helping our team (and only our team) win—we ignore what our civic institutions get right.

Here’s the institution in its own words:

While countries like Australia had a Chief Electoral Officer before 1920, Canada was the first to make the position independent from government. This makes Elections Canada one of the world's first independent election agencies.

We have the most effective electoral process in the world—which must be where we find all that time to argue about such trivial matters and the comfort to breed the arrogance that encourages some of us to claim the system is broken.

In the Guardian, Steven Poole reminds us that it’s been a decade since the death of author Iain Banks, and offers newcomers a few suggestions about where to start. Let’s have more of this—though, keep in mind, in a broader sense, that the right place to start with Banks or anyone else remains: anywhere.

You know Banks’s science fiction even if you haven’t read him. People who turn their nose up at the genre puzzle me: after all, who did they think was writing the future?