For all of the punditry about the federal government’s brand pivot this week, I think Stephen Maher’s Toronto Star piece most accurately captures where we’re headed:

Progressives should brace themselves for more disappointment, because the election ahead may be won by whoever can get closest to the middle of Canadian political sentiment, setting aside the activism and polarization of the Trudeau years for a government that moves to consensus positions on contentious files and focuses on threats to Canadian sovereignty.

There’s two thoughtful and hilarious pieces on Canada in the Atlantic this week: Eliot A. Cohen’s history of American invasion attempts and Chris Jones’s profile of Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Calling it here and now: leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada will be his for the asking if the party loses the looming election.

I am a week late to Namwali Serpell’s excellent New Yorker piece about literalism and, while her focus is movies, I wonder how much this actually speaks to a broader cultural trend:

It's hard to say which came first: our so-called media illiteracy or the dumbing down of the media. Complaints about our inability to read, interpret, or discern irony, subtlety, and nuance are as old as art. What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically. This strikes me as a blatant redefinition of art itself.

The world is changing and rapidly. Few are keeping up as well as Brendan O’Neill and Frank Furedi in their recent Spiked podcast chat.