Last week, I got up early to go for a bicycle ride before heading into work. I tricked myself out in the appropriate number of insulating layers; it’s cold enough now that the wind chill provided by nature combined with the one I create myself can quickly become discouraging. I am generally quite sensible (about…
Month: October 2014
The problem with strategic voting
Two weeks from today, Toronto will elect a new mayor. The leading candidates appear to be, in alphabetical order, Olivia Chow, Doug Ford, and John Tory. Ari Goldkind appears to be coming in at a distant fourth. I’m using the word “appear” intentionally here. We’re inundated with polls daily; sometimes polls proclaiming quite different results…
The Middlemarch effect: Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies
I knew halfway through Middlemarch that whatever book I read next was utterly doomed. Eliot’s novel is too fine, too well-written, too mature (as Woolf so succinctly said, it’s “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”); whatever followed it would come off as shabby, awkward, and half-formed. And it was; I chose a Neal…
Nothing says “I love you” like canned peas cooked in the kettle
The first person ever to take me on a date was my Nana. We hit the all classy joints together, like Ponderosa and Kentucky Fried Chicken, in the town where I grew up. But the local Chinese restaurant was my favourite. It had those plastic, yet also somehow extremely plush, booths so integral to a…
Jam and Idleness 
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