Here’s a complete thought from Nikhil Krishnan’s New Yorker review of Rebecca Lemov’s recent book, The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion (2025):

It's a familiar pattern in our polarized age. The right accuses the left of using the institutions it dominates—the federal bureaucracy, nonprofits, universities, Hollywood, and “legacy” media—to brainwash the public. The left, in turn, levels the same charge against the right, pointing to talk radio, partisan television networks, and manosphere podcasts. (Each side condemns the other’s social-media activity.) Naturally, no one admits to doing what they denounce in their opponents. But that’s to be expected: persuasion is what we do; brainwashing is what they do.

Talking past each other is one thing, but I could do without the condescension.

If you can’t quite bring yourself to concede Jim Balsillie’s point below, from a recent guest piece in the Globe and Mail, then hopefully you can at least agree that policy monoculture, in any form, is a bad thing:

Canada’s economy is in structural decline because our traditional policy community is composed exclusively of people with expertise like Mr. Carney’s. Their economic strategies have repeatedly failed to shift Canada into a place where our highly educated work force, and our investments in R&D can generate higher value-added outcomes across all sectors and industries. They are unable to support Canadian companies that produce high-margin goods and services that drive better pavcheques.

There are few actual problems for which cheering “go, team” are a solution.

Canadians and Americans should commit to the kind of relationship we both deserve per Peggy Noonan’s recent Wall Street Journal column, once the present tension relents, rather than only formally talking to each other at inflection points.

The publication date might be a punchline, but Justin Ling’s recent Toronto Star piece about the Arctic sure isn’t.