2023-11-20

David Cameron returns to politics, to take up the foreign secretary portfolio from a seat in the Lords, and the Economist’s Bagehot columnist isn’t having any of it:

A man who deserted his office is now painted as an example of duty. In British politics, the appearance of competence is more important than the evidence of it. Aesthetics trump achievement. Nothing demonstrates this more than the renaissance of Mr Cameron.

The contempt is amusing, of course, but I have to confess that the real view from across the Atlantic is that of envy: no Canadian columnist, in a comparable political situation, would assume such a tone.

I spent the past few weeks taking in Martin Amis’s as yet appreciated final novel, Inside Story (2020). It’s many things—it includes some of the clearest and most thoughtful practical advice about writing, for example—but it also doesn’t have to be anything more than a story about a man who misses his friend.

Here’s a beautiful passage that I keep thinking about:

Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word), That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I'd be a part of it.

2023-11-13

“I look at you as an exquisite poet of self-hatred,” says filmmaker Errol Morris to David Cornwell (that’s John le Carré to your bookshelf), the subject of his excellent new documentary, The Pigeon Tunnel (2023). “Yeah,” laughs the subject, “I would go with that.” If you’ve seen the film, but are new to the author, you’ll enjoy Larry Wilmore’s recent podcast chat with Morris.

The current edition of the Economist has two smart pieces on government. The first, looks as prospective reform in Italy (“Italian politicians cannot resist changing the rules.”). The second, takes a deep look at why the crafting of legislation in the UK has gotten wobbly: it’s not the process, it’s the people.

2023-11-06

“In response to growing concern over Canada’s capacity to welcome more newcomers,” the Toronto Star reported last week, “the federal government says it will incorporate housing, health care and infrastructure planning with provinces and municipalities when setting the country’s annual immigration targets.”

We’re in annual performance review season so this is a great opportunity to return to the basics—like, for example, how it’s generally not ideal to volunteer that you haven’t been doing your job, by suggesting that you’re going to start doing your job.

This is either a communications blooper or a confession from a country that’s hitched both it’s economic well-being and feel-good national identity to something it hasn’t put even an idle thought toward. This is serious: failing to set those who want, or need, to come here up for success, while undermining the hard work of those who’ve come before, can only feed a populist backlash. I’m reduced to quoting, out of context, an enduring meme from the otherwise excellent animated series Archer (2009-2023): “Do you want ants? Because that’s how you get ants.”

Here’s a thoughtful definition of creativity from John Cleese’s wonderful book, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide (2020), which I re-read last week: “Wherever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative.”

2023-10-30

Here’s an observation about centrism, from Bari Weiss’s excellent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism (2019), which I read last week, and find myself still thinking about:

…in the absence of healthy centrism, many progressive politicians practice avoidance. They ignore real social tensions associated with mass immigration, unsure how to acknowledge those tensions without stoking xenophobia, alienating their perceived base, or being smeared as bigots. They downplay patriotism, afraid of stoking jingoism or of being accused of it. They ignore the need for a return to a common culture or even a set of civic values, lest they be accused of promoting cultural intolerance. […] In the absence of serious liberal answers to these significant questions, the bluntness of authoritarian populists becomes that much more seductive to the average voter, who comes to see liberals as evasive and out of touch.

There’s a third, lesser observed problem in all the tragedy of recent weeks: there are few, if any, adults in any room right now. To lift a phrase from P.J. O’Rourke, we need a cry from the far middle.

Inkoo Kang’s reflection in the New Yorker on the end of the FX series, Reservation Dogs (2021-2023), which I also finished last week and recommend, captures something I’ve been trying to describe about the network’s artistic approach for years:

The showrunner, Sterlin Harjo, who created the series with Taika Waititi, continued expanding this mosaic for the next two seasons, in a mode spearheaded by Louis C.K.’s “Louie” and brought to its apex by Donald Glover’s “Atlanta”: the formally and tonally mercurial, auteur-driven, detour-prone, impressionistic half-hour dramedy. (Call it “the FX mood piece.”) The result can be easier to admire than to get lost in.

If you’ve also finished the show, I recommend listening to Marc Bernardin’s recent thoughts on the Fatman Beyond podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, Halloween is tomorrow, and that means there’s still time to listen to the Dana Gould Hour’s annual special.

2023-10-23

Your homework this week is to read Lionel Shriver’s latest Spectator column (“Keep your politics à la carte”) and then go for a long walk. While you’re on that walk throw on Scott Galloway’s latest No Mercy / No Malice post (“Listen”) as read by George Hahn. If you should happen to come by any strangers, be nice to them.

I’m not sure what we did to deserve Maria Bamford or her recent memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere (2023). She reviews in passing, for example, a self-help book by using the framework of that self-help book against itself, and it’s not only unspeakably hilarious it also qualifies as high art.

2023-10-16

I find it endearing that the least interesting thing about Sir Patrick Stewart’s recent memoir, Making It So (2023), are the Hollywood anecdotes. His origin story, of finding an interest and then being encouraged to develop that interest to the best of his ability, should be a path offered to every youth. As he observes: “I was fortunate to grow up in a time when there was a compact between the government and the people dictating that the arts were a necessity of life, not a frivolity.”

Speaking of adults doing the right thing, you must listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger explain why he refuses to describe himself as “self-made man” on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. It’s too bad he can’t run for president. I’m serious. We’re already through the looking-glass, friends.

Speaking of podcasts, if my notes from last week about Timothy Garton Ash’s memoir, Homelands, failed to entice your curiosity, perhaps his recent chat with Paul Wells will.

2023-10-09

Book blurbs are notoriously cliché and vacuous. Here’s an exception from Mark Lilla:

We know there are Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and Poles—but are there Europeans? Yes, at least one: Timothy Garton Ash. Homelands is the brilliant, captivating story of how he became one.

I find that impossible to improve upon and all that need suffice as a review, too.

Is the United Kingdom in Europe? How much of Europe is even in Europe? As Ash notes in Homelands (2023), his recent memoir: “…European countries have a long history of existential uncertainty about their full belonging to Europe.” Europe may not be certain of itself but Ash definitely is—at least in a way that I cannot imagine an American or a Canadian attempting about their respective federations, as that would ultimately require an effort to tread and take in the whole of the place.

Here’s a stand-alone thought we ought to keep in mind: “The gamble of civilisation is that we can learn from the past without having to go through it all again ourselves.”

2023-10-02

Finally, something else to worry about:

Earth is currently thought to be in the middle of a supercontinent cycle as its present-day continents drift. The last supercontinent, Pangaea, broke apart about 200 million years ago. The next, dubbed Pangaea Ultima, is expected to form at the equator in about 250 million years, as the Atlantic Ocean shrinks and a merged Afro-Eurasian continent crashes into the Americas.

Run for your lives! Well, tell your kids—to, uh, tell their kids, to…

Anyway, this is precisely the sort of thing you expect to read in Scientific American (which is where the above paragraph is from) but not front-page news, where you no doubt saw it last week. Sure, it sounds like a problem—but one for which nature’s given us a good 250 million year head-start.

I’m going to keep saying it: it won’t be actual problems that get us in the end but our failure to focus on those actual problems. Hell, the least we could do is limit our catastrophizing to the present.

Over in the Atlantic, Tom Nichols is absolutely right about a functional opposition being an overlooked healthy necessity in politics.

Not that you need an excuse to think about the Roman Empire but, if you do, and you want to outrun your FOMO, seek out Emma Southon’s exceptional book, A Fatal Thing Happened on The Way to the Forum (2020), without delay.

2023-09-25

As I’ve said before, I admire when people change their mind and have the courage to share what led them to do so. Jeff Jarvis’s revised reflection on the death of the book in the Atlantic is not only a thoughtful essay but a dignified pivot. May we all achieve such balance with our respective multitudes.

I know it’s part of his brand but I just cannot help but be amused whenever I see John Waters command any mainstream attention. Here’s a great thought from his recent (digital) New Yorker interview (speaking of branding):

You embrace and make fun of what they use against you. That's what I did from the very beginning, calling [my movies] a "trash epic" or a "gutter film." One critic in Baltimore who hated me said, How do you beat us to the typewriter?

Over in the not-yet-linked October issue of Wired, Paul Ford has puts finger on the very subtle tension inside academia where creatives are now well-positioned to run away with the very AI tools thought to make them irrelevant at the expense of their designers:

When stuff gets out of hand, we don’t open disciplinary borders. We craft new disciplines: digital humanities, human geography, and yes, computer science (note that “science” glued to the end, to differentiate it from mere “engineering”). In time, these great new territories get their own boundaries, their own defenders. The interdisciplinarian is essentially an exile. Someone who respects no borders enjoys no citizenship.

Unless, of course, there are no longer any borders.

2023-09-18

Walter Issacson’s recently released biography of Elon Musk will no doubt sell well, but I wonder how many potential readers will be deterred by, say, subject fatigue. I have decided, for example, to limit my interest to Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review, a hilarious experiment in both articulate exasperation and restraint. Cheap shots these are not:

Biographers don’t generally have a will to power. Robert Caro is not Robert Moses and would seem to have very little in common with Lyndon the "B" is for "bastard" Johnson. Walter Isaacson is a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer. […] Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster!

The New Yorker also reminds us that Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad arrives next week. If you’re curious why that’s noteworthy, seek out the first sentence of her (already published) translation of the Odyssey.

Novels rarely offer an eloquent summary of their own premise, so it’s important to appreciate it when they do, like this passage from Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (2022):

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safe-guarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

I’m still thinking about this throwaway line from Marc Maron, during his WTF podcast interview with Hannah Einbinder: “The idea, that the right accuses us, of having some sort of organized agenda, is hilarious—because we cannot (sort of) come together on almost anything—and most progressive activism is neutered because of class. There: I said it.”

More people should say it. Though, every time I offer a friend or colleague a version of this, I am immediately treated to a remedial argument—as though argument, specifically winning the argument, were the key to moving the proverbial political ball forward and not part of the problem.

2023-09-11

Best wishes to the prime minister who, as Paul Wells noted late last week, in addition to being stranded in India waiting on replacement parts for his plane, is also trapped in a metaphor.

Every year I read the Massey Lecture, the book version of the national public lecture series founded in 1961. I think it’s important to celebrate scholarship that’s not limited to ivory towers or hidden behind ivy paywalls.

This year’s topic (and title) is The Age of Insecurity—and, while I generally agree that we’re anxious at a civilizational level (my wording), I am ultimately not persuaded that what ails us is the singular fault of a particular economic system. Here’s my rule: if “law of the jungle” can be effectively substituted for capitalism, it’s a reflexive argument that you’ve likely grown tired of hearing. Incidentally, the same rule holds for “in a kindergarten classroom” and socialism.

Anyway, don’t let that discourage you from enjoying it—or any of the other lectures that have come before. It’s important to defend institutions, even—especially—when you don’t always agree.

Speaking of making a correct diagnosis, the Spectator’s Kate Andrews, in an excellent effort to retrace the route the Tories took to paint themselves into their present corner, actually gets to the root of why everyone is anxious and everything feels broken:

…Rishi Sunak now must explain why, 13 years on, schools are unsafe, nothing gets built, and the country’s major institutions all seem to teeter on the brink of collapse. Because that’s what happens when short-term political decisions pile up: lots of money is spent, nothing much happens.

In other words: it’s the software not the hardware. If it were the hardware, we couldn’t have build these things in the first place. We’ve either forgotten how to operate them, lost the will, or need to reconsider our leadership criteria.

Questlove’s recent appearance on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is pure joy.

So far, I’ve only seen a few tributes to Peter C. Newman, who died last week, but I hope the trend continues. If anyone deserves a long-form journalistic fête, it’s him.

2023-09-04

September arrives with typically selective self-importance. Yes, we need to catch up. No, not all of us have been away. But for a few who mistake loudness for leadership, the awkwardness stems mostly from the fact that it’s the unacknowledged new year.

For downtown Toronto, it also brings the Canadian National Exhibition’s Air Show: a pageant of rare skill, no doubt, but also insensitivity and ingratitude. Maybe let’s not buzz refugees with fighter jets, in their already precarious accommodations, or take for granted that we’re fortunate such sounds are not part of our life over here. “I love you,” says the patriarch from the series Succession to his halfwitted would-be heirs in the final season, “but you’re not serious people.”

While we’re on the subject of seriousness, let’s appreciate the lead editorial in the Spectator for both self-awareness and ownership:

In her memoirs, to be published on 14 September, Theresa May cites the net zero commitment as one of the achievements she would most like to be remembered for. This sums up the problem of the modern Tory party. Anyone can set a target without first working out how to get there, or how much it will cost. But to do that is the epitome of the vain, unserious politics that May takes aim at in her book. May's outlook is sadly bereft of any sense of what conservatism is–or should be.

This problem is not exclusive to conservatism, though; it may as well be the spirit of the age.

Here’s the best sentence that I read all week (which is just as excellent in context as it is here all by itself): “The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.” It comes from David Sedaris, in an essay entitled, “A Speech to the Graduates,” from his most recent collection, Happy-Go-Lucky (2022).

2023-08-28

Perhaps the most compelling thing about Ronan Farrow’s recent New Yorker profile is that he’s got his subject dead to rights: “[Elon] Musk isn't peddling pabulum. His initiatives have real substance. But he also wants to be on the show–or, better yet, to be the show himself.”

That’s the trouble with problems: it’s often less the problem itself—that is, the classic struggle between capability and complexity—that needs solving as such, and more the navigation of someone who needs to make the solution about them—or, failing that, at least prevent it from being about someone else. This, my fellow humans, is why we cannot have nice things.

I have just finished Deborah Levy’s remarkable “living autobiography” trilogy, on the advice of a friend (I certainly do not want for exceptional recommendations). Here’s an excerpt from the end of the final volume, Real Estate (2021), that captures the spirit of the entire endeavour:

I supposed that my literary purpose was to think freely, or rather for the books to speak freely on my behalf. If this sounds easy and obvious, it is not easy, not on the page or in life. Some people feel crazy when they try to deal with two contradictory thoughts at the same time, as if they fear they have done something wrong and need to purge the intruding thought before it muddies the water.

The dust jacket to the first volume positions it as a response to Orwell’s famous “Why I Write” essay but I think that undersells it. Writing about writing is notoriously tedious but thinking and speaking freely in any form is not easy and certainly brave. It reminded me of Zadie Smith’s forward to her own pandemic essay collection, Intimations (2020): “Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”

2023-08-21

To paraphrase a famously tedious philosophical question (I leave it to you, dear reader, to determine whether any of that is redundant): if a federal cabinet minister puts their foot in their mouth, figuratively speaking, in the middle of August, does it still matter, even if there’s no one around to notice?

Here’s a real example from Canadian Press last week:

OTTAWA - Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says Canada has been considering a “game plan” for how it would respond if the United States takes a far-right, authoritarian shift after next year's presidential elections. “We are certainly working on scenarios,” Joly said in French during an interview with a Montreal radio station Wednesday.

I can think of six issues at first pass:

1. Since the United States of America made the downpayment on the defence of modern democracy in the middle of the last century (which, for the record, still checks my “what have you done for us, lately?” box), we ought to at least grant them the benefit of the doubt until they concretely demonstrate otherwise.

2. Canada’s official diplomatic position on American politics should remain Churchillian at all times—that is, we may not like the route or the means but they do always get there in the end.

3. Not that it’s any of our business, mind. Canada has made absolutely no effort to establish the sort of diplomatic relationship with America that could support this kind of glib public comment. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself how we’d react if the Secretary of State alluded to some sort of “game plan” should the NDP happen to form government and make dental care too affordable.

4. Here’s the big one: Any fundamental change in American constitutional practice, order, and values would, like an earthquake, shake the world and would, like an earthquake, reduce even the most sophisticated “game plan” to a single option: bracing for impact.

5. Canada gets a free ride on continental defence and won’t even commit to meeting the minimum NATO defence spending requirement—so, we could easily imagine a brave member of the press gallery putting this down by asking Minister Joly here, with all due respect, you and what army?

6. This is almost parody—specifically, for example, of an early episode of the West Wing where the deputy chief of staff, filling in for the press secretary, blunders into suggesting there’s a “secret plan to fight inflation” by being a little too glib and loose at the mic.

One’s relationship to their government often mimics the mutual fear parents and children reserve for one another: sometimes they embarrass you. Fortunately, it’s the middle of August and no one noticed.

2023-08-14

I am grateful to a friend for recommending Timothy Snyder’s recent Yale lecture series, “The Making of Modern Ukraine” (2022), because it embodies precisely the type of boundless curiosity and command of context that led me to study history. Here’s a fabulous example from the preamble to the second class:

…when we’re thinking about this social form of the nation, what makes it particularly tricky is that the nation, once it exists, lays claim to the past. So the nation didn’t always exist but once it comes into existence, it tells a story about the past and the story that the nation tells about the past is wrong. That’s the short version. It tells a story which clears out the past and that story calls itself history. Although it’s not really history, it calls itself history.

We forget, for all of our recent tribalism, that the record not only includes what happened but also attempts to tamper or meddle with the record. We also forget, as a culture now obsessed with keeping score, the value of being able to navigate such context. It is so conspicuously absent from our present discourse that it often feels to me as though we’re on the cusp of inventing it.

Comedian Pete Holmes’s You Made It Weird podcast is consistently one of the more thoughtful ways you can spend a few hours. Last week, he sat down with one of my favourite television creators, Bill Lawrence.

2023-08-07

Here’s an extraordinary passage from Steven Wright’s recent novel Harold (2023):

From his conversations with his grandfather and comments he made he learned that being in love with someone was a very tricky thing and was like gambling with the idea of yourself. It was a package deal of positive and negative emotions—a pendulum festival—like being served a birthday cake that might have poison in it.

Yes, that Steven Wright. I can’t recall if Conan O’Brien made a comparison to Vonnegut, during their recent podcast chat (which is where I heard about the book), but I’m sure he would have observed as much eventually because there is a remarkable (unforced) likeness.

No one likes a critic, the Economist noted last week, but they do provide a service to readers and we should all “mourn the death of the hatchet job.” I think we’re plenty cruel to one another all the same but it’s curious to see an argument like this that does not mention participation trophies and a general preference for comfort over curiosity (which has, in part, fuelled the decline in readers). As for criticism, let’s honour Martin Amis’s call to arms about cliché and dispraise in direct proportion to laziness.

2023-07-31

Here is the week that was, care of the Economist, in a single sentence: “Twitter is now officially called X, though everyone still calls it Twitter.”

It was never the worst social network—that honour is held by LinkedIn, for its fad-ridden credentialism and performative revenge fantasies (seriously, if you only did that thing to show up your grade school teacher she wins because you’re still talking about her)—but it did occupy far more space than it ever deserved. The site’s new management have gone ahead and solved that problem for us.

Speaking of the Economist, it’s heartening to see someone take Ottawa to task for their indifference to NATO’s benchmark defence spending requirement. Any country that prides itself on internationalism, like Canada, would do well to make sure it’s not a would-be burden on its allies, in any event from disaster relief to military deterrence, to say nothing of being able to help those in need.

Here’s a remarkable sentence from Fredrik Erixon’s latest column in the Spectator: “Nationalism is not a conservative creed: just as George Orwell observed, it’s inseparable from the hunger for state power.”

2023-07-24

Opinion polling is out of hand. Ask the wrong question and you get the wrong answer. Worse, ask an irrelevant question and you draw focus from the core issue and set the wrong expectations.

Last week, MSNBC cited a negative poll about the Supreme Court—the top of a federal branch of government, firmly ensconced in the separation of powers, and appointed for life. It’s fine to take an opinion on their opinions but any desired change will require going to the source of the problem. You know, I’m starting to think we just like complaining.

I think Stephen King is right, that all writing is essentially telepathy, and I’m consistently amazed at how Jill Lepore always makes her first paragraph feel like you’re already in deep conversation—her latest in the New Yorker is no exception.

Finishing The Power Broker (1974) by Robert Caro is like concluding jury duty. After all, it’s effectively a legal case prosecuted by a journalist using a historian’s toolkit. There’s just nothing like it. If you do jump in, make sure it’s with both feet—and, remember, the only way out is through.

Oppenheimer (2023) confirmed what I felt about Hamilton (2020)—namely, that any subject, however complex, can be relayed to a mass audience, if done deliberately.

2023-07-17

“There is a real chance of [the Liberal Party of Canada] forming a government next time,” writes Andrew Coyne in a recent Globe and Mail column, “even if they don’t win the most seats: finishing behind the Conservatives, that is, not only in the popular vote, but also in seats won.”

Coyne sees this as a potential legitimacy crisis. I share the concern—the next election could play out entirely as he foresees here—but I can’t help but see any discussion about legitimacy that does not also make an effort to reset expectations more generally as a missed opportunity.

Here’s two points about legitimacy that I’d like to see the media do a better job of qualifying for Canadians before the next election:

First, there is no popular vote in Canada. We do not practice direct democracy. Just because we can aggregate the total number of votes per party across the country does not mean that number played a role in determining the overall outcome, nor does that number affirm any sort of national mood and therefore mandate.

Second, legitimacy is maintained by whomever holds the confidence of the House—and, yes, that can include a party who wins fewer seats than another. That may not feel legitimate but it is until the House says otherwise. If a party calls legitimacy itself into question (and perhaps also provokes the Governor-General into intervening) that party can be held to account by voters during the next election.

The concept of legitimacy exists to forestall crises. If we remind ourselves that both rules and recourse exist for a reason, we can reset the bar on what actually qualifies as a crisis and therefore deserves our attention outside of an election.

2023-07-10

I finished Netflix’s relatively new political drama, The Diplomat (2023-), last week. The cast and writing are both excellent but I can get my take it or leave it recommendation down to five simple words: Michael McKean plays the president.

More than a few people mentioned the show to me but none mentioned that. Worse, some suggested it’s like The West Wing (it isn’t) without bothering to point out the glaringly obvious connection (and no, it’s not context). It made me wonder whether, given the overwhelming volume of content available in any medium, the basis of or our recommendations to one another now proceed less from critical taste (or even novelty) and more from a more general need to relate.

That is, you see the thing to see the thing, not to learn, grow, or be challenged. If that’s the case, we’ve become nothing more than extensions of the algorithm.

I think recommendations should aim for two things. First, they should only ever be offered in a take it or leave it way (otherwise, your over-investment makes the other person feel like you’ve assigned homework). Second, they should be concise but relevant. Don’t tell me it’s good, tell me why it’s good. Don’t tell me what it’s like, tell me what it does differently. And, if there’s an inspired choice, in the casting for example, maybe lead with that.

If you read one thing this week, make it Kai Bird’s piece on J. Robert Oppenheimer in the New Yorker. Here’s why:

In 1954, America’s most celebrated scientist was falsely accused and publicly humiliated, sending a warning to all scientists not to engage in the political arena as public intellectuals. This was the real tragedy of the Oppenheimer case. What happened to him damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory—the very foundation of our modern world.