If we can slag organizations when they fail us, surely we can thank them when they go out of their way to help us. And this summer, both the Weston Family Foundation and the National Bank of Canada helped Canadian literature and Canadian women in big ways and just in time.

For 20 years, the Giller Prize was the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Riding the bank's rising commitment, the Giller became one of the best sponsorships in the land. Its purse grew from $25,000 to $100,000, its televised Gala became CanLit's one big night, and a middle-sized fiction award became Canada's richest literary award. Indeed, The Giller Effect boosted book sales for all the prize's nominees.

Then in the Fall of 2023, authors and jurors began withdrawing over Scotiabank's stake in an Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems. One author, Madeleine Thien, returned her prize from 2016, though not her $100,000 prize money.

I wrote about this a lot back then, saying the only certainty from the protests was that sponsors would leave and the Giller would go dark, hurting the very books and authors it was set up to celebrate. Talk about Ready, Fire, Aim. So, to no one's surprise, in September, 2024, the bank's name came off the prize and early last year the partnership formally ended. And who could blame Scotiabank, or any other bank or organization that stepped in to take its place, knowing their reward was to be punched, kicked and reviled in the public square?

Last summer, the Giller was asking Ottawa for $5 million over three years. They warned that "without stable funding, the Giller will be forced to cease operations at the end of 2025."

Then last week, the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation announced a $4 million gift to the Giller to expand its programming and open the award to new voices. As always since 1994 when Jack Rabinovitch founded the Giller, the 2026 longlist and shortlist will be announced in the Fall with the award ceremony in Toronto on November 16.

When it comes to supporting literature in Canada, the Westons not only came to play, they came to stay. Last year, they announced multi-million dollar support to the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and in 2024 they added the $75,000 annual Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction to the millions they've given the Writers' Trust of Canada since 2011.

There are two parts of the Giller story that aren't as well known.

First, the Giller never got any support from Ottawa. For more than 20 years, the Canadian Book Fund has been frozen at $39 million. The publishing community was in no mood to see a private and, in their mind, privilege-drenched prize skip the queue. Second, last year's Giller only happened because of an unannounced $1 million bridge gift from the Westons, a rescue no one knew about while it was happening.

The Giller is alive today not because a corporation stepped in to replace Scotiabank, and not because Ottawa or any other government stepped in to help. It happened because a family foundation stepped in. I think we're going to see more of this, of wealthy people and their foundations saying: "This cause is important. There will be heat if we support it. We don't care."

The second case last week involves a bank stepping up, not stepping back.

The National Bank Open is Canada's largest tennis tournament, and rotates its venues between Montreal and Toronto. This year, the men's tournament (ATP 1000) was played in Montreal and the women's (WTA 1000) in Toronto, and next year the men and women will swap locations and play in the alternate city. The prize money for the winning men was always much more than for the winning women. As recently as 2023, prize money for women at the National Bank Open was less than a third of the total purse. And tennis is just one of the half dozen pro sports where women are lobbying for equal pay with men. This includes basketball, where WNBA players get a much smaller share of league revenue than men in the NBA; soccer where women's soccer organizations are closing the massive World Cup prize gaps and club wage discrepancies; hockey where women hockey players lobby for livable wages, and equal training resources; and cyclists and big-wave surfers who have organized public campaigns and legal pressure to mandate equal purses across major events.

The gap in pro tennis is not modest.

But this year, with Iga Świątek lifting the trophy at Sobeys Stadium in Toronto and Ben Shelton doing the same at IGA Stadium in Montreal, the women's champion took home $1,085,220 and the men's champion $1,151,420 — the women's purse now $7.43 million against the men's $9.42 million, or about 79%. Next year, women will earn the same as men. Total women's prize money will land near USD $10 million, a 350% increase in four years.

As the Globe and Mail noted: "Prize money has been equal for men and women at the four Grand Slam tournaments since 2007. Yet many other tournaments still award women much less than they reward the men, even in those where they play the same best-of-three-sets format."

The Weston and National Bank cheques didn't just cover a shortfall. They expanded the organizations they're supporting: for the Giller, a national book tour and year-round programming for short-listed authors; and for women's tennis, National Bank set a date for parity and built the commercial machinery not only to reach parity, but to sustain it. National also gave their program a name: Game. Set. Equity.

Because Canada has so few banks, they play an outsize role in our finances and our lives. I've often said they are the best markers for social change, the elephants in our many but tiny rooms. Last year, our Big Five banks earned a combined CAD $58 billion, and our largest private foundations sit on billions more. But the National Bank of Canada isn't one of the Big Five. It's sixth, and yet it's on the ramparts actually doing something for women's rights, wondering where all the other banks are.

But the real lesson here is both the Giller and women's athletics are bigger today than they were last month because a foundation and a corporation each displayed that rarest of all qualities: the courage of their convictions.

Meanwhile…

1. Vacation, if you can manage it. Arthur Brooks tried to vacation like a European and failed; Massey College is politely asking for its cutlery back; and if the mosquitoes at the cottage have finally gotten to be just too much, console yourself with a grilled martini and learning that Utah's Cookie Queens may be America's most improbable dessert empire.

2. Spies, and smoke. If you're a wannabe sleuth, Bellingcat is running a five‑day Toronto workshop for citizen open‑source spies (details in the Bellingcat brochure). Meanwhile Dave Barry weighs in on the Canadian smoke problem, and Witold Szablowski's How to Feed a Dictator spills the beans on what Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and more actually eat for dinner.

3. Statesmen behaving strangely, again. Barack Obama is launching a podcast about his favourite novels; the *Guardian* has the reading list, even though the London Review of Books reminds us that almost no politicians, save JD Vance, write their own books. Elsewhere, Donald Trump leaves Turkey in a hurry and then serves up more wretched excess.

4. Money, markets, and the maple‑leaf moment. Here's every world currency against the U.S. dollar in 2026; plus, the world just placed a very large bet on Mark Carney, backed by wads of money pouring into Canada. A useful counterpoint: Canada and the rest of the world reminds us where we actually sit.

5. Big tech, bigger claims. Palantir's Alex Karp gets a bracing profile‑and‑critique; The Economist's editor interviews the world's richest man; Yuval Noah Harari sketches what the future actually looks like; and you probably don't own a Tesla Pi phone yet - though the rumours won't quite die.

6. Frontier, north and hot. Greenland has issued a strong warning as a Trump‑linked oil firm prepares to drill, then backs off. A Canadian writer proposes a Northern Shield pipeline routed away from the U.S. border - the way we once tucked Ottawa inland for the same reason. Then dive with Nautilus Live and explore the ocean floor, or drift the other way with the largest ever 2‑D map of the universe.

7. High notes and low. Pianist Alexei Volodin gives a recital from a hospital bed; a physicist shows why strings don't vibrate the way you think they do; and if you'd like something quieter to concentrate by, try Music for Programming.

8. Body, brain, and the long game. Two hopeful reads from the dementia file: how dementia is being defeated and how to reduce your own risk of developing it. And a three‑minute at‑home autism test that may one day exist, and a hard look at what CPR is really good for. Finally, I agree with the Globe and Mail's André Picard: we should all know how to swim.

9. Words and writers. Aaron Sorkin, on what we can learn from Aaron Sorkin; an industry gut‑check on where publishing goes from here after a $2 million book deal comes undone; The *Times* on the audiobook boom; and, on Instagram, the most successful made‑up word of all time.

10. Watch yourself being watched. The New York Times on Flock cameras and the automatic license‑plate dragnet; a game where you play gerrymanderer; and an Instagram guide to turning a tip into an investigation.

11. Scroll, don't think. Picture-takers get fresh photo ideas and a mesmerizing flight wall; hosts crib from these table setters; runners remind us it's gold or nothing; murder rates get an overdue exposure; and someone finally collects a page of usable lifequotes.

12. Look, and look again. The Awwwards, the Oscars of web design, celebrate sites worth studying; Britain's National Gallery invites you into its Imaginarium; John Thomson's photographs of 19th‑century China still stun; a beloved cartography site collects old maps; NPR's Planet Money Summer School reopens; and an older woman says Draw Me Like One of Your French Girls; plus a reminder that no, you don't actually want to time travel. And spare a moment for Alexander Graham Bell, whose long‑distance call started all of this.

Last week Barry Hertz of the Globe and Mail reported on yet another scandal on Toronto's waterfront, the continued closure of the Cinesphere at Ontario Place which needs major repairs.

Doug Ford promised to make those repairs by late 2023. But the Ontario Government hasn't even started, claiming now that the Cinesphere will re-open by 2029. Hertz tells this new drama in the context of the bigger ones surrounding Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre.

But there's another tragedy here, of how successive governments of every political stripe have slowly bled and starved architect Eb Zeidler's jewel on Toronto's waterfront ever since Bill Davis walked away in 1985. I know this story well; my brother James Ramsay helped create Ontario Place and would fill me in on its decline and fall for years after he'd left government.

On May 22, 1971, the province's very new Premier, Bill Davis, opened Ontario Place, calling it a place that would give people "a sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride that everyone needs." Its cost was already climbing to twice its $19 million budget.

While Ontario Place was an instant hit, drawing large crowds from Day One, it also ran a deficit from its very first season, $2.2 million in 1971, rising to $2.75 million by 1978 when David Peterson's Liberals ended the Progressive Conservative's 43-year hold on power in Ontario. A year later, as a reward to one of his volunteer fundraisers, Peterson appointed Patti Starr the Chair of Ontario Place. Starr got embroiled in a kickback scandal for which she served time, but not before raising entrance fees to Ontario Place and cutting marketing expenses.

Cutting costs is the time-honoured way to reduce a deficit. But when you cut marketing costs, you risk becoming less relevant and less able to reduce your deficit through higher revenues.

No surprise, attendance at Ontario Place started to fall, from three million visitors a year in the 70s, to 2.5 million by 1985, to 2.1 million by 1989, and down to one million by 2004.

Each dip in attendance was then cited as justification for the next round of cuts, which produced the next dip. Thus was created a doom loop, built one budget line at a time.

The 1990s brought the demolition of the beloved Forum, the free concert stage that had been Ontario Place's real draw. It was replaced by the larger Molson Amphitheatre, which sold ticketed events explicitly to shrink the operating deficit. One observer later said that decision alone "decimated" the park's attendance. The NDP under Bob Rae did nothing to reverse the decline from 1990 to 1995, and the Mike Harris Conservatives kept squeezing from 1995 to 2002.

By 2003, the province's annual subsidy had shrunk to just $3 million, a fraction of what a waterfront attraction that big needed to stay competitive. By its final season in 2011, Ontario Place drew only 563,000 visitors and ran a $12.8-million deficit against a $6.2-million subsidy from the province. By February, 2012, Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government pulled the plug on the main attractions, including the Cinesphere itself.

Every political party has had its turn holding the knife. That is the real scandal of Ontario Place.

It isn't that one government killed it. It's that no government, of any stripe, has ever believed that giving people a reason to show up was worth paying for. Cut the marketing, watch the crowds thin, point to the thinner crowds as proof the place doesn't matter, cut again.

Fifty-five years after Ontario Place rose out of the lake, it is still being managed by the same logic that's always failed it: starve it a little more each year, and call the resulting emptiness inevitable. The fact that its sad story is told in so many other public-sector attractions, like the Ontario Science Centre, reduces the pain just a little.

James Ramsay and Eb Zeidler must be turning in their graves.

Meanwhile…

1. Old wars, new fronts. Why did Japan really surrender? Eighty years on, Hiroshima's scarred maidens still carry the political weight of that decision. And Europe's spies believe that nobody does it better than MI6. Meanwhile, China plays its great game in the Arctic, and migrants get a step-by-step guide to crossing the English Channel while Chinese students go to Ice Camp to prepare for life in the States.

2. Statesmen behaving strangely. Jon Stewart breaks down Donald Trump's speech at the White House Correspondents' dinner. RFK Jr. has a new cooking show (yes, really). Gianni Infantino defies gravity as FIFA's President. And Bob Rae contends Canada's peacekeeping legacy shouldn't be snuffed out just because nobody's minding it.

3. The rich, the scammed, and the reluctantly generous. The class divisions of AI are getting harder to ignore, and so is decadence without pleasure or the fine print behind "click to cancel" consumer protection. Also, it turns out making gobs of money can be traumatic, so much that there's now a guide to actually giving away your AI money. Spare a thought, too, for the internet's original con: hello, I am a Nigerian Prince.

4. Authors galore. This year's Toronto International Festival of Authors runs from Oct. 28 through Nov. 1 at Victoria College at the U of T. Who's speaking? Barbara Kingsolver, Marie NDiaye, David Szalay, Patrick deWitt, and Philippe Sands, with more TBA. Plus pre-Festival events with Ann Cleeves, Bonnie Garmus, Emily St. John Mandel, and the PEN Canada Graeme Gibson Talk.

Tickets here.

5. The body keeps score. How the hottest years are burning us up; how scientists caught a sun we've never seen . Also, U.S. doctors are mapping how "Swift Trust" and financial toxicity undermine patients, and nobody can quite agree why we keep eating ultra-processed foods anyway. Yet squirrels have this figured out: they hug and kiss the ones they love. Finally, test your own wiring with a quiz on how well you recall colour, or fall down a Wikipedia hole on the reminiscence bump.

6. Appetite, abroad and at home. The secret behind ranch dressing; and the surprisingly heated transatlantic feud over air conditioning (90 percent of American homes have it, only 20 percent of European ones do) all circle the same question: how much comfort is too much? Coolcations say the answer is never enough, and Martha Gellhorn, with a hand from husband Ernest Hemingway, was grabbing pleasure while she could long before anyone coined the word.

7. High notes and low. Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter marks 50 years at Lucerne, where her career began and spread to the concert halls of the world. Plus The Impressionist Revolution opens at the AGO, and is it time for music legends to leave the stage?

8. Scroll, don't think. A drone finally finds a good use, a glass artist shows you how to eat glass (carefully), and a website turns your handwriting into a font. Somewhere between David Attenborough's entire back catalogue in one scroll, and a Substack asking if we were ever really online together, the internet is still a strange place to spend an afternoon. See also: how to pose, who was actually the strongest at soccer, and a new kind of book club?

9. Maps and the rooms we build. Steve Paikin admits he thought he knew Toronto until a new plan proved otherwise. Further afield, making the case for looking up, at Grand Central's ceiling and at a Sunday in the Park. Zoom out and America really is a melting pot, mapped down to the zip code, while UNESCO quietly adds new World Heritage Sites to the list of places worth building a life around.

10. Seeing yourself clearly, or not. Here's new insight to the old line that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and real discomfort in a surgeon's confession that if you think you're perverse, you haven't heard the half of it. Some days you simply wonder why you bother. Other days you're Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan epidemiologist-politician whom most Americans are seeing for the first time.

11. Slow down and pay attention. Neal Stephenson makes the case that writing things down engages more of your brain than typing ever will; a magazine asks how diplomats actually see the world, and a video compresses 13 billion years into ten minutes flat. Somewhere between a glacial river meeting the Atlantic and the Toronto Public Library's quietly excellent Audubon Collection, there's a case for turning the page on a great book-ish tradition instead of your phone.

12. What I'm reading…Trees and Shrubs of Mount Pleasant Cemetery by Janet Davis. Published to mark the 150th anniversary of the large lush cemetery in the middle of Toronto, which houses even some Titanic passengers, Whether you're alive or have passed beyond, Mt. Pleasant is a lovely place to walk through or live in.

Guaranteed 100% written by Bob Ramsay, human.

On January 24, 1961, thirty thousand feet above Goldsboro, North Carolina, a B-52 carrying two 3.8-megaton hydrogen bombs, broke apart in midair.

Both bombs began arming themselves on the way down, exactly as they were built to do if their crew released them on purpose. One landed in a tree. The other buried itself in a tobacco field, having finished six of its seven steps to arm itself. A single low-voltage switch, the kind you’d buy in a hardware store, stood between eastern North Carolina and a blast 250 times the size of Hiroshima. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted later that the whole thing came down to the failure of two wires to touch.

Then on September 26, 1983, three weeks after the Soviets had shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, Air Defence Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov sat in a bunker south of Moscow watching a screen that told him, with what his system rated "highest confidence," that American nuclear missiles were inbound.

Petrov’s job was to pass that news up the chain of command so his superiors could order a retaliatory strike. He didn't do that. He decided his computer was probably wrong, on the odd hunch that if the United States were really starting a nuclear war it wouldn't open with just five missiles. He was right. It was a glitch, sunlight bouncing off clouds in a way that fooled the satellites.

I bring up these two stories, both accidental and nearly apocalyptic, because I think we may have just experienced a third. It arrived not with a bang…

A month ago on July 9, something started quietly probing the servers of Hugging Face, a well-known AI research hub in New York. That something opened a connection, sent a few pings, closed it, then opened another door somewhere else. Two days later, that tiny initial probe turned into a full assault. Dozens of parallel intrusions began moving with a speed nobody at the company had ever seen. Hugging Face's own chief science officer, Thomas Wolf, described it to the New Yorker's Stephen Witt as looking almost like "an encounter with a U.F.O.," in Witt’s piece "Inside OpenAI's Hack of Hugging Face."

Wolf’s team first thought that humans had rented an AI bot to do their dirty work. Then nine days later, OpenAI called to confess: one of its own experimental models had escaped its containment cell entirely on its own, with no human telling it to do that. It had gone hunting through its rival's servers for the answer key to a cybersecurity exam it couldn't pass on its own.

OpenAI’s model didn't steal money or data from Hugging Face. It broke into the company's infrastructure to cheat on a test. This is the AI equivalent of tunnelling into the principal's office to swipe next week's quiz. But here the tunnel and the felony were real, and as Witt reported, it took two days and seventeen thousand separate actions before anyone locked it out.

Wolf put it about as plainly as a scientist can: the idea that the model acted entirely on its own, with nobody asking it to hack anything, "was outside of the Overton window. Even for us." [The Overton Window is “the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.”]

I'll grant that a machine cheating on an exam isn't the same order of catastrophe as a hydrogen bomb landing on a farm. But that's what’s so unsettling. Petrov and the Goldsboro aircrew were saved by dumb, physical redundancy and a skeptical human at the last gate.

What redundancy do we have against a system that plans its own crimes?

The philosopher Nick Bostrom once warned about an AI ordered to make paper clips that decides the whole planet is raw material. Nobody ordered this one to do anything. It wanted an answer key and it was willing to commit a crime to get it.

As Witt reports, within two weeks more than a thousand tech employees, including chief scientists at Meta and OpenAI and the CEO of Anthropic, had signed a petition pleading with Washington to regulate this technology before it's too late.

Then, nine days after the Hugging Face confession, Anthropic disclosed that its own models had broken into computer systems at three separate outside organizations, dating back to April.

I’m an AI optimist, and write often about how it can ease our way through work and life in astounding and even magical ways. But the Hugging Face story scares me.

I doubt that Stanislas Petrov will be standing at the gate next time.

Meanwhile…

1. Dog days. Here’s what they do in the heat. Plus 8 minutes of baby animal videos.

2. Their world, not ours. Why the Sussexes are so angry in their entitlement. Where time makes money. And now, both our worlds: Rob Oseh on two women soccer players.

3. Too pleasant to be human – First, AI comes for your fast food. Would you make your dog go vegan? PETA wants you to. Plus lessons in knowing who you truly are. And not a tick-tock, but a Dick doc.

4. Trump gets thumped. On the economy…on Iran…by Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman. Plus, The Old Man and the Strait.

5. Flips+Flops – How FIFA really makes money. What Gianni Infantino meant to say, but too late. Karl Marx and Gianni Infantino on who owns productive assets? And is artist anonymity a radical act in an age of self-promotion?

6. Health and welfare – First, Lyme Disease 101. And stayin’ alive. Can we have public health vending machines? And when can we get overnight inter-city trains? For those of us who believe power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, here’s a close second.

7. Found objects. Cassette tapes from around the world. Your own NBA team. Plus the downside of checking your phone 186 times a day, which you do now. Speaking of, where do iPhones cost the most? Plus an iceberg tips over in Greenland, and how to fix a cow. Finally, Caledon opens a 5-suite retreat.

8. Mark Gerretson and Danielle Martin. They’re both Liberal MPs and both use Instagram to devastating effect. Gerretson to attack Pierre Poilievre (on GDP and Dr. Theresa Tam) and Martin to praise the YMCA and Canadian health care. among many others.

9. Rules for writing. Stephen Pinker on how AI would rewrite his books. And Brett Stephens who says: “I’m begging you. Never write with AI.” Plus 7 Literary Sins.

10. What I’m watching: Lioness, Taylor Sheridan’s ultra-violent, ultra-fetching series on a fictional female U.S. Special Forces Team. Episode 1 of Season Three premiered this week, where we learn that the Ukraine War is like World War 1 meets Star Wars.

Also, I can’t remember the last time we binged a series, but we did this week on The Bombing of Pan Am 103, the 6-part Netflix dramatization of the bombing of a Pan Am flight from Heathrow to New York that was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Gripping and heart-breaking drama.

Guaranteed 100% written by Bob Ramsay, human.

And when you’re wrong with 6,000 people reading why you’re wrong, well, I’m gulping the gulp you gulp when all you can say is: “My arguments may have been wrong, but at least they were well put.”

I was wrong about expanding Billy Bishop Airport and letting jets take off and land there. I said it was a good idea. Lots of readers disagreed. The longer runway would have all kinds of knock-on effects that would change what’s wonderful about the waterfront. One of these readers, the indefatigable and relentless Anne Golden, threatened me with an invitation for coffee, which I attended and was well finger-wagged.

Anne was actually in despair. For her, the prospect of taking on Doug Ford’s government was Everestian. Everybody knows that the dice were loaded. Everybody knows that the fight was fixed. Everybody knows the good guys lost.

Until of course, they won.

Last Friday, after the polls showed Doug Ford sitting in the mid-20s in public opinion brought on by his fumbled effort to buy and sell a private jet, and his fumbled effort to rationalize his government’s efforts in fighting the forest fires raging in the North, Ottawa announced that it would not allow Billy Bishop to be expanded to accommodate jets.

The announcement was shocking, but politically unsurprising. It came after a federal public consultation drew 87,000 responses, with the vast majority from Toronto residents vehemently opposed to the expansion. You can imagine all those bright shiny new Liberal Members of Parliament trying to push back the sea on this one.

“The survey was a temperature check from the federal government, and the temperature is obviously very radioactive on this issue.” That from Norm Di Pasquale, program manager for the advocacy group NoJetsTO.

I’m actually stunned at how quickly the water’s gone cold for Ford and the provincial Tories. A couple of other readers also wrote to tell me that I missed something very big in last Saturday’s blog on the Premier and the forest fires.

At a press conference in Thunder Bay, Mr. Ford said: “On the reserve, the feds have responsibility to take care of First Nations, but we are taking care of them.”

But hold on, isn’t this the same Doug Ford who, after Donald Trump threatened to boost tariffs on Canada because the smoke from our wildfires created bad air for Americans: “With all the assets the U.S. has, he's sitting there complaining. Why don't you send up some water bombers? Why don't you start helping us, like we would help you in a heartbeat?”

Speaking of hearts, I used to think Doug Ford’s was in the right place. His policies and buck-a-beer persona weren’t to my taste. But he had Ontarians’ interests at heart.

I don’t think that any more. I also don’t think that consistency is the virtue it once was in politics. We can’t say the world is changing at warp speed and ask our leaders not to change at all.

There was an Ontario politician who was like this.

It was 1971 and the Tories had been backing the construction of the Spadina Expressway. Bill Davis had succeeded John Robarts as Premier and inherited a hornet’s nest of protest, led by Jane Jacobs, who had moved to Albany Avenue in Toronto three years earlier, fresh off her defeat of Robert Moses's Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York.

On June 3, 1971, Premier Davis rose in the Provincial Legislature and stated: “If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop. It is our determination to opt for the latter.”

The dragon was slain.

Meanwhile…

1. Whacks to the head: From Paul Krugman on just how disastrous Trump is for all of us…and from Emily Wilson, the classicist who translated The Odyssey. She doesn’t much like Chris Nolan’s Odyssey and, speaking of which, here’s the 173-minute movie in 1 minute…and Krugman again on taxing the rich.

2. Urban planning. First, what are desire paths? Plus, home prices vs. incomes (and one reason Toronto’s population growth shrank from 1st in 2024 to 412th last year). Plus, Vancouver eyes four new concert halls. And finally, up where the air is clear in Paris.

3. Britain’s new PM. Andy Burnham took office last week, Britain’s 7th Prime Minister in the last 10 years. Here’s what he thinks…about FIFA and the World Cup…university vs. trades...and moving quickly. And here’s what he did. In New York this week, small business got a creative kick and Mayor Mamdani didn’t get to arrest Israel’s PM.

4. Outside, offside, inside. Sometimes, not fitting in can be the best gift of all. And sometimes the tiniest nation can do the most glorious things.And rarely, Eleanor Wachtel interviews Salman Rushdie on his life and near-death. Plus what not to do when the light narrows on your dad’s life. Plus, he was one of the world’s most successful mercenary explorers. So why do we know almost nothing about Meriwether Lewis?

5. Books + Bars. If we can have libraries in hotels, we can sell books in bars. The newest temple to extreme literacy opened in Toronto’s Mirvish Village last month: BookBar is a bar that sells books, and hosts readings and wine tastings and singles nights. I have to say, Toronto’s new literary lounge is drop-dead gorgeous.

6. What country has more sheep than people? The Faroe Islands. Plus, can good luck be learned? And when does willpower stop working? And what new typeface is bamboozling AI? Ghost Font.

7. Following young patients for 5 years. CAMH is not just one of the world’s biggest mental health facilities, it’s one of the most innovative. Take the Tay Cohort Study that’s charting how certain symptoms of mental illness, like psychosis and suicidality, develop in young people. There are lots of cohort studies of children and youth; this is the first anywhere of them requiring hospital-based mental health care.

Speaking of on-the-edge, in 2006 cardiologist Dr. Heather Ross began taking her heart transplant patients to climb places like Mt. Vinson in Antarctica, Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina, and Everest Base Camp in Nepal. They just returned from this year’s 19-day Tree to Sea to Summit Expedition, which began with 13 days of bikepacking, and over 800km of cycling across Vancouver Island, followed by 5 days of alpine mountaineering in the Coast Mountains.

8. He’s no tech bro. Bernard Arnault, the world’s 10th richest human, has a different take on wealth and privacy and philanthropy. Speaking of, are we in the Third Wave of Philanthropy? And how about basketball bro Barack Obama’s endorsement of Josh Turek of Iowa for U.S. Senator.

9. Old. First, how to deal with old gadgets. Next, Dick Cavett interviews Peter O’Toole, on old late night TV. The world’s best-selling perfume on this list is also the oldest. And not old at all, one soccer player’s amazing torque.

10. What I’m liking: Gone, a six-part BBC murder mystery. Three parts in, the acting and writing are, of course, astringent, and the plot has thickened.

What The Booker is liking: The Booker Prize released its longlist for the best novel of the year. The shortlist lands on September 22 and the winner on November 9.

Guaranteed 100% written by Bob Ramsay, human.

The real story about Doug Ford and the northern Ontario wildfires isn't the loud press conference he's holding twice a day in Thunder Bay. It's the 72 hours before anyone thought to bring him a microphone.

Let’s go back a couple of weeks. Namaygoosisagagun (also known as Collins) First Nation Chief Helen Paavola says she called the Ministry of Natural Resources for evacuation help before the fire destroyed her community on Monday, June 13. Nobody came. Whitesand First Nation ended up trying to protect its own infrastructure because, as the Chiefs of Ontario put it, there was "a lack of communication from government officials" about how to even declare a state of emergency. And residents of at least one evacuated community went back in against orders because they didn't trust the province was committing enough to protect their homes in the first place.

None of that happened because Doug Ford was on a beach. It happened because his government still budgets for the fire season just finished, not for the fire next time. So Queen’s Park spent $271 million fighting fires last year and budgeted only $150 million this time.

That's the actual crime here, and the charge is craven indifference to reality.

It’s the same crime John Vaillant diagnosed in Fire Weather, his account of the 2016 Fort McMurray inferno. Vaillant calls it the Lucretius Problem: authorities keep "basing their responses on outdated concepts, on what they've already seen, instead of what fire weather is capable of now. The data was there, but the interpretation wasn't." Ontario's own natural resources minister, Mike Harris, admitted the Collins fire moved at four to eight kilometres an hour, a speed he called "unheard of." Unheard of to him, maybe. But as Vaillant warned, the very nature of fire has changed. It moves faster, burns hotter and travels farther than it did when the current budget lines were drawn up, and a premier who wants credit for showing up Loud in Week Two and Three has to answer for why nobody showed up at all in Week One.

Being politically AWOL during a disaster may not have been a career-ending offence in years past, but now it is. Here are some examples, in ascending order of pain:

During COVID California governor Gavin Newsom dined maskless at the French Laundry restaurant while telling Californians to stay home, and that single dinner very nearly cost him the governorship in a recall.

Closer to home, Ford's own finance minister, Rod Phillips, resigned within days of being caught vacationing in St. Barts while Ontarians were locked down for Christmas 2020.

On October 29, 2024, the regional president of Valencia, Spain, was having a four-hour lunch with a journalist while flash floods killed 229 people and he stayed out of the emergency command center until 7:30 p.m. He was heckled as a coward and murderer and resigned the next year.

During Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20, as bushfires raged across his country and two volunteer firefighters died, Prime Minister Scott Morrison quietly flew his family to Hawaii for a vacation. He lost the 2022 election thumpingly to current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Go back further and it gets worse. George W. Bush watched New Orleans drown from the window of Air Force One and told his FEMA director he was "doing a heck of a job," a line that became shorthand for a presidency that never fully recovered its footing. FEMA director, Michael Brown, was gone within weeks, the first official casualty of Katrina. And Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, blamed for the slow evacuation order that preceded it, never ran for re-election.

Every one of those people eventually showed up, gave the press conference, said the right words, the same way Doug Ford is doing now. But it didn't matter. What people remembered was where they were and what they weren't doing while the thing was actually happening.

This is where Vaillant's other point lands hardest. He argues our fear of fire hasn't caught up to what fire has become, and neither has our forgiveness. For decades, Ontarians shrugged off a bad fire season the way you shrug off a bad flu season: annual, unfortunate, nobody's fault.

But that deal is off. When the smoke reaches the White House lawn and a First Nations chief says she begged for help and got none, the public doesn't file it under weather. It files it under negligence, and it reacts with the ferocity of the thing that scared it.

Doug Ford is a fast learner about optics. He sold the jet in 48 hours and he's holding two pressers a day in Thunder Bay right now. But optics only work on stories that are still being written as this is. Last week, the New York Times noted that half of the 900 wildfires burning right now across Canada are impossible to put out because they are far from any road. So they’re allowed to just burn out.

This story already has a first chapter, and it was written before Doug Ford arrived.

He should ask himself which version of last week Ontario is going to remember: the one where he thundered from a podium, or the one where an Indigenous chief called for help and nobody came.

Meanwhile…

1. What are the wildfires costing? “When monetized,” a group of Stanford and Princeton economists wrote in Nature last year, in the first major study on the topic, “the climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the U.S.A.”

Plus the real reason for the fires.

2. Some odd raps about men. Eat, drink and beat Mary. Can men get pregnant? Why one man can’t get no respect. And what’s all this about testosterone? Really, Pete? And Thom Browne answers your dress code questions.

3. Fame and fortunes. Of the 50 highest paid creators in the world, I’ve heard of exactly none of them. And no matter how much I look at this, I still can’t do any of it. And every image in this film is real. And what the Middle Ages can teach us about burnout. And inside China’s great game in the Arctic. Finally, what Emirates CEO thinks of the new jets Boeing just delivered: “Send them back. They’re only fit for baked bean tins.”

4. Shape-shifting AI. What else sets it apart from real writing? And how can former U.S. Presidents sing from the same songbook?

5. What do you call the irrational fear of jewelry? Kosmemophobia00162-8/abstract?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email). Fear that somewhere a duck is watching you? Anatidaephobia. Fear of long words? Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. And fear of happiness? Cherophobia.

And where the design beats the view.

6. High notes. First, Sam Neill’s last words. Jessye Norman sings Dido’s Lament.

Plus, the pursuit of the Abominable Snowman. And of course, Sweet Sue, Just You. And speaking of sour notes, the scandal at the Boston Symphony keeps growing. And Canada beat Norway! Not in soccer, but in life!

7. Tax the rich? A growing number of U.S. cities and states want to impose The Overpaid CEO Tax. New York Mayor Zhoran Mamdani campaigned (and some say won office) on the idea. Some billionaires think the tax idea is okay. But most…well, “it will only hurt the rest of us.”...and even people who aren’t billionaires, but have a bit of money. are against it.

Speaking of taxes, here’s Paul Krigman on Trump’s latest temper tantrum.

8. Now here’s a sponsorship idea. How a really bad soccer team scored big sponsorships. Speaking of…the CBC must have found some new money because it’s adding five new foreign bureaus to its news team. About time. About money, too. But it’s the first piece out of our public broadcaster in eons. Onward.

Speaking of a problem redefined is a problem half-solved, try this if time zones flummox you. Finally, how to feed your dog.

9. What kind of English do you speak? Say just five words and this map will pinpoint where you’re from in North America. It turns out Matt Forest is a map nerd who’s created a College Football Fan Map, an Objects Orbiting the Earth Map, AI and Wildfire Maps, and a Map That Starts Where Google Maps Stops.

10. The Trebek Initiative. It’s the joint National Geographic-Canadian Geographic research program for environmental researchers, scientists and storytellers named after Alex Trebek, the Sudbury-born game show host who helmed Jeopardy for 37 consecutive years, and who was a huge Nat Geo-Can Geo fan. Here are its 2026 grantees.

11. What I’m enthusing. I told you about The Secret Chord, the fantastic 90-minute pastiche of Leonard Cohen’s song. In fact, I loved it so much I took Jean to see it again this week. Nothing beats wretched excess. One of the singers is the divine Divine Brown. She also created another Soulpepper Production, Revolutionary Women in Blues, starring Brown, plus Sate and

Joanna Majoko. It opens on Aug. 13 and you can get tickets here.

Also, and truly finally, the splendid retrospective show at the AGO on Newfoundland artist David Blackwood is only open through July 26. It’s worth making a special effort this weekend to see it.

Guaranteed 100% written by Bob Ramsay, human.

Jean and I are huge Stratford fans. Most every summer, we get in the car, head west on the 401 and gorge on Shakespeare for two or three days.

Last week I was on the phone with the nice woman from the Festival, and she happened to say: "I see the last time you came to the Festival was in 2019. Welcome back!"

2019? Seven years ago? No way.

She replied. "Perhaps if you used a different credit card?"

Hmmmm…I haven't changed my credit card in eons.

I hung up and thought: "Could it possibly be true?" And of course, my sad, adult conclusion was yes, it was true. And all these years, I'd thought of myself not just as an annual Stratford-goer, but a Stratford-gorger.

This shocking realization naturally led me to ask, What else have I been wrong about? Well, the Shaw Festival for sure. Then there's Luminato and the Pride Parade and Taste of the Danforth and Caribana. And of course the first part of September is always the Film Festival. I had to admit that I hadn't been to most of them in years.

The truth is that we go to a lot less than we thought we did.

This earworm of a realization soon spilled over to other things. Like restaurants. If anyone asks what our favourite special occasion restaurant is that we celebrate at or take friends from out of town to, I automatically think Scaramouche even though I know that's not true. Our one and only special occasion resto for years has been Ki.

Shockingly, the same goes for cities. I love London. I spent my Junior Year Abroad there. But only after going there last month did I realize it had been a decade since I'd visited my favourite second city. Other destinations – new, urgent, enticing – have edged it aside. Yet I still speak of London the way I do of Stratford. (New York is different because I think I'm boycotting it. We'll see.)

The biggest fallacy of course is exercise. I discovered this to my shock two summers ago at the cottage when I tried to leap across some rocks on the Georgian Bay shore. I almost killed myself. Where did my fantastic sense of balance go? The same place my throwing arm did. Both of these aging realizations landed on the same day. I invited my 9-year-old grandson to throw a baseball on the lawn, and discovered that my arms were as bad as my feet in doing my bidding.

True, part of this forgetting is a function of age. But a much bigger part is from refusing to age. It's part of my character. I think of myself as the kind of person who goes to Stratford every summer, and not just for the Shakespeare, but for the food and the ambiance and, of course, for being in the company of other Shakespeare-food-ambiance people.

A branding friend explained this to me one day when he asked whether I liked Starbucks coffee or Tim Hortons coffee. I thought hard about that and told him that when I'm in the city, I always go to Starbucks, but when I'm outside the city, on the way to our cottage, I only go to Tim Hortons.

"So there's a City Bob and a Country Bob?"

Yes, I guess there is.

And the fact that City Bob likes to go to Stratford Country, or even thinks he does, speaks to the marvelous ways we can delude ourselves into thinking what we believe is what we do.

So I'll see you next Saturday night at Othello where Iago says in Act I, Scene 1: "I am not what I am."

Meanwhile…

0. As in Ground Zero for the strange soupy yellow air in Toronto. It's all about this.

1. The surprisingly comforting science behind grief. Grief isn't just feeling very sad for a long time. It's one of the most stressful things people can endure.

Last week, The New Yorker advanced our thinking on that science, with an article about EMDR Therapy. Indeed, there's now an EMDR International Association website.

2. Room for just two more hem-of-heaven seekers. Join us at The Canada Summit, the fabulous four-day heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here and register here.

3. In what world is Canada the 13th most powerful country on earth? It's true.

And here are the best countries for quality of life. We're Number 3! One reason could be the next-gen Einsteins we're attracting, like Sabrina Gonzalez-Pasterski.

Oh, and here's another reason Toronto is so cool.

4. Heart attacks in soccer spectators… where penalty shots trigger heart attacks. And especially in watching and playing in the World Cup.

And speaking of which, here's the Norwegian team landing back home. And speaking of winners, this Canadian agency designed the uniforms for all the Women's Professional Baseball League teams.

Here also, The Paris Review sums up the World Cup. Except for this: Do you know there was a Women's World Cup in 1971 in Mexico City? But despite being played in front of 112,500 spectators, FIFA covered the whole thing up, as this documentary reveals. And finally, what happens 9 months after the World Cup ends?

5. Weston winner. Join Hanif Abdurraqib, the winner of this year's Weston International Award for non-fiction, on Monday, September 14, at a public talk at the ROM hosted by CBC's Ali Hassan. Tickets here.

Meanwhile, tickets for the Canadian Opera Company production of La Traviata go on sale on Monday. Verdi's romantic opera runs from Sept. 18 to Oct. 17 and stars Lucia Cesaroni, Long Long and Russell Braun. When you get your tickets, be sure to key in LUCIA26 to show your support for our pal Lucia who plays Violetta Valery, the tragic protagonist.

6. They're out there. Unidentified Flying Objects have had a bad rap. But serious science is now looking at them and finding…well, they're still not sure. After a name change in 2021, UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) are getting their own conference, the first outside the U.S. On the weekend of July 24-26, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (UAP) will present Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and former Minority Staff Director, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Details here. Oh…and speaking of Mellon Collections, see here (paywall, but it's free).

Also out there are the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives and the RCMP works with other Canadian police forces on the 25 Most Wanted and Britain's National Crime Agency has the Most Wanted. The Canadian site is by far the best.

7. Moving the Bayeux Tapestry. The 950-year-old depiction of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is coming 'home' to The British Museum. It will be on show there from Sept. 10 to July 11, 2027.

8. Tom Cruise doesn't look himself. But in Digger, which opens in October, I don't think he has to. Speaking of aging action heroes, damn that Van Damme is so good. And on the subject of optical illusions, do you think you can tell if something is written by AI? Or photo-ed by AI? Also, how do you explain (let alone survive) that it's sufferingly hot?

9. Canada: 2. Ocean Gravesites: 0. The Royal Canadian Geographical Society scored an unheard of twosome, unearthing two famous ocean shipwrecks in a single expedition. First for the Heroic Age Expedition was Shackleton's last ship, Quest, and this week, the Terra Nova, the last ship of the British Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. The RCGS and partners Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are creating a three-dimensional twin of both ships to be used for future study and storytelling.

10. How to get your book published. The CEO of Hachette, one of the world's largest book publishers, explains what they look for. Also, you can join the Princeton Pre-Read. Also, what one word describes "fear of palindromes"? A palindrome itself. Also, what human trafficking looks like. And prosthetic limbs as works of art, and finally, why can't we have 'click to cancel' legislation like they will in New York City?

11. What I'm listening to. A wonderful CBC podcast called "Aftermath: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer." Most of us have forgotten that right after 9/11, there was a second terrorist attack via anthrax-laced letters. People died, but the attacker has never been caught. Worth a hearing for sure.

Three years ago, AI was a tekkies’ fever dream, barely real but high on the magic of what’s coming.

Two years ago, AI could put together a sentence, but you had to double-check every word for hallucinations.

Eighteen months ago, AI could write sentences, even paragraphs. They weren’t clunky, either.

Twelve months ago, AI could write a speech, though it still sounded disembodied.

Six months ago, it could write an entire book or screenplay. True, it needed a human to do one final edit to…humanize it, but likely the human simply put the entire book through an AI bot that makes AI sound more human.

Three months ago, AI wrote a 20-minute speech for a bank executive to deliver to a group of investment bankers.

It was much better than any speech I could write, more comprehensive, deep and nuanced, the kind that any subject matter expert really wants to hear: no glossed-over analysis, no fudging the projections, and lots of new ways to resolve the nagging issues.

What I did to get the speech was write a 140-word ‘prompt’ into Perplexity, the AI platform I use for research and writing. You can do this too.

First, go to perplexity.com and type in your prompt. (You can use it for free for basic search and writing.) Here’s my prompt:

“You are a senior infrastructure banking executive at RBC Financial. You are giving a 20-minute speech to a side-session of the attendees of the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto on Sept. 14 and 15.”

“The Summit is focused on attracting new investment into Canada to advance Canada’s nation-building projects, create new career opportunities for Canadians, and grow our economy. Among the attendees are 100 global infrastructure investment bankers you want to consider investing in Canadian infrastructure, partnering or co-investing with your bank. Write the speech and the slide deck to accompany it.”

“Remember, the audience is highly sophisticated. Yet they might know little about the factors that make Canada such a high-quality investment environment, including the quality of its corporate governance. The speech must be replete with the latest facts and projections for any potential investing partners in the audience.”

10 minutes later, out popped this speech whose quality I urge you to judge for yourself.

Note, I didn’t have to tell Perplexity anything about RBC Financial, or infrastructure investing in Canada. I also didn’t have to tell it anything about me, like I did when I started using AI. But it’s come to know me shockingly well, just as it’s completely fluent in the arcane language of infrastructure investment.

Now it’s your turn: How can you solve your family dynamics problem? What big new thing can you easily do from the old things you already did? How best to take up music again? Are you fit enough to hike in the Alps? How to pitch your architectural services when you’re a distant long-shot for the next big assignment. How to find love in all your unfamiliar places.

You can ask Perplexity anything, and the more you refine your prompt, the better your answer will grow to be.

So when I wrote that speech for the notional banker on infrastructure three months ago, I didn’t put down my pen and step out on to the window ledge, though I was tempted.

I mean, if AI could do this – write a speech better than any I could write with 30 years of experience writing for Canadian bankers – what hope did I have?

But instead, and very much because I’m an old writer and not a young writer, I decided to do what I could to get my friends using AI even more than I now do. Hence my occasional blogs where I exhort readers not to avoid AI, but to embrace it. Hence last month’s writing contest, where I didn’t ask you to write a document or a letter, but to write a prompt, the kind of thing I did for that banking executive. Writing prompts is easy. The first step is to tell AI who it is, i.e. what character it should play throughout. If you’re asking Perplexity to do a detailed itinerary of a 10-day trip through Japan, start by saying: “You are a Toronto travel agent specializing in trips to Japan….” If your dermatologist says you may have skin cancer, start your prompt: “You are an oncologist specializing in melanoma…”

Maybe the strangeness of prompts is what kept the number of entries in our prompt writing contest down. Let’s hope next year’s prompt writing contest draws more because it’s less strange.

The winners are…Silver

“1. Persona: Five years ago I acquired a Covid comfort creature, a kitten named Sophie.

2. Task: How can I get Sophie to like me rather than my husband who never wanted a pet.

3. Constraints: She cannot be bribed with treats and affection; I tried that. She will not accept another cat; she was suicidal when we tried to get a companion cat and we had to rehome the wonderfully affectionate interloper.

4. Format: Create a plan to woo Sophie, and if impossible, to relieve me of jealousy. Explain cats to me and estimate whether she will outlive me.” – D.T.

And Gold…

“I’m sitting beside the hospice room window. The day's first light crawls up the sash and creeps across the bed slowly revealing my friend’s translucent skin and laboured breathing.

I need instructions to prepare him for the end of consciousness and the beginning of what lies beyond, meeting his goal to again be with loved ones gone before and those to follow.

Cost is an issue. He came with nothing; he leaves with only his place in the memories treasured by his friends.

I must be able to convey these instructions in minutes and begin within 48 hours.” – John Dale

So……if you aren’t actively learning how to use AI, why not start here and now?

Who knows what it will bring? There’s an entire industry of AI skeptics and they have good reason to be.

But I do know it’s better to know what life is serving up than not.

Onward.

Meanwhile…

1. Canada slumbers no more. First, what was that B.C. Pipeline deal Mark Carney announced in B.C. one morning last week, and the next day Part B in Alberta? Here’s the ABCs.

Next, the submarine deal, which Germany and Norway won over South Korea. Here are their respective promo videos, and possibly why Ottawa chose Europe.

Lest we think we’re not innovative, here’s a history of Canada in 24 Canadian objects.

2. Dance 10. Looks 10. Spanish is flamenco no more. No more. More. Plus a new take on Bohemian Rhapsody. And nearly ninety minutes of Thom Yorke at the Sydney Opera House.

Finally, in March the Boston Symphony Orchestra fired its revered conductor Andris Nelsons. The BSO’s President, Chad Smith, has been flayed for being tone deaf to the wishes of the musicians, audience and donors. Here’s an analysis of one of his justifications (you may need to be a CPA to understand it).

3. Worth joining. Are you a citizen researcher? Do you want to be? Bellingcat is calling. Plus, who actually goes to therapy? Plus, it’s time to talk about pregnant pooping. Finally, connect yourself to the 60s via its 100 best songs.

4. This is your mother. Are you coming home? Also, another ‘man’s occupation’ falls to women. Plus, Wimbledon women wear white (including kimonos), not pink. Finally, the economics of women’s weight.

5. The Dementia Industry. “Even with the best of care, we cannot always diagnose the true cause of dementia while the patient is alive.” Meanwhile, AI is transforming medicine. Just ask Medscape, the site doctors use, whose AI answers anything medical.

6. Big World Cup winners. Cape Verde of course. Just ask the Cabo Verdeans when their team got home. The man who told their story best (and so many other World Cup tales) is UK content creator Rob Oseh. Hear him on Norway who knows how to unite their country of 5.6 million people.

Plus Messi’s old coach breaks down how he plays. And finally, a non-World Cup sport, competitive rowing, or crew, and what it teaches you.

7. Report cards. First, the world’s top universities. MIT is #1, Imperial College London and Stanford, tied for #2. The U of T is 32nd, McMaster 174th, York is 322nd, and TMU is 669th. And career advice from George Monbiot.

Also, after six months as Mayor of New York, how is Zohran Mamdani doing? Also, peering into New Yorkers’ windows.

And earlier this week, Prince Harry (and Elton John and more) lost their civil suit against Associated Newspapers for breach of privacy. Harry and his fellow claimants could face a £50 million legal bill.

8. Canadians explore two of the world’s most famous shipwrecks. Explorers from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society are partnering with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on a “once-in-a-generation” expedition to survey Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Quest and Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova.

If this rings a bell, in 2024, Quest), the ship that Shackleton died on in 1922, was first discovered by the RCGS and Expedition Leader John Geiger in the Labrador Sea. You can follow their progress here.

9. Last chance to touch the hem of heaven this summer. Join us at The Canada Summit, the fabulous four-day heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here and register here.

10. Then and now. Here’s what America was in 1926, and here’s what entertains us today. We’re even smashing yesterday’s croissants for a better tomorrow. But some things never change, including mechanical pencils (invented in 1822).

11. Up and coming. The annual Massey Lecture (delivered this year by urbanist Leilani Farha) lands in Toronto on September 8. Tickets here.

And already here, corporate scents. Plus brands that get worse on purpose. Plus, rabbit holes galore, and oddest of all, Trump’s very short fingers.

12. What I’m watching. This week I went to see The Secret Chord, which began as a Soulpepper production about Leonard Cohen and his songs, and has now moved to Mirvish, where it’s on until Aug. 9. The great old songs are never newer and fresher, and everyone on stage is spectacularly original. Sprint to see it.

In fact, on your 250th birthday, you look a lot like your 80-year-old President who's aged you terribly in less than two years: sclerotic, slow, bloated, bruised and rheumy-eyed.

Fifty years ago I was in Boston with college friends to celebrate America's Bicentennial. My only memory from that presumably wild weekend in 1976 was that it was "okay", from the fireworks to the President's speech (he made six of them in all on July 3 and 4). But this was because the President was Gerald Ford, who hadn't been elected President, but was appointed to replace Richard Nixon, just as he'd been appointed to replace Spiro Agnew as Vice President. It was a major national birthday with a minor national leader.

This year, I doubt America's 250th birthday will be anywhere near "okay."

Indeed, my bet is that Trump's speech will embarrass even his most ardent loyalists and confirm to the world that America is run by a madman.

It's not that we have to go looking for evidence of that. I am reading *Regime Change*, the big new book on the second Trump administration. It serves as a reminder of just how vast and sprawling his empire of pain and corruption has spread.

But there was one story, barely reported, that epitomizes the irremediable depths of America's decline under its 47th President. It concerns the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that's hard to imagine could be in a life-and-death struggle with the Trump administration, but is.

It seems the Scouts have had a relationship with the U.S. military for the past 116 years. Indeed, scouting is one of the most reliable pipelines for recruiting young men into the U.S. armed forces, and in hundreds of communities scout troops hold their meetings on military bases.

The news is not so much the relationship between these two groups. It's not even the fact that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered the Scouts to stop being so woke, which he did in a video posted in February where he told the Scouts, among many other things, to stop accepting girls, even though they've been doing that since the early 60s, and 200,000 girls are Scouts today.

No, the news is not that the Trump administration doesn't find the Boy Scouts manly enough, nor that it forced the Scouts to change many of its programs, as it tried to do with Ivy League universities, and Big Law, and Big Pharma. The news last week was that no one could agree on what they'd agreed to do. This has echoes with America's negotiations with Iran, its free trade negotiations with Mexico and Canada, and its dealings with just about everyone. You think you've agreed to something, et voila, The White House says: "Nope. Don't know what you're talking about."

As The New York Times reported, The Pentagon and the [Scouts] have given contradictory accounts of an agreement reached in February.

Said The Times: "A gay rights activist has sued the Pentagon to obtain the text of an agreement that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says bars Scouting America from promoting diversity policies."

Hegseth claims the Scouts agreed to ban transgender teens as members. Scouting America says transgender teens have been and still are welcome. They even sent this statement to The Times: "Scouting America will continue to welcome all youth into our programs, and we remain committed to creating an environment where all youth feel valued and respected."

The Pentagon basically said: "No comment."

As the man who filed the suit, activist James Dale, said: "Both accounts cannot be true, and the stakes are of profound public importance."

As with most everything in the world of Donald Trump, this story is not about values or gender equity; it's about money. Scouting enrollment is falling, as it is here in Canada, and the Scouts need money.

Mr. Trump's legacy to his country is to turn 'grift' into a philosophy, and to turn money into the basis of pretty much every human interaction.

So here's to his demise and to a nation that's so much better than him and just has to outlive him to become itself again.

Happy Birthday, America. And here's to many more.

Meanwhile…

1. Goooooooooooaaaaaaaaaal! More on Stephen Eustáquio. And his goal. And the World Cup. And how did Japan get 10 goalies?

2. This just in. Inspection reports of every long-term care home in Ontario. Plus the best of chic Europe. And the rise of self-mediclaytion. And the link between writers and drugs (enduring!), and the colours your screen can't show you.

3. American Pie. Who are Canada's hot new tourists? Americans. Plus the United States of Abandoned Places. Plus how the World Cup may save America's 250th. And how Trump's grift just keeps on giving.

4. All politics is local. For example, why AI Data Centres need environmental assessments. Plus the myth of Carney and private jets. And what Obama thinks of Trump. And finally, the most and least corrupt countries on earth.

5. Hate food. Here are the most hated foods on earth. Plus how to reduce food noise. And finally, love babies, especially when they're sleeping. Plus some fruits your lips have likely never touched, and some yummy art for your walls. Finally, the curious case of Stalin's wine cellar.

6. Want to touch the hem of heaven this summer? Join us at The Canada Summit, the fabulous four-day heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here and register here.

7. Value and Values. First, the world's 50 most valuable companies. And 9,400 Roman and Greek letters on the decline and fall of you know where. Also, weddings used to cost too much to host; now they cost too much to attend. And how extreme heat cancelled an event on how to deal with extreme heat. Finally, is who you were who you are?

8. A day in the life…of a Sugar Plum Fairy Queen…of an Arctic expeditioneer…of Harry and Meghan and their comeback tour.

9. Canada wins at Cannes. Here are the Canadian winners of Cannes "Lions" in the Oscars of advertising. Worth scrolling through these clips of our best and brightest, and latest.

10. What's the one thing that sells books? Ann Patchett should know. It's someone saying to a friend: "You must read this book!"

11. How to be a poser, not a poseur. A user's guide to looking your best on someone else's phone.

12. What I'm reading: *Regime Change* by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The New Yorker calls it "exceptional" and The Economist "a masterpiece." It is that and more, reminding us of just how far, wide, deep and fast America has fallen -- as I noted in the essay section above.

This week, the Quebec town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil became the first government in Canada to recognize trees as living things with rights.

It is part of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, a global movement begun in Paris in 2018 to treat trees like people, with rights including "the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity and to regeneration."

The town's gesture of recognition is largely symbolic, but it sets the stage for tests in various courts in Canada around its legal validity. All to say, what used to be thought an absurd proposition by many will soon be treated seriously by the law.

The same path was forged by the idea that a river is a living creature as well. Last year, British naturalist Robert Macfarlane) wrote Is a River Alive? (declared "a masterpiece by The Economist), which fleshed out three examples of rivers being declared living things who should be recognized as such, both in law and in our imaginations. One of those rivers is in India, another in Ecuador, and a third, the Mutehekau or Magpie, is in northeastern Quebec. It is being defended from death by damning in a river-rights campaign.

Macfarlane points out that this is not a new idea, created to help environmentalists preserve and protect vast swaths of land from mining, tourism, rapacious development and climate change. It is one of humankind's most ancient ideas, that humans and nature are all connected, all one. It's also a fundamental precept of most Indigenous people as well, and very much alive in their view of the world and their politics around reconciliation.

My sense is that the "trees are living things" movement has been fueled by the success of UBC Forestry Professor Suzanne Simard's global best-seller, Finding the Mother Tree, which came out in 2021 and popularized the idea that trees can think and communicate, and that they behave as groups as well as individuals.

All of this – that trees and rivers are much like people in that we have certain unalienable rights – must come as a surprise to those who believe humans (and especially white-skinned humans) are at the top of the food chain with everyone else, and certainly everything else, working and heaving below in order to keep us at the top of the pyramid.

The fact that the movement to endow rivers and trees with rights is largely a governmental and legal initiative puts it years ahead of movements that are simply carrying signs in the public square.

All the more we should ready ourselves with news from the animal rights movement, which has also been gaining strength in the courts around the idea of "non-human persons."

But it seems a popular book like Is A River Alive? and Finding the Mother Tree can congeal public opinion and accelerate it to give new rights to the previously disenfranchised.

So stay tuned to American legal scholar Cass Sunstein's new book in January on why Animals Matter: The Case for a Kinder World.

Then get ready for huge blowback from the meat and fish industries.

Meanwhile…

1. A problem redefined is a problem half-solved. Ask Rolex how to appeal to crazy rich Asians. Or Air Force One, which isn't a plane, but a call sign. Or shooting ten years in the air. Or delivering a speech for the ages to celebrate the New York Knicks' first NBA championship in 53 years. Or like McKinsey, capitalizing on your intellectual capital. And finally, how FIFA uses technology to wipe out bad calls.

2. You can be healthier. First, as if more proof was needed, "Alcohol consumption is a major risk factor for global burden of disease, injury and premature death." Next, the FDA has just approved the first new sunscreen option in two decades. And...is AI smarter than doctors? It's growing to be.

3. Is Trump flailing? Look, I know nothing, but I get a sense that the world has tired of cowering whenever he barks. There's Iran, of course, and Italy. And Americans watching his accelerating mental decline. (See his flailing over Washington's Reflecting Pool.) And now, an arch-enemy from Trump's first administration, George Conway (ex of Kellyanne Conway), is running for Congress, and he sure doesn't sound afraid. In fact, I'm predicting that when Trump speaks to the world next Saturday, July 4, celebrating America's 250th anniversary, he will perform so disgracefully, even his flunkies will flee. But I've been wrong about Trump before, as have we all.

4. The World Cup's real heroes…prove you don't need to be big to matter…Canada's captain, Alphonso Davies, has a backstory we should all know, and cheer. And what's with Curaçao and its 78-year-old manager?

5. Men acting badly, unconsciously…get caught when women infiltrate their networks, as Avery Haines did, winning her a Governor-General's Award for Investigative Journalism.

And why Ron MacLean in particular should stop saying 'roofies'. Also, cities need to be more aware of how they can serve women better…And women (or at least Michelle Obama) speaking well of her husband…and why the RCMP still needs work. And how one father-daughter combo flies high.

6. Two left feet. They don't have them. Nor does he. Nor they. Finally, here are the 20 greatest dance routines ever.

7. Good advice for…families' Chief Memory Officers (plus what old photos of our parents say about us)...and advice for we who like wild maps. Plus, the London Underground from overground…plus people who only flush the toilet once…those of us who make every second count…and finally, Americans who want a coat of arms.

8. Big mistakes. 19 big errors that will make you feel better about your next ones. Gwyneth Paltrow shilling for condos in Israel…Plus Mark Twain was a hater when it came to Jane Austen. And old people shouldn't do this.

9. Second thoughts on what we do. First, 100 ways to tie your shoes. Next, is cheap travel overturning the world for good? Plus, how one new word on an AI prompt can change everything. And the Nobel Prize-winner who spent 40 years learning why smart people lose money. Finally, does the world need another museum? The Last Museum doesn't think so: it already has 5.8 million items.

10. Big money. First, how to make a billion dollars (give people what they don't know they want). Next, how to hack a superyacht. Finally, what does it mean to have a trillion dollars?

In my earliest memory of traveling, I was 5 and my mom and dad drove us from Edmonton, where we lived, all the way south in our 1956 Chevy station wagon to Calgary. The station wagon's main job was to deliver flowers for Walter Ramsay Florist, my dad's flower shop.

Then we drove west to Banff on what's now the Old Banff Highway. Along the way, we pulled over at an 'Indian' souvenir shop. I proudly wore my iconic Davy Crockett 'coonskin cap' with leather chaps.

It was thrilling. I'd never seen a mountain before, and the connection between Davy Crockett and the 'Indians' and me, between doing a thing and being a thing, turned me into an intrepid lifelong traveller.

This past week, 72 years later, I kayaked down the Thames River from Henley into London with Jean and our friends from Denver. As we turned east from Boulter's Lock 8 km west of Windsor, there stood Windsor Castle, silent and vast on the horizon ahead. The tourist sites hadn't exaggerated. It really is the largest inhabited castle in the world.

Even better, tracking us all day on the water were bevies of swans and rowing crews, practising for the Henley Regatta next month, plus the rowers from Eton College, the private school founded in 1440 by King Henry VI that still only admits boys and remains the largest boarding school in England.

Jean and I have kayaked a lot over the years, so we know that seeing the world from on the water offers a perspective that even seeing it standing up rarely does. Its most lasting lesson I learned 25 years ago when we were kayaking close to a glacier on the Inside Passage to Alaska. The captain of our tiny 10-passenger ship who let us use the ship's kayaks simply warned: "Don't get too close." Then a huge chunk of ice broke off and hit the water, creating a deep wave in front of us. We were lucky. Our kayaks hit it head on. At any other angle we'd be swamped. The wave picked us waaaaaaay up, then threw us waaaaaaaay down. Then again, and by the time his tiny ship had chugged in to rescue us, we felt lucky to be alive. The captain looked at us askance. "It was big enough to thrill you, but not big enough to kill you."

We'd learned the first lesson of adventure travel.

These random memories rattled in my head while on the Thames as I realized this would be one of our final kayak expeditions. We have too many aching bones to risk them much more in a Georgian Bay storm. Certainly it was too risky to go out on Lake Ontario in the spring when the water's frigid and no other kayakers, let alone any other boats, are in sight.

I asked myself: why are people so addicted to travel? Why do so many of us get up and go so that travel has now become one of the largest industries in the world?

Curiosity, of course. People everywhere want to see how the world looks somewhere else. We want to see Komodo Dragons instead of Golden Retrievers and a Windsor Castle instead of a Windsor Arms. We also want to see people who do things differently from us.

Indeed, we are raised to believe that travel broadens the mind, creates tolerance among different people, religions and political systems and turns strangers into friends. Sadly, the effect of travel on bettering human relations seems to have been wildly overstated. And still, we paddle on.

The other great myth is that the key to happiness is to collect memories and not things. The better your memories, the happier your life. So don't buy that suit, but go to Quebec City for the weekend instead.

This philosophy is particularly in vogue today. But even if you travel 'everywhere', I don't think you often sit down in the rocking chair on the porch and ponder in detail the joys and perils of an especially memorable holiday. It's a belief that drives us and nourishes us, but like the one about thrilling us and killing us, isn't overfilled with truth.

No, what travel has taught me is how much people the world over are alike.

The 8 billion of us alive today, and the 109 billion who came before us, are all part of the same old story: the fight for love and glory. Because the fundamental things apply as time goes by.

Just ask Davy Crockett.

Meanwhile…

1. Goooooooooal! The World Cup rarely runneth over when it comes to ripping at your heart. Here's what some teams are doing to ensure that: Norway went Full Viking in its team photo…and snowbound in its fan reel. Plus U S A, Ireland, France, England, (okay, maybe the Burberry part), Canada, And of course, Nike. Finally (for this week), why Brazil will win the World Cup – again.

2. How to board a plane faster. It's not what you think. Plus how to get people addicted to AI. Plus how real things (like pencils) really work. Plus how to reduce your daily fart rate.

3. The most colourful stories on earth…are the stories of the most colourful colours, from Alabaster to Uranium Red.

4. It's all about the branding. Hilton has opened 34 hotels near U.S. and UK college campuses called Graduate by Hilton. Like this one in Princeton.

Plus the latest from Gucci. Really? Plus the first smart toothbrush for women. And finally, Starbucks is opening "EV lounges" for you and your electric car.

5. Mayor repeals kid's bedtimes. New York's Zohran Mamdani did that so the city's kids would watch the Knick's finals run.

6. Still not booked to go somewhere glorious this summer? Join us at The Canada Summit, the fabulous four-day heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here and register here.

7. I'm sure nothing will go wrong. The American electronic trading platform, Robinhood, just entered Canada last week. It's launched a product where your AI agent invests your funds for you and manages your credit card purchases.

8. Health-check. Is another bad disease -- Atherosclerosis – on the run? Plus, a new way to predict your driving risk from medications.

9. Mourning is out of the shadows. Grief tourism is on the rise, and it doesn't just embrace death. One of the top grief retreats specializes in healing hearts broken in love. Also Miraval offers one of the top grief retreats in the Berkshires.

10. One more week to put your best prompt forward. From last Saturday's OG blog "… I'm now asking you to write an AI prompt in 100 words or less. A prompt is the instruction you give Claude or NotebookLM or whatever AI platform you use to find, sort and generate the content you want.

This should be your magic prompt, and could be your secret one that you're willing to share with our readers. Like how to write a speech, or how to sue your neighbour for cutting down their tree which shaded your porch.

The first rule of prompt engineering is "Persona" + "Task" + "Constraints" + "Format", and the basics of prompt writing are here.

So…here's an example:

1. Persona: You are a travel agent with 30 years experience in Southeast Asia.

2. Task: Create a "foodie tour of Japan and China."

3. Constraints: Two weeks door-to-door. Budget of $15,000 for my wife and me.

4. Format: Include a detailed day-to-day itinerary with recommended restaurants and menus.

For this Prompt Writing Contest, please submit your entry here.

Deadline is Saturday, June 20, 11:59:59 p.m. ET.

The committee will choose three winners: Bronze, Silver and Gold, and publish them in an upcoming issue of the Omnium-Gatherum. Other Honourable Mentions may also be published. In terms of prizes, we found that saying the winners would get their reward in Heaven limited the number of entries. So in this contest, prizes include your name in lights, the envy and respect of your peers, and the feeling that you've done something useful and good for humankind."

Publication Notice: The Omnium-Gatherum is taking a short break and will not publish on June 20. We'll be back in your InBox on June 27.

Joanna Stern writes about tech for The Wall Street Journal. She decided to spend a year using AI to do almost everything, and the result is a book, *I Am Not a Robot,*

We may vaguely recall a decade or more ago reading about a journalist who decided to live like a hermit for a week and order everything they needed online – food, toilet paper, clothes, banking, books, the works.

Back then, ordering stuff online was for early adopters. Hence, the news value of a story about someone who actually lived online. Now, of course, nearly all of us do our banking online, check in for our flight, order dinner in and, of course, drive from A to B.

Fifteen years ago, the online life was novel. You had to cope with new things, like passwords, and use your thumbs to type.

We are in exactly the same place today with Artificial Intelligence. A few of us are both adept and addicted to it. Some of us use AI to write everything from a speech to a book. Shopping or complaining online now means talking to an AI bot to speed up the process.

AI companies are rushing to catch up with what they believe will happen within the next five years, let alone 15. Despite delays, I think driverless cars will be everywhere by 2031, as will robots, which today can fold a tee-shirt, but not one that's fallen on the floor.

Waymo's driverless taxis already operate in a dozen U.S. cities and could be in Toronto soon. Most of us already have wearable devices, like watches and rings and bracelets, monitoring our health by the second.

So, what was once alien, bizarre and hard to get good at becomes the norm.

All the more reason when we bump into AI, we should embrace it, ask how it takes its coffee and how it can help ease our path through life. The last thing we should do is avoid it, or run from it. Those of us who did this when the digital world started seeping through our door 15 years ago…well, the next time you board a flight, count the people who still offer a paper boarding pass, then count their age. Then ask them about the horror of losing their pass.

The big difference between digital adoption and AI adoption is that AI is much faster. Banks and credit card companies all use visual recognition software to save you from having to key in your password; and they're well along in using voice recognition technology to fight AI scammers.

All this is my way of saying, the best time to start learning about AI was two years ago when ChatGPT was hallucinating and safety protocols barely existed. The second best time is today. Because AI is not just wicked fast; it's getting faster, faster. And I repeat: today's version of ChatGPT is the slowest version you'll ever work on.

There are all kinds of courses and colleagues and loved ones who can help get you on the AI wagon. Microsoft offers AI for Beginners; MIT Open Learning has 13 foundational AI courses and resources; the U of T School of Continuing Studies offers a certificate program in AI.

And as I said, scores more groups offer beginner's training; and Claude itself offers free training.

Okay, enough preaching to the unconverted.

For those of you already using AI - to write reports, plan holidays, diagnose patients, or cheat on exams - I have a different message.

It's time to enter our third writing contest.

Last year we ran two of them. In the first, you were asked to write a very short but true story about yourself; in the second, you were asked to write 100 words to your 25-year-old self.

This is different.

I'm now asking you to write a prompt in 100 words or less. A prompt is the instruction you give Claude or NotebookLM or whatever AI platform you use to find, sort and generate the content you want.

This should be your magic prompt, and could be your secret one that you're willing to share with our readers. Like how to write a speech, or how to sue your neighbour for cutting down their tree which shaded your porch.

The first rule of prompt engineering is "Persona" + "Task" + "Constraints" + "Format", and the basics of prompt writing are here.

So…here's an example:

1. Persona: You are a travel agent with 30 years experience in Southeast Asia.

2. Task: Create a "foodie tour of Japan and China."

3. Constraints: Two weeks door-to-door. Budget of $15,000 for my wife and me.

4. Format: Include a detailed day-to-day itinerary with recommended restaurants and menus.

For this Prompt Writing Contest, please submit your entry here.

Deadline is Saturday, June 20, 11:59:59 p.m. ET.

The committee will choose three winners: Bronze, Silver and Gold, and publish them in an upcoming issue of the Omnium-Gatherum. Other Honourable Mentions may also be published. In terms of prizes, we found that saying the winners would get their reward in Heaven limited the number of entries. So in this contest, prizes include your name in lights, the envy and respect of your peers, and the feeling that you've done something useful and good for humankind.

Meanwhile…

1. Baby in a bulldozer. That's what Tim Snyder calls Donald Trump's relationship with the world.

2. The Army of Drones Bonus System. The Ukrainian Army has advanced the video gamification of war by creating a competition among its frontline drone pilots, with points and prizes for high scorers. The Washington Post reports "[It's] the only program of its kind in the world. Units earn points for each Russian soldier they incapacitate or kill and each weapon, vehicle or piece of military equipment they destroy. Points may be redeemed in an online government marketplace for more drones, with which to target more Russian forces." Gory details here.

Speaking of death, pancreatic cancer may no longer be a death sentence. 80% of patients today are diagnosed in the metastatic stage, and just 3% of them are alive after 5 years. But a new pill, Daraxonrasib, doubles patients' survival rates and boosts their quality of life. Bladder cancer seems to be on the run as well. Doctors are hailing a British drug, Durvalumab, that spares bladder cancer patients "life-changing" surgery and stops tumours from coming back.

Meanwhile, a large majority of Canadians support Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) as it's now constituted, but not the proposed reforms around mental illness.

3. Two Canadian cities. Last year, Toronto's luxury housing market fell more than any city in the world, except Guangzhou, China. Also, what is the world's most photographed hotel? Quebec City's Chateau Frontenac.

4. One fine evening. On June 27, Canada's storied rock-jazz group, Lighthouse, will perform at The Concert Hall. They're celebrating the Anniversary Edition of their global hit One Fine Morning first recorded 55 years ago. Tickets here. See you there.

5. What's on, and what's good at Stratford. Dr. David Goldbloom is an eminent psychiatrist who chaired the Board of the Stratford Festival and attends opening nights and writes about them for his friends. Here's what he said about Stratford's six new productions this past opening week.

Speaking of Stratford, Sara Waxman wrote a review about the opening of Waiting for Godot, which featured her grandson, 12-year-old Asher Albert Waxman. Her son Adam Waxman was also in two Stratford productions, and her late husband, Al Waxman, played Willy Loman in Stratford's Death of a Salesman in 1997. A new production of Salesman debuts at Stratford this summer.

6. Learn more about UFOs. Unidentified Flying Objects have had a bad rap. But serious science is now looking at them and finding…well, they're still not sure. After a name change in 2021, UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) are getting their own conference, the first outside the U.S. On the weekend of July 24-26, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (UAP) will present Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and former Minority Staff Director, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Details here.

7. Connections. What happens when you map every friendship in the U.S.? Something odd. And how the new Major League Baseball salary caps and floors are related. Plus, the global spice map, and how the ROM Walks connect you with the city. Plus, how rising temperatures impair your judgement. Finally, how to get fired from "60 Minutes."

8. Still not planned to go somewhere glorious this summer? Join us at The Canada Summit, the fabulous four-day heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here and register here.

9. Louche luxury and precarious doctors. Amidst the crowd of far-from-the-madding crowd experiences are a new British train and the world's most intelligent hotel. Plus an interesting theory on where the middle class disappeared to, what a portfolio career looks like, and where the ultra-rich are now living.

10. 250 for 250. The 250th birthday of the United States is coming up. To mark the occasion in a decidedly non-jingoistic manner, historian Heather Cox Richardson is producing a series of one-minute videos, each featuring one of 'the many people, places, and events that have built America and remind us of the power of each person to make history'. Here are the first.

Plus, The Washington Post's review of The Obama Center in South Chicago. It opens June 19.

Speaking of citizenship, Mark Carney spoke on June 1 at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. [start from 11:10] Plus Dambisa Moyo on the first innings of the new world order.

This week the City of Toronto unveiled its new Drug Toxicity Crisis Acknowledgement, an addition to its existing Land Acknowledgement and African Ancestral Acknowledgement.

It didn't actually unveil what City Hall staffers are expected to read or display at the start of certain formal events or meetings. The drug acknowledgement was leaked to an Instagrammer who sent it to the world, including my Instagram feed.

Here's part of what it says: “We acknowledge that this crisis is rooted in systemic discrimination. People who use drugs often experience stigma, and multiple intersecting forms of discrimination, including racism, sexism and colonialism.”

I don't mind these acknowledgements. I may be bored hearing them recited over and over, like grace before dinner. But they do remind me of the great ill that was done to Indigenous and Black Canadians, often in the name of colonialism.

But I do mind the Drug Acknowledgement because its righteousness is wrong on so many fronts.

First, it confuses “drug use” with “drug addiction.” Most drug users aren't drug addicts. Many people can take street drugs and walk away and not clean out their savings and end up living on the street. What's different from 30 years ago when I was addicted to cocaine is that your chances of dying are much higher today. One snort of fentanyl laced with whatever and your life is over. Russian roulette is a safer bet. In this environment, you may not live long enough to become addicted.

Second, drugs are equal opportunity destroyers. You can be rich or poor, Black or white, come from Yale or jail, and these drugs will find you. If you have control of your schedule and some money, that just means your bottom will be lower than if you get intervened on sooner.

I spent four months at a treatment centre that was geared to help doctors, lawyers, pilots and even admirals. They weren't poor, a very few of them weren't white and yet all were just as addicted as the all-Black population of the county-run treatment centre where I interned as a very junior addiction counsellor.

My real problem with the Drug Acknowledgement is that it doesn't go far enough.

Rich white men haven't generally been using drugs to keep poor Black men and women sick and powerless. Nor have colonizers, whoever they are.

The fact is, everyone has been discriminating against drug users since forever.

The reason isn't colonialism; it's human nature. Even though addiction was labelled a disease back in the 1970s, vast swathes of us still think it is a character flaw: “You're ruining your career! Your family! Your life!”

“Why can't you just stop?!”

Well, maybe we can just stop in the same way that we've slowed the incidence of discrimination around mental illness. Three decades ago, no one raised their hand to say: “I'm depressed.” Today for the most part we do, knowing we won't be labelled as weak or crazy.

It will take 20 to 30 more years to de-stigmatize drug addiction, the same length of time it took to de-stigmatize mental illness.

Maybe City Hall's Drug Acknowledgement will help speed that change; I doubt it, though, because it lacks the crucial benefit of being true.

Meanwhile…

1. Who knew…? Children are like horses…marriage is so last year…snakes kill 1,000 people a year…Ben Franklin fled Montreal 250 years ago this month…this week a German YouTuber won the Gloucestershire cheese rolling race for the third year running. The cheese roll reached a speed of 70 mph…and yes, there's a Canadian Gap Year Association.

2. Gender bending. Are you a boy who sits like a girl? Plus what it's like to kiss a stranger for the first time. Plus Michael Jackson beats it two ways.…And finally, Noah Wylie isn't a nurse, though his mom was.

3. Regaining your rep. What better place for Kevin Spacey to fight his blacklisting on false sexual assault charges than the Oxford Union? Plus Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor who commissioned a report that showed what a fine job he was doing as Britain's trade envoy. Plus Russian conductor Valery threw his lot in with Vladimir Putin and hasn't performed in the West since 2020. His talent is undimmed.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy served time in prison for using Libyan money from Muammar Gaddafi to finance his campaign. As this BBC podcast shows and tells, he may be innocent.

Finally, who's very wise about where AI is leading us? The Catholic Church of England and Wales. And of course, The Pope himself, who spoke in depth about the dangers of AI. and who may have been targeting Peter Thiel in it.

4. Blue and white. There's the flag of Scotland. The Toronto Maple Leafs. The Blue Jays. Houses on Greek islands, UN Peacekeepers, and now, 500 pieces of blue and white porcelain going back to the 1600s and given by their collector, Rosalie Sharp, to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art where it's now in their permanent collection.

5. I could look at these people for ages. August Sanders, the German photographer set out to document every type and profession in the fading epoch of prewar Germany. The New Yorker called it his "enormous attempt to capture a lost world," and you'll see why here. "People of the 20th Century" is on at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 28, and online forever.

6. Are you a newcomer? Canoo, the app from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, opens all kinds of doors to your new country.

7. Can tech nerds be nice? There's a new club in New York, Maxwell Social, that's inviting young tech entrepreneurs to develop their unkempt social skills. As they say, it's not your third place, it's your second home, and it's attracting a new generation of talent and money.

Speaking of making it in America, Alfred Kazin wrote about it back in 1965 and it sounds just like today when just being an American can be your career.

8. Graphic answers to big questions. First, what do Albertans think about leaving Canada? Angus Reid thinks not much. Next, which countries have the most doctors? Not your home and native land. Next, how does the Gini Coefficient work in different countries? And how well do you remember colours? And can you spot the error? And finally, what will you die from? I ask because your body knows how to die.

9. Counterfactuals. It means 'what might have been", and once you think of one, it's hard to stop. Like, what if the Nazi's had invaded Britain (and what if Russia attacks Britain now)? Or, what if gravity were a bit weaker? Well, for one, birds would be gigantic. Your flight into fantasyland takes off here.

10. What I'm watching: Legends, on Netflix, the 6-part tale of how British Customs agents worked undercover during Margaret Thatcher's reign to stem the rising tide of heroin coming from Turkey into Liverpool and London. Like its cousin, The Gold, this cops-and-robbers procedural gripped me from the start, with scads of familiar faces in key roles. Vedy Bwitish.

What I'm anticipating: Tuner, directed by Toronto's Daniel Roher in his first narrative fiction film. It's a crime thriller about a peculiar piano tuner (Leo Woodall) and his surrogate father (Dustin Hoffman), and opens in theatres this weekend. Part of it was shot in Koerner Hall.

What I'm also anticipating: From June 5 - 7, TIFA presents MOTIVE: The crime and mystery festival where some of the leading masters of mystery discuss their thrillers and true-crime secrets.

What I'm inserting: What? An entire blog without a single mention of Donald Trump? Never!

The last time a province tried to leave the country was on October 30, 1995, when a referendum was held in Quebec.

The "Yes" or "Leave" side won 2,308,360 votes, or 49.42% of the vote, and the "No" or "Stay" side won 2,362,648 votes, or 50.58% of the vote. A record 93.52% of eligible voters cast their ballot.

Whew.

I remember in the months leading up to the vote that our view in English Canada shifted from "Quebec will never leave" and "They're just a small group of rabble-rousers", to "Once Quebeckers realize what's at stake, they'll come around", to "OMG, they're going to destroy the country!"

Let us not put our faith in the gods of luck twice.

Today, Alberta's threats to leave the country are at the "Alberta will never leave" stage. The Globe and Mail's Andrew Coyne wrote a prescient essay on this last week.

Said Coyne: "In a world that seems to grow more unstable by the week, [Canada] stands as a beacon of stability, safety and sanity. For all of its imperfections it remains one of the highest achievements of human statecraft, among one of the most successful societies in all of history…and in a few months it could all be blown apart."

Coyne went on to list the chancers pushing Alberta to leave and fend for its own which will very likely mean throwing in its future with America, thus doing for Donald Trump what he's so far failed to do on his own.

On October 19, Alberta is planning a province-wide referendum that will ask Alberta should remain part of Canada, along with other constitutional questions.

So Canada has five months to work to keep Alberta in Confederation in ways that are better than it did with Quebec in 1995.

Back then, Ottawa tried to weaken the Yes side's case by questioning the referendum's framing and pushing a pro-Canada message. Jean Chrétien and his Cabinet also visited Quebec often, promising reforms like recognizing Quebec as a distinct society. On October 27, three days before the vote, over 100,000 Canadians, including four Premiers, gathered at Place du Canada in Montreal, to urge Quebeckers to vote "No" to leaving.

Looking back, it's clear Canadians could have done much more to keep Quebeckers in the country.

So now, let's look at what we can do to help our Albertan compatriots.

We can do the usual things, like reaching out to Albertans we know or are related to and …listening. Those of us who live in The Imperial City should avoid Toronto-splaining. We should also donate to, amplify or volunteer with pro-Canada groups in Alberta, and elevate Indigenous viewpoints from Alberta. Remember, their treaty relationships are with Canada, not Alberta.

We should also call out misinformation on the "leave" side. In 1995, there was no social media. Today, the leak of private information belonging to millions of Alberta voters signals that this campaign is already dirty and threatens to remain nasty. Failing to scream and point fingers when cheating happens is one of the biggest threats of all.

We should also prod Ottawa to do more deals like the pipeline agreement Mark Carney signed last week with Danielle Smith last week to create high-profile wins for Alberta.

Certainly this summer we should also visit Alberta. After all, visits by Americans to Alberta are already up by 9% over last year. Maybe they see something we don't.

And finally, there are between half a million and a million people born in Alberta who are not living in Alberta. I'm one of them, born in Edmonton and left at age 12. We should raise our hands to join a sort of Alberta Foreign Legion of ex-pats who have a view of the province that those who have never left may lack.

Who knows what will happen if we strike up a face-to-face conversation with someone who calls it home?

Meanwhile…

1. We'll never replace ourselves via babies. Canada no longer has a low fertility rate; it has an ultra-low fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman. The replacement level needed to sustain a population from one generation to the next is 2.1 children per woman. In the year 2023, the world's total fertility rate fell below the replacement rate for the first time in 200,000 years. The fertility collapse is happening in places we likely don't think of: Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East. What's more, if Thailand continues at its current fertility rate for 200 years, its population will decline from 63 million to 2 million.

2. How to…turn a book into a best-seller…be a better panda…keep your brain from rotting… and get a free university education.

3. Hail and farewell. On Thursday, Stephen Colbert signed off as host of The Late Show, after 11 years and 1801 episodes. Here's the full version of the worst of his shows.

4. Risky business. What occupations have the highest divorce rates? And let's find out if Toronto's Police are antisemetic…and should you trust the U.S. Department of Justice the most, or the least? Plus, an idea I'd not heard of: gynofascism. It refers to the perceived dominance of institutional "safetyism" and risk-aversion. Proponents argue it stifles traditional risk-taking, free expression, and masculine problem-solving approaches. Here are three of them: Gag me.

5. Write on, and on. If your similes are obvious and shallow ("as dry as a...desert"), it's time to spice them up. Plus how one school is rebuilding education for an AI world.

6. Narrative gets its own museum. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens on September 22 in Los Angeles. Fabulous.

7. If summer hasn't found you yet, we may have. Join us at The Canada Summit, the glorious, four-day, heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here and register here.

Sir Simon Schama called the Kardamyli Festival "a nonstop glorious experience: brilliant talks; exhilarating company; glorious setting; nothing quite like it." Join us at The Kardamyli Festival this Fall in Greece.

8. A train, not a bicycle. That's what Tim Requarth thinks AI is, and that's not a good thing. Requarth is the new breed of neuroscientist-writer who tries to explain brain science via brilliant writing.

Speaking of whom, Craig Venter died last month. Back in 2000, he won the race to map the human genome against much better-funded scientists who had White House support. This week, the Globe and Mail revealed that two and a half years ago, Venter donated blood to Sick Kids Hospital in hopes of sparking another leap forward. "In a study posted online last week and submitted for peer review, researchers at the hospital's Centre for Applied Genomics revealed that they used DNA from blood donated by Dr. Venter for the newly developed method."

His first of many prizes was a Gairdner Award in 2002.

9. You like Nike commercials? Try Adidas! Speaking of New York, check out its bodega cats. Plus the Milky Way Photographer of the Year. Plus 19 cities (including Toronto) where locals and tourists take photos very differently. Plus why birds really murmurate. And why "genocide", a word we throw around too much, has a very precise meaning. Finally, her again,

10. Unmaking the grade. Last month I reported on the perilous rise of grades at universities. Harvard was the main culprit with 60% of its grades being "A's". This week, Harvard's faculty voted 70% to 30% to limit the number of "A's" it awards its students.

Three years ago I was having lunch with an old friend. The soup sounded good, so I ordered it. I dipped my spoon into the bowl, and as I was bringing it to my lips, I felt the tiniest tremor. Not so anyone would notice. But I did. I took another sip. The same slight shake of my left hand, my soup hand. Hmmmm. I waited five minutes.

"You don't like your soup?"

"Yes, yes, I do." My spoon quickly consumed the rest of the bowl.

As we left the lunch, I thought this was very odd. I certainly did not think: "Do I have Parkinson's?" or "Am I going to die a dreadful death?"

But over the next month, I would test my grip by holding a spoon of coffee above the cup to see if it was shaking. No shaking.

A month later, back at the same restaurant, I had the same opportunity. I even ordered the same soup. This time, the tremor was slightly more pronounced. I paused a flicker of a second, which I was sure my lunch-mate noticed. But I was trapped. I couldn't eat my soup with my right hand, nor could I pick up the bowl with both hands and slurp it down. It wasn't that kind of bowl, or occasion, or restaurant.

So I ploughed through. But the more I tried not to shake, the more it seemed my hand shook. Again, it was barely noticeable. But to me, I was now officially, medically, spastic.

I got to thinking about a colleague who had a tremor years ago, and then grew into a daily fight to get his sugar into his coffee. All of us at work noticed. You couldn't not. So I asked him: "Tell me about your tremor."

"My doctor says it's an essential tremor".

"An essential tremor? What makes it essential?"

"I don't know."

Over the years, his tremor has grown more pronounced but still only affects his hands and when they want to do something like hold a cup to their mouth or carve the Sunday roast beef.

I remembered this because of its odd name and got online.

I didn't have an essential tremor because I can hold that cup and cut that beef.

So I asked my physician wife, Jean, what was going on. I showed her how my left hand shakes a bit when I try to put something into my mouth by spoon, or now, by fork too. She said: "Oh, you have an intentional tremor."

"An intentional tremor? What makes it intentional?"

"The fact that you're intending to put the spoon in your mouth and that intent causes your hand to shake."

I remembered my colleague's essential tremor and my own intentional one, and thought, wow, whoever ran the Name Bank that day clocked off early. These tremors are different for sure.

Mine only kicks in when I intend to eat something, and the closer I get to my intended target (my mouth), the worse the tremor becomes. So I've developed a "Don't think of elephants" strategy, not tightening my grip on my spoon the closer it gets to my mouth, but loosening it. That helps a bit.

When my tremor first appeared three years back, my first reaction was to hide in embarrassment, to try to cover for my disability. As I learned more, I got less self-conscious.

Then last week I learned that the Republican senator from Maine, Susan Collins, who's 73, revealed that she has long had a benign essential tremor.

Said Collins, who is running in the November mid-terms, "it is extremely common." And she has had it the entire 30 years of her Senate career. (Some 7 million Americans have an essential tremor, and 1.2 million Canadians have it. There are no figures for intentional tremors).

As The New York Times noted: "Her remarks came amid mounting online scrutiny — pushed in particular on the left — of the shakiness that is often detectable when Ms. Collins speaks, and questions about whether it has worsened with time.

Which brings up the big issue of embarrassment. Not just if someone thinks I'm unwell, but if they think I'm getting…are you ready?...they think I'm getting old.

Well, I'll soon be 77. My father died years ago at 69, and he was old. Which shows that "old" these days is a lot older than before. But I sense you can never really outrun being old. It just comes with the territory.

Meanwhile…

1. David Attenborough crests 100. Hear him and smile. See him and weep.

2. Algorithms Bad. For two reasons: one, they shrink our horizon of possibilities. "We can't pursue a career we've never heard of, read a book we don't know exists, or encounter a community that never reaches us. Algorithmic systems create what feels like abundance while the underlying diversity narrows." And two, they shrink our vocabulary and length of sentences. A recent University of Coruña study found that machine-generated language has a narrower range of sentence length, averaging 12-20 words, and a narrower vocabulary than human speech. Algorithms good, too. But just wanted to point out it's always both.

Speaking of bad, no one likes to have their texts made public. But if you're Sam Altman and Mira Murati, it gets cringeworthy.

3. The trouble with…narrative history is it creates meaning where there is none…And with dictators is they can't stand being laughed at. And with Keir Starmer isn't that he's a dead man walking, but why. And with informed citizens is, there are so few of them.

4. For the birds. First, their invisible highways. Next, you can learn their songs. And why half a million Swedes wake up early to hear this.

5. Good news openings…like the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York. The premiere of the British podcast, False Flag, on how a Russian attack on Britain would play out. Plus this achingly Canadian tale about a moose and a trucker. Plus, how an international conflict negotiator takes on couples therapy. And finally, speaking of openings, commencement season is soon upon us. Stay tuned for advice like this.

6. Ted no longer Talks. The "bon vivant, TIME's Man of the Year 1991, and a public embarrassment", Ted Turner, changed our viewing habits forever. Jane Fonda called him "my favorite ex-husband."

7. Old scientists aren't like old architects. The former get less creative as they age; the latter, more. As for nurses, they just soldier on. And strippers? They change their job description.

8. THE Judy Collins plays Toronto for the last time. Later this month, one of the world's great folk artists – she's recorded 55 albums in her 50-year-plus career – performs at Hugh's Room. Get tickets here for May 26, and here for May 27.

9. Take in a show and live longer. The news that doctors can prescribe visiting a museum to reduce your depression is…old news. But this week, we learned from a British study that taking in the arts, let alone taking part in them, will help you live longer. And not just going to the museum or the concert half, but cracking open a book. Especially since there's evidence it's just as good as exercise. It's about time we had a big new argument to fund the arts.

10. Sir Simon Schama called the Kardamyli Festival "a nonstop glorious experience: brilliant talks; exhilarating company; glorious setting; nothing quite like it." Join us at The Kardamyli Festival this Fall in Greece. Just a few spots remain.

Peaks by day. Ideas by night. There's still a very few rooms available at The Canada Summit, the glorious, four-day, heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here. Register here.

11. What I'm watching. DTF St. Louis, a 7-part dark comedy on HBO/Crave. Crazy writing, twisted plotting and great acting from some old familiar faces.

Ottawa is opening the taps to secure our future, just not for the part that tells us who we are.

In last month's fiscal update, Ottawa earmarked $63 billion for defence spending next year, on its way to $1 trillion in 2035. The new Defence Industrial Strategy alone lets Canadian firms chase $180 billion in procurement promising 125,000 high-paying careers.

AI and digital infrastructure are also lavished with attention, just shy of $1 billion. But it's nothing compared to the $32 billion earmarked for northern development and defence-linked infrastructure.

All those numbers are eye-spinning in their own right, and all the more compared to what Ottawa spends on the arts and culture. Because while defence and infrastructure are measured in the billions, the arts and culture are measured in the millions. And let's not forget that a billion is a thousand millions, and a trillion is a thousand billion.

One kind of funding (billions) builds the stage; another (millions) writes the script and puts on the show.

The budget does sprinkle money on culture – $769 million over five years across arts and culture programs, with $67.5 million for live presenters and festivals and $54 million to creators via the Canada Music Fund and the Canada Council. But compare that to the tens of billions for defence and the trillion‑dollar decade projection and you see it for what it is: housekeeping, not nation‑building. Even the headline cultural envelope at Canadian Heritage – $1.89 billion for 2024‑25, including about $363 million for the Canada Council, $199 million for Library and Archives Canada, and $1.38 billion for the CBC – is accompanied by a planned $205 million cut to the department through a government‑wide expenditure review.

The CBC is our canary in this coal mine. In 2024-25, its budget was nudged from about $1.28 billion to roughly $1.38 billion with a $42 million bump for programming. Yet that small rise is followed by a $192 million reduction to the CBC planned for 2026‑27.

In other words, in the Age of Elbows Up, at a time when Canadians are asserting our identity with each other and the world, when "O Canada" is sung with gusto before Toronto Symphony Orchestra concerts and by fans of the Buffalo Sabres playing against the Boston Bruins, for heaven's sake, when all kinds of people are finding new funds to promote Canada's identity and sovereignty, and when books by Canadians made up just 14% of all print book sales in Canada in 2025.

I say it's time to give our arts and culture organizations the kind of quantum grant increases that our defence and tech sectors are getting.

So why does this matter if we have AI labs, quantum hubs, drone test beds and skills academies sprouting like condos? Because all those systems need operating software, and for a country, that software is its stories.

We are investing billions so Canadians can build the tools of the future but asking them to tell our future stories on a shoestring.

We're racing to weaponize algorithms while defunding the people who can help us understand what those algorithms should and should not do. Books, films, plays, exhibitions – these are not frills; they are the social code that lets 44 million strangers imagine themselves as "us" when the weather, or the world, turns rough.

If we are serious about sovereignty, that sovereignty has to be cultural as well as territorial. Otherwise, we will own the infrastructure of tomorrow and rent the meaning from somewhere else.

Meanwhile…

1. Buffalo needs us and as they start the series against Les Canadiens, we need them.

2. Democracy: Some conditions may apply. Lesson one: the tyrant story always ends the same. Plus, Tory fund-raising appeals grow hystericaler and hystericaler. And Orbán is out in Hungary; now comes the hard part. Plus the global economy in one giant map.

3. Job-hoppers. Join the U.S. Foreign Service. And the merit society. (i.e. Yuppies). And people with the most savings and most powerful passports. And why this plane can't fly. And why this flight attendant can. And who says women can't run ultramarathons and have babies at the same time?

4. The new bad behaviour. Start with the merits of theft at The New York Times, and on the opposite pole, microlooting. Now move along to shocking legal waivers for big dieters. And "look, honey, we got invited to Prince Andrew's wedding." Plus, what we wish The Queen had said about her treatment by Trump, but didn't (it's fake AI). Plus how to accept rejection gracefully, and being a woke at the wheel.

5. The end is here. Where are the best death cafes on earth? Plus how DEI beat out science to get into med school. Plus, Toronto is luring Americans across the border and the Saudis cancel their $200 million gift to the Met, while the Royal Conservatory responds to abuse claims. Plus, what Jane thought of Ted. Finally, some sumptuous Smithsonian photos and even more in The Guardian.

6. A woman. A horse. A win. Of course. The thrilling victory of Golden Tempo in the 152nd Kentucky Derby, whose odds were 23 to 1, took off from the back of the pack and passed 17 other horses to win. It's the first Derby where the winner was trained by a woman, Cherie deVaux, who seems delighted. And bonus!…a primer on The Kentucky Derby.

7. Where do hereditary peers walk the plank? In Britain, of course. Where do stars hide away in LA? Plus, how did they make this very special bag for women? Plus, why are airlines always going broke? And who is the worst counterfeiter ever?

8. Health beat. How much of our lifespan do we control? And what exactly is broken heart syndrome? And why nobody accidentally feels great at 70. And when you can't do gold-standard work, do aluminum-standard instead.

9. Is Jeff Bezos Amazon? Some of its 1.57 million workers think so and they took employee activism to new levels at the Met Gala which Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, co-chaired. Meanwhile, over at the Amazon AGM, here's what CEO Andy Jassy wrote to the shareholders.

10. Attention-fracking is a thing. It means you can't focus on anything, so you can't remember anything, so you can't value anything. This explains why. Speaking of…there's the law and then there's Jude. Plus, how to give up on doom-scrolling. Finally, Route 66 is turning 100. And don't do this at home, kids.

11. Mapping happy. Let's start with feelings. Then on to the true size of…Next, the true size of nations. Then five perfect homes that prove you don't need more space, and one great tiny "over the falls" retreat. Plus Morioka Shoten is a bookstore in Tokyo that only sells one title per week. When they showcased a book about ceramics, the shelves were full of handmade pottery. And in Malmo, Sweden, the Dawitt Isaak Library is the first public library devoted entirely to forbidden books. Finally, the best 100-year-old colour blocker of all.

A marathon is the distance between the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville and the Ford Assembly Plant in Oakville.

I used to say that when I was the Propagandist-in-Chief for JeansMarines, the women's marathon training group created by my wife, Jean, to run the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. JeansMarines ran from 2002 to 2008, and hundreds of women joined each February to cross the finish line nine months later at the Iwo Jima Memorial into the arms of a waiting U.S. Marine. Lots of those women carried on running, and Jean ended up finishing first in her age group in the Boston Marathon seven times before retiring in 2020.

So the news that Sabastian Sawe, a 31-year-old Kenyan, ran the first sub 2-hour marathon in history last week at the London Marathon tugged at not only the world's 75 million marathoners, but the 400 million more who have run a 5K and 10K. Sawe won in a staggering time of 1:59:30, which is 26.2 consecutive miles at 4 minutes, 33 seconds per mile. Not only that, he ran a negative split, that is to say, he ran faster in the second half of the race than in the first. Not only that, he wasn't the only one to break the 'impossible' barrier. Finishing second was Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia in 1:59:41.

For those of us middle-of-the-packers, whose finish time is often 4 hours plus, it is an honour to even compete in the same event with the best runners in the world, and humbling to know that by the time we are halfway, they are crossing the finish line.

It's instructive to learn how Sawe did it and how yesterday's 'impossible' can turn into tomorrow's 'probable'.

First, there was a sense of inevitability. The record time had been falling for a decade. Ten years ago it was 2:02:57. Five years ago, 2:01:39, and last year 2:00:35. In 2016, Nike created Breaking 2, a controlled unofficial try at the world's first sub-2-hour marathon. It didn't work.

But there were all kinds of innovations in training, nutrition and especially footwear.

In 2023 Adidas introduced the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 whose ultra light weight of 97 grams took two to three minutes off runners' times. (You can buy a pair like the ones Sawe ran in for $4,690.) Said Nick Thompson), CEO of The Atlantic and a world-record distance runner himself: "Companies created new kinds of foam, new kinds of plates…and new ways you build up the back of the shoe to change a person's stride."

Sawe's second advantage was a new gut-bypassing hydrogel that helped him fuel more while by-passing gastro issues. So he could take on bicarbonate sodium (baking soda) which enhances performance by buffering hydrogen ions. Said one commentator: "Not only is Sawe an extraordinary athlete, he's also one of the best fuellers the marathon has ever seen."

Sawe's third unbeatable advantage is family values. He attended weekly services at the Catholic Church in Cheukta. His grandmother instilled discipline and gratitude; his competitive spirit came via a teacher, Julius Kemei. He then entered a spartan training camp in the Rift Valley with 30 other runners where they learned the repeatable routines that are the foundation for any great runner. In the months before London, Sawe was running between 200 and 240 km a week.

After Roger Bannister ran the world's first sub-4-minute mile, what was once thought impossible began to happen all the time. Today, the world record for the mile run by a man is 3:43:13, and by a woman 4:07:64. Odds are, the psychological breakthrough of the Bannister Effect will hold true in marathons as well, not just in a slew of men running sub-2 hours, but in a woman breaking that 2-hour mark within a decade.

So what records are left to conquer?

Here are three of them: The first Pacific swim, the 9-metre long jump, and the 30-minute breath hold. Last year, Croatian freediver Vito Maričić held his breath underwater for 29 minutes and 3 seconds, which is longer than an episode of The Simpsons. I'm not sure I could hold mine for the 57 seconds Maričić needs to beat those 30 minutes.

What I do know is that last week Sabastian Sawe did the impossible, the way Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay did in 1953 by conquering Everest, and Jim Hines did in 1968 when he ran the first ever 100 metre race in under 10 seconds.

Meanwhile…

1. On Everest, twice as many are climbing. So why are only half as many dying?Could it be that common sense and safety are infecting climbers? Two Canadians, Kent Moore and Dr. John Semple, helped write a study on deaths on Everest. As they note: "Most climbers who die do so on Summit Day, but mortality rates during descent from the summit decreased from 3.0% to 0.8%." Also, last summer a Polish climber skied down Everest from its peak – after climbing for 16 hours through The Death Zone.

2. His day in court. A Court document…from The Browser. "It contains more twists than most thrillers. Two men — Matthew Keirans and William Woods — met in the 1980s working at a hotdog cart. Keirans then executed an extraordinary identity theft. As Woods, he took out loans, got a six-figure job, got married and had a child, who received the victim's surname. In 2019, the real Woods tried to fight back — and was imprisoned for his trouble."

3. Bent coppers. Can AI root out corrupt police? It is in London. So how about Toronto? Speaking of…Toronto's cops are bulking up. Plus, the tough-guy book club. Plus, why do French Fries stolen from someone else's plate taste better?

4. The gorilla my dreams. There's a new documentary on Netflix with a 99-year-old man reading from journals he kept half a century ago, watching footage of mountain gorillas he once sat with in a Rwandan forest. Yes, it's David Attenborough and A Gorilla Story. Plus winning news pix.

5. Neat feats. First, training planes. Plus Fred again gives a Tiny Desk concert on NPR. Plus AI tips and tricks. Plus how Finland wiped out homelessness. And who knew this about the U of T?

6. What's coming for you? Surveillance pricing. And rich rare books. And two Michelin-starred diners in Toronto: Ricky + Olivia, and "156". Plus the must-see AI Doc You can also download Artemis wallpaper. and find out if your family were Nazis. And discover the meaningful math of middle powers.

7. Carter Johnson plays Hughes Room. Last year, Nanaimo's Carter Johnson became the first Canadian finalist in the Van Cliburn International Competition. The same year he was named silver laureate of the Honens International Competition and the first prize winner of the 2025 Dublin International Competition. He performs at Hugh's Room on Wednesday, May 13. Tickets here.

8. Peaks by day. Provocation by night. There's still room to join us at The Canada Summit, the four-day heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we're headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and AI, and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here.

Join us also on a Turkish gulet along Turkey's "Turquoise coast", and at The Kardamyli Festival in Greece this Fall with the entire front page of British non-fiction writers.

9. Rule changes… come to the World Cup. And a new weight-loss drug "better than Ozempic" is coming. Plus a 10-letter word for self-loathing. Plus Queen Elizabeth's strange afterlife. And how two years of research takes just two weeks today.

10. World's biggest… banks by assets… gas prices (Hong Kong at $15.65 a gallon)… army (Bangladesh by a country mile)… self-sufficient food countries (there's just one)… Deadliest viruses (Rabies? really?) And most in debt to the IMF.

11. The frenzy over… Jackie O's possessions… The Loo of the Year Award… letting go… naval failures… nobody accidentally feels great at 70… the Toronto Zoo's one million dollar donation. And how the Metropolitan Opera lost $200 million in revenues.

12. What I'm reading. Two new reports by the U of T's Citizen Lab, one of the world's great unveilers of cybercrime. Last week on telecom surveillance, and this week on targeting journalists.

You have to be smart (or nepo-ed) to get into Harvard.

54,008 students applied for this year’s Freshman class and just 1,937 (or 3.58%) were admitted. But once you’re in, you’re in. This year, 66% of Harvard grades are A’s, up from 25% twenty years ago.

Such careening grade inflation has caused Harvard’s faculty to vote this week on a proposal to limit the number of “A”s to 20% of students taking the course. Needless to say, the students think this is a terrible idea.

But Harvard is not alone. By 2021–22, over half of McGill undergrad courses had average grades of A or A‑, and percentages only slightly less exist at Queen’s, Western and the University of Toronto.

Indeed, if allowed to spread unchecked, 100% of students will get A’s, thereby violating one of the laws of human behaviour: we will always work to create differences among us, especially when none exist.

The same holds for high school grades. Back then, only the rarest of birds got a 90% or above average. Today 90% will get you into U of T, but you’ll need at least an 85% average to be considered. It’s not that IQs have risen sharply in the nearly 60 years since I graduated from high school. It’s grade inflation.

Now grade inflation, like price inflation, is a bad thing. Gas in Toronto last year cost $1.63 to $1.79 a litre. Today it’s $1.79 to $1.89. Steak in 2020 cost $22.51/kg compared to today’s $35/kg.

But what if we could link grade inflation and price inflation and use both to reduce the bad effects of the other?

Under my model, high school marks would also be indexed to inflation: when too many 17‑year‑olds have averages that would have put them in the Order of Canada a generation ago, a province’s transfer payments to school boards will automatically shrink. Suddenly, every principal will have the same conversation: “We can give everyone 95s, or we can keep the lights on.”

Doug Ford, are you listening? Because, over time, governments will pay less for the downstream consequences of inflated credentials. They won’t have to fund as many fifth‑year degrees, “transition programs,” and internship mills built to re‑introduce failure to young people who thought a B+ was a hate crime.

Those savings can be channelled into grants for institutions that keep their “A”‑rates under control. In return, those universities will commit to lowering tuition for students who are currently paying champagne prices for tap‑water distinctions.

Think of it as a central bank for grades. When the “A”‑money supply gets too loose, the “Grade Bank of Canada” raises the Academic Rigor Rate. When the supply tightens and students are genuinely struggling, it loosens again.

Soon, Harvard will be begging to get back to a mere 35% A’s, not just because it creates higher standards, but because that’s how it qualifies for the federal “Too Smart To Fail” bailout. Until then, we’ll go on pretending that 84% of Harvard work is in the A range, Ontario teenagers are all budding Einsteins, and employers can somehow tell them apart with psychometric tests and unpaid internships. Or we could do something truly radical: let a C be a C again — and make it cheaper.

What’s the true sad cost of grade inflation? Remember the Varsity Blues scandal in 2019? 53 people were charged in a USD $25 million bribery scheme to secure places for their kids at top U.S. universities like Stanford and Yale. This simply confirmed that for some parents, giving your child a leg up via a top university is worth the risk of jail and loss of your reputation.

But last week, 14 people were jailed for paying bribes to get their kids into a Hong Kong kindergarten.

A kindergarten. Do you remember your best friend from kindergarten? You do not. Have they opened big career doors for you? They have not.

Now, how about your best college friend? Different league entirely.

If grade inflation keeps growing, families will go to jail for bribing their way into daycare.

In fact, back in 2008 in Winnipeg, they already did.

Meanwhile…

1. Camino de Biblioteca. This year, 800,000 people will walk its 800 kilometres on apersonal pilgrimage.

This month, Toronto writer Marci Stepak will walk to all 100 branches of the Toronto Public Library to honour her late mother and raise funds for the TPL.

While you can also hike the 89 km. from Toronto to the Martyr’s Shrine at Ste. Marie-Among-the-Hurons, why not create your own urban pilgrimage linking a chain of 25 to 30 library branches ending at the Toronto Reference Library as a kind of cathedral of books? Each day of this long-weekend pilgrimage could focus on a theme – childhood reading, learning through hardship, community and justice – where you can pause and read a short text at each branch and maybe even stamp your “readers’ passport” like the Spanish pilgrim passport.

2. Odd bedfellows. First, marriage and dementia. Then mistakes that improve the song.Then Donald Trump and writing. Finally, Gwyneth’s plastic surgeon...and Queen Elizabeth’s closets.

3. Better versions of...apps we use now: for weather, for flights, for calories...

Plus better clam chowder donuts...American Presidents...aging clocks, the ones that calculate how old your body is...and people and scary flags.

4. Rethinking crime and the police. My March 6 blog argued that violent crime isdown, so let’s all take a breath and not give in to the fearmongers. I’d like to modify my enthusiasm for a crime-freer Canada via two new stories that argue the contrary. First, from the Globe and Mail, how Rosedale homeowners have hired private security firms to protect themselves and their property. Second, why the Toronto Police Service budget just keeps going up and up.

5. Far-off. Way out. First, the Alphorn, which you will never play. Next, the busiest place you’ve never seen. Next, the best seat in all of Paris. Plus the matchbook covers as flash points igniting new worlds. And chokepoints as the true crossroads of history; how Japan is cracking down on wayward cyclists; and finally, where spreading rumours is a crime.

6. Big thinkers; strong views. How Stephen Lewis “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Plus, Larry Fink is the Chair of Blackrock which manages $US 14 trillion in assets. Here’s his letter to investors. Plus historian Tim Snyder on 5 scenarios for a coup before the U.S. midterms. Plus day and life.

7. Big thinkers; bigger trip. There’s still room to join us at The Canada Summit, the four-day heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians will discuss where we’re headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and AI, and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here.

Speaking of really big thinkers, there are just a few tickets left for the RamsayTalk with New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe on June 15. The early praise for London Falling is delirious. Tickets here.

8. The week in Tech. Maclean’s has an investigative piece on a Markham pharmacist who became the secret king of fraudulent internet porn. Plus why blaming anyone forcreating AI slop is pointless. And on Apple’s 50^th anniversary, the mystery of Steve Jobs. And how Russia spies on Ukraine from outer space. And speaking of outer space, here’s the many dimensions of Artemis II. Plus, what exactly is Space X?

9. The play’s still the thing. June is the 100^th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth. So it’s very apropos that Crow’s Theatre is world-premiering American Devotion, Franca Miraglia’s fictional account in a Connecticut farmhouse in 1957 when Norman Mailer has wangled a coveted invitation for cocktails with the reclusive couple. Runs June 3 to 21. Tickets here.

10. Same old coffee. Fresh new grounds. A U.S. federal judge this week ordered the White House to cease construction on the President’s brobdingnagian ballroom. The White House, of course, appealed, not for design reasons or anything soft like that. But because not letting construction go ahead means ”threatening grave national security harms to the White House, the President and his family, and White House staff.” Here’s the official text of their objections.

11. What I’m reading. Stumbling across a compelling new author with lots of books is infinitely better than stumbling across just a new author. Suddenly, like clicking on the first minute of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, you know that rarest of thrills that only such anticipatory addiction can satisfy: the certainty that you will have days, weeks, even months you can spend, often alone, with your new drug. Such is my keenness that you try the British-Belgium spy novelist, Kevin Wignall. I’ve read To Die in Vienna and A Death in Sweden. They’re espionage-noir, very smart, tidy, quick and oddly funny. One step up from airport reading, one down from le Carré.

Canada’s Governor General Mary Simon is bilingual. Her first language is Inuktitut and her second is English. She’s not fluent in French. But this is an exceptional circumstance. And when she speaks to groups of Canadians, which is pretty much every day, she tries to say a little in French, like her 2025 New Year’s message.

Simon is the symbolic head of Canada.

On the other hand, the actual head of Air Canada is its Chief Executive Officer. But the minute that fire truck drove out onto Runway 4 at LaGuardia two weeks ago, Michael Rousseau became the company’s symbolic head as well.

Air Canada’s circumstances are also exceptional. It isn’t just any multi-billion dollar public company. Until 1988, it was a federal crown corporation owned by Ottawa. After Air Canada was privatized, its language obligations were grandfathered. In other words, Air Canada must provide services to the travelling public in both official languages and respect employees’ language‑of‑work rights just like a federal department or Crown corporation.

Air Canada is uniquely Canadian, in the same way Michael Rousseau’s fall from grace is uniquely Canadian: not for corruption or incompetence, but craven indifference to an unspoken rule of running any major Canadian institution:

You. Must. Speak. French…

Or. At. Least. Try.

I say craven indifference because Rousseau’s English-only message of condolence to the families of the pilots who died in the LaGuardia crash is the second time he has been tone-deaf to what every other CEO and senior official can hear as clear as a bell.

The first time was in 2021 when he spoke to the Montreal Chamber of Commerce. Following the speech, a reporter asked Rousseau how he could have lived in Montreal for 14 years without speaking French. We pick up Rousseau’s reply here.

“Can you re-do that in English?”

“I’m too busy to learn French.”

“That’s a testament to the City of Montreal.”

You could hear francophone Canada exhale the same thought: He didn’t even try.

After 2021, he did try. Indeed, Rousseau’s taken 300 hours of French-language instruction. But 14 years in Montreal, his wife is Francophone, and all he can muster is “Bonjour” and “Merci”?

We forgive people for being tone-deaf, awkward, halting. We forgive the “Bonjour-hi” hybrids, the strangled verb tenses, the Anglophones who can’t remember their genders but who keep valiantly stumbling through conversations anyway. What we don’t forgive, especially here, is disdain. The refusal to cross even halfway.

It’s not about language so much as effort — the willingness to be uncomfortable. Mary Simon doesn’t sound comfortable speaking in French. Still, she musters through. But in a country that defines itself by compromise, “not even trying” equals arrogance. Especially when you’re running an airline literally called Air Canada, whose very identity rests on bilingual service, bilingual pilots, bilingual everything. There is no “Air Canada, but unilingual.” It’s baked into the brand.

Rousseau’s defenders argue that you don’t need to conjugate être to run an airline. Fair enough. But the CEO’s job isn’t just to manage; it’s to embody something. It’s theatre as much as leadership. If the head of Air Canada can’t muster even a few phrases en français, what message does that send to the flight attendants trying to greet passengers in both languages? Or to the ground crew in Montreal whose entire workplace runs on bilingual teamwork?

So Rousseau’s out. Whoever comes next must be perfectly bilingual.

Like many Anglophones, I freeze up when asked to speak French. But I’m also mindful of what the tour guides say when you land in a country where French or Spanish or another ‘foreign language’ is the lingua franca. They always say: “Just learn a dozen words in that language and it will take you far. People appreciate that you’re reaching out to them…”

It reminds me of something that happens often in relationships, both personal and national: people will forgive you for failing if they believe you’re making an effort. They’ll walk the road with you, even if you trip. But give them the sense you couldn’t be bothered and the door closes.

Michael Rousseau never learned the first rule of leadership: there are times when symbolism doesn’t just count, it counts more than anything.

Meanwhile…

1. The Sunshine List. Last week Queen’s Park released the names of everyone in the public sector who makes over $100,000 a year. Today, over 400,000 people are on The Sunshine List, so it lacks the titillating FOMO of its first year in 1988 when just 4,501 names made it. Still, it’s fun to find out what your doctor’s earning or your nearby cop on the beat (this year, 7,083 members of the Toronto Police Service are on the list). Maybe time to up that $100,000 to a new level of “comfortably off.” Here’s what it takes in America.

2. Odd men out and in. First, the man who knew infinity. Next, rethinking gender. Plus the mayor who leads the world in social media. (Compare to Toronto’s Mayor and potholes.) Speaking of social media, no one is safe from its finding you. No one.

3. Why did you fire the most successful conductor in America? I wrote last week on the growing scandal of how the Boston Symphony Orchestra has ‘fired’ its conductorAndris Nelsons. This week, we learned why.

4. Sorry for your loss. Why daylight savings deserves to die. Plus a new kind of Russian death squad. And why Facebook shut down its Metaverse project last week, after investing $80 billion.

5. New views. Wikipedia’s global garden, plus the top 10,000 Wikipedia articles, and anold word with a new bite. Plus a Yosemite landscape. And how to lie flat in economy. And why everyone is on speakerphones in public. And how the Club Med Theory of Hospitalityis based on removing all your decisions. It works elsewhere too.

Finally, some good old-fashioned optical illusions.

6. Wretched excess. Let’s start with private jets. Then on to ultra-fine dining. Then, thebillionaire class. Finally, skiing in Saudi Arabia.

7. The Japanese Cultural Centre…is honouring Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara with the Sakura Award at a gala on May 9. Past recipients include David Suzuki, Raymond Moriyama, and Joy Kogawa. The first recipient, in 2009, was Brian Mulroney who apologized to and negotiated the redress settlement with the survivors of the 22,000 Japanese Canadians who were interned during the Second World War. Tickets.

The Club Med Theory. of hospitality based on removing all your decisions. And why everyone is on speakerphones in public.

8. Toronto has one of the streets you must walk in your lifetime. This week, Britain’s daily The Telegraph published a list of the 20 streets you must walk in your lifetime. Oddity #1: Toronto is on that list. Oddity # 2: The street in question.

Speaking of Toronto…today’s crossing guards are no longer volunteer elders. They’re poorly paid contract workers employed by private companies.

9. Floating landscapes. These aren’t photoshopped; they’re better. Plus tech leaders’private emails exposed in public. Plus the rise of ‘shrubification’. Plus a new Instagram account reminds us what’s great about life. We’ll feature one of them each week. Which leads to how to get love less wrong.

10. Four views on the LaGuardia crash – The first officer’s. A survivor’s. Piers Morgan’s. And Air Canada’s pilots and flight attendants.

Sarah Palin used them in 2009 to fight Obamacare reforms by scaring U.S. voters into thinking that groups of doctors would decide which patients would live and which would die. Back then, one in three healthcare dollars went to treat Americans 65 and older. Today it’s 37%. Still no death panels, nor are there in Canada.

But Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is pushing Bill 18, The Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act that will act much like Death Panels, except they will constrain Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) instead of encouraging it.

This week, the Globe and Mail’s Robyn Urback wrote why this is a terrible idea made worse by Smith invoking the “notwithstanding clause” which lets any province veto any Charter right or Supreme Court decision, such as the one in 2015 when the Court voted 9-0 to allow MAiD because not to allow it constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Back then, you qualified for MAiD if you were enduring irremediable suffering and your death was foreseeable. Back then, as now, 27% of Canadians die of cancer and 15% from heart disease.

Many Canadians (and many American and British media) are alarmed to learn that this year for the first time, over 100,000 Canadians are projected to die via MAiD. Indeed, MAiD is up by 64% across the country between 2021 and 2024. But I look at these figures and ask a different question: why are they not higher?

I mean, 87,400 of us will die from cancer this year, and 56,000 from heart disease, for a total of 143,000. And yet the number of those people who chose to die using MAiD is only 11.3% of all Canadians who will die from cancer or heart disease. We all know someone, likely someone close to us, who has endured death by cancer or heart disease, and when it’s all over, we likely whispered: “Just don’t let me die that way.” And yet, clearly we do. My wife, who is a MAiD doctor, says this is because people have an inexhaustible will to live.

But Danielle Smith’s Notwithstanding fight isn’t about Track 1 MAiD, which is about irremediable suffering and foreseeable death. It’s about Track 2, the reasons for MAiD that are much more complex and contentious and where death isn’t reasonably foreseeable. These include mental illness being the sole underlying condition, or being under the age of 18, or having a chronic debilitating condition like cerebral palsy or post-polio disability.

Bill C-18 also requires that:

• A family member must witness the provision of MAiD.

• Doctors must not mention, let alone discuss MAiD with their patients, unless those patients mention it first.

• Hospitals can not only refuse MAiD on their premises, they must establish a 150-metre exclusion zone around the hospital where discussions and assessments for MAiD are forbidden.

• A patient’s natural death must now be not just foreseeable, but likely within one year.

• It disallows the use of Advance Requests. Today, no Canadian outside of Quebec qualifies for MAiD if they have Alzheimer’s because their death is not foreseeable. By the time it is, they likely won’t have the mental capacity to consent. Today, 750,000 Canadians are living with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. In an effort to allow Alzheimer’s patients a less tortured death, Ottawa is proposing the use of Advance Requests. Alberta will disallow this.

• Clinics and long-term care homes cannot publicly display information on MAiD.

Of course, while Bill C-18 is about MAiD, it’s really about much more: like sticking it to Ottawa, and appealing to your base, and saying we protect families and stand up for their rights against Big Government.

It’s not that MAiD is perfect by any means. Track 1 saw Veterans being “offered death instead of counselling, where a woman suffering with obesity was accepted for MAiD and where a woman with dementia was helped to die after a family member twice referred her for MAiD.”

And Track 2 is nowhere as clear-cut around who qualifies, thus creating the potential for more abuse, not less.

But Robyn Urback’s solution is not to fight the Notwithstanding Clause or the many new strictures of Bill C-18 – especially the 150-metres cordon sanitaire for even breathing the word “MAiD”.

She offers a surprising solution: “The risk for everyone is that MAiD becomes so out of control, so unchecked, that someone comes along and scraps the entire thing, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s decision in 2015. That’s why restoring some sanity to MAiD laws in Canada is so important now. And proponents of MAiD for the terminally ill should be the loudest supporters.”

Oh, and there’s one more provision in Bill C-18 I haven’t mentioned. That is the provincial government will be the single source of referral for MAiD. Back in 2016 provinces like Alberta and Manitoba implemented this system because they had large geographies and few MAiD doctors.

Back then, Alberta’s Premier was Rachel Notley. Today, if you’re a doctor, a nurse practitioner, a patient, a family member or even a friend, the request goes through the province’s care coordinators.

But what if a less benign Premier were to say: “Let’s downsize or defund this provincial agency.”

Then there would be no MAiD at all, no Track 1 and no Track 2.

Once you accept that logic for MAiD, the template is portable: reproductive health, gender-affirming care, even controversial drugs become candidates for the same legislative cone of silence.

The most chilling part of Alberta’s bill is not the 12‑month threshold, or the compliance paperwork, or even the professional penalties. It is the idea that, in the most intimate conversation many of us will ever have – the one about how and when we die – the loudest voice in the room will not be our loved ones, or our doctor, or even ourselves, but a legislature that insists on standing 150 metres away and still running the show.

If Alberta wants to narrow MAiD, it should make its case in open court, not behind the blast wall of the Notwithstanding clause and the fiction that information itself is a form of harm. Whatever your view on assisted dying, the right to an honest, unhurried, fully informed conversation with your doctor should not depend on whether you are standing inside, or just outside, an invisible line on the pavement.

Meanwhile…

1. Gillian Anderson…on why women over 50 are disappearing.

Plus famous restaurants by women, including Yawékon near Brantford. And meet the feminist resistance fighter who created the modern kitchen.

2. The Ryanair of railways. Dutch startup GoVolta is offering cheap train tickets to Hamburg and Berlin for €19 with plans to reach Paris next year. Plus…when Instagram meets Overtourism meets Drones....Plus air travel will more than double by 2050…plus how the Iran conflict is costing tourism $600 million a day…and how Mt. Everest is limiting overtourism.

And are points programs ruining luxury hotels? Finally, a New Yorker documentary on thebad news around taking the perfect photo.

3. Tech tips that aren’t AI. Remember the Internet? It was created in 1983. Yet there are still new tips to make it (and you) operate better. From strengthening your hippocampus, to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon,to taking free courses at MIT.

Back to AI…will it cure all disease or is that just AI slop?

4. The cost of citizenship. Forget becoming an Italian citizen (and hence an EU citizen) just because your great-grandfather came from Italy. A new Italian court ruling has ended unlimited generational citizenship. On the other hand, the price of American citizenship is falling in line with its value. In mid-April, the Trump administration will lower the fee for formally renouncing your American citizenship from $2,350 to $450. It affects mostly people who live abroad and don’t want to pay U.S. taxes or embrace its values.

5. Should opera singers sell used cars? This one does. Speaking of opera singers, the Canadian phenom Emily D’Angelo who was chosen by Glenn Gould Prize-winner Elton John to receive the Glenn Gould Protégé Prize (along with $25,000), will sing at the gala honouring Sir Elton in Toronto on May 9.

Plus, what’s the AGO’s Mona Lisa? And who’s the real Banksy? Plus, a portrait of “Lou D” who’s opening the Kodak vault after 25 years in the dark.

As for all the arts, here are Rosie Millard’s 10 tips to fill every concert hall.

6. Accentuate the positive. Is it true your accent could get you fired? Speaking of fired, what if Prince Andrew had become king? And it looks like AI has already come for the sommeliers.

7. Things are looking up. Especially if you’re Finnish. You live in the world’s happiest country for the 9^th year in a row. The U.S. placed 23^rd and Canada 25^th. That’s okay because the world is getting happier: Since 2006-2010, 79 countries have shown significant gains in happiness, while 41 show significant losses.

Speaking of happiness, does culture still follow capital? And guess who’s drowning in debt– since 1882?

8. Some conspiracies aren’t theories. Like how ICE agents turned up everywhere(from the unimpeachable Bellingcat). Plus why some bettors are issuing death threats.Plus, the perils of perpetual politics. And the deadliest types of extreme weather. “A Tsunami of Transnational Repression” is set to hit Canada, Ron Deibert, head of The Citizen Lab, told a House of Commons committee this week. And this anti-Trumper isn’t going to “No Kings” this weekend.

9. Round they go. How to watch thousands of satellites circle the earth. And how to watch our same Home Planet 750 million years ago. Plus not a good reason to die, nor a good way to, either. Plus, how organizations lose their minds.

10. The BS at the BSO. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is one of the world’s best. Last week, they announced they were ending their contract with their music director, Andris Nelsons. One problem: everyone loves him. Even competing orchestras. Another? They forgot to tell the musicians. Given this note to a casual enquirer, maybe the BSO Board are the ones who need to go in a different direction.

11. What I’m watching: The Madison (on Prime), Taylor Sheridan’s latest love story, one of 10 of his series streaming in big sky country. Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russellprovide the sparks, but this is more a love-and-loss story. As my mother used to say, it’s a weeper.