In honour of Cabo Verde's valiant stand in the World Cup yesterday, here's my translation, from @wwborders.bsky.social, of an essay by the country's best-known writer, Germano Almeida, exploring his homeland's troubled relationship with African identity. wordswithoutborders.org/read/article...

Went to the #CanadaDay fireworks in #Guelph with my kids. We were speaking Spanish. People stared at us: no other family within earshot was speaking a European language.

Q for UK HE folks: i) Your unis don't charge differential fees by program. ii) lecture courses like humanities have lowest costs iii) ergo humanities programs must have an easier time being profitable. So why are humanities programs seemingly first up for cuts Are enrolments dropping that fast?

10 years ago today, Canada's national soccer team lost 8-1 to Honduras and this was considered normal. Look at them now.

Here you see what results from the ruling class delusion that human workers have no value whatsoever beyond total obedience

If you watch and share one thing today make at this. Why is every democrat in the country not talking like this?

University students have a reading level previously expected in ten-year-olds. This is no surprise to those of us who teach them. www.economist.com/internationa...

Reading from *The World of After* (@cormorantbooks.bsky.social) at the Albion Hotel, #Guelph two nights ago.

There is no Canadian journalist who deserves this honour more

RIP John Stockwell. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/u...

Three Democrats who made criticism of Israel central to their political identities swept to victory in House primary races in New York City on Tuesday, signaling a new era of skepticism in their party toward the country and its actions.

If you're in downtown #Guelph on Wednesday night, come out to the Albion! I'll be reading from *Blue River and Red Earth* and *The World of After* (both @cormorantbooks.bsky.social), and possibly something new....

Colombia is going back to civil war. This result marks the end of the Colombian peace process. DT has endorsed Espriella, choosing to overlook his seedy funding of friends of NIcolás Maduro. Will this alliance last? www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

How much we all learned from her during the darkest days of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. ua.news/en/culture/p...

Just discovered I share my birthday with both Salman Rushdie and Chico Burque de Holanda. (I'd always assumed Rushdie was born on August 15, like the characters in *Midnight's Children*).

Mosque windows smashed in overnight attack in Trois-Rivières montrealgazette.com/news/provinc...

In the 1950s Orlanda da Costa, immigrated to Portugal from Goa. He later wrote novels about the Angolans and Guineans he studied and did politics with in Lisbon. His son, António Costa, is now President of the European Council.

Like lots of other immigrant kids, I was integrated into Canada in part by free hockey on TV. Another common touchstone shattered. www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hocke...

Former left-wing hero Erri De Luca comes out as a zionist.

Selling property in occupied territory is potentially money laundering. news.sky.com/story/homes-...

The European old guard's staunch position of no-sanctions-ever-regardless-what-Israel-does is untenable. And it only guaranties that when the shift comes - and it will come at some point - the correction would be more aggressive.

Algorithms don't have brains. Opening newspapers this morning, I'm finding articles surrounded by ads for my own books at 15% off.

This is both powerful and depressing. A Black Man Wears a MAGA Hat for a Week share.google/h0RcjqEcUTuj...

The study of #Angola has changed/ Mudou-se o estudo de Angola.

recently talked with CBC to help bring attention to the problems with AI in the bookselling and publishing world. love to see Nimbus Publishing making their policy with generative AI crystal clear www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

The destabilizing aspect of this result is that Peruvians living in Peru voted for Sánchez, then Peruvians living outside Peru, many of them well-off, who won't have to live under Fujimori, reversed this result.

With 2% of votes left to be counted only 4000 votes separate the two candidates. It looks like Fujimori is going to win, with all the destabilizing authoritarianism that implies.

Every government spending item should be expressed in teachers or nurses. "This highway will cost us 1000 teachers" "This pro-Ontario ad campaign cost 100 nurses."

The Canadian Griffin Prize is reinstated! I am so pleased! Thanks to everyone who rallied behind Canadian poets, and to the Griffin Trust for hearing us. griffinpoetryprize.com/press/2026-a...

Now here's a book I'll be reading this Fall @biblioasis.

"Something remarkable happened in April. For the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas across the entire planet. Not in a country. Not in a region. Globally." Tons of great news here from Danny Kennedy (via @billmckibben.bsky.social's newsletter, which rules).

With only 7% of #Peru's vote left to be counted, mainly in remote Andean districts, Sánchez is winning 90-95% of the vote in rural areas. If this continues, he will eventually pass Fujimori, if only by a few thousand votes. www.democrata.es/en/internati...

In 2002 I published a short book that sold a few copies, then disappeared. In 2014 Putin annexed Crimea; the book started selling a few copies each year. In 2022 Putin invaded Ukraine and threatened Moldova, and the book kept selling.

🇨🇱 Chilenos protestam contra possíveis indultos a criminosos da ditadura O gov. de José Antonio Kast tem dado sinais que indicam a possibilidade de conceder indultos a condenados por violações de direitos humanos durante a ditadura de Augusto Pinochet. 🎙️Beatriz Michell, de Santiago, Chile. HispanTV

Just picked this up in a cute little bookstore near UQAM and it is SUPERB.

Haaretz: IDF soldier shoots and kills 7 month old baby in Hebron, wounding his parents

For the last 69 years, Israel has held the West Bank and Gaza under military occupation, where local Palestinian residents have no civic rights. A very long time. -more than a third of the world's nation states are younger than 69. -East Germany or Apartheid South Africa survived less than 50 years

An excellent, truly wacky novel.

On June 24th, I'll be feature reader at the #Vocamus reading at the Albion Hotel. More info coming soon...

RIP Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026)

Russia's biggest battle right now is Armenia. Russia has already lost elections in Romania, Moldova, and Hungary, and is now losing in Armenia. If it loses Armenia, Georgia will likely be next. Turkey is watching closely. Russia is now doing everything it can to pull Armenia back into its orbit⤵️

A couple of interesting new titles coming from Penguin Classics - next year will see a new translation by Bryan Karetnyk of Ivan Bunin's autobiographical The Life of Arseniev, written over 12 years, and previously published in English as The Well of Days in 1933 without the fifth part.

Nearly 147,000 US-born kids have had a parent abducted under the regime’s mass deportation obsessions. 22,000+ have seen both parents detained. The new family separation crisis is here. “Families are also now being split up in ways that are more dispersed, more hidden and harder to track.”

Very pleased to see that both I and some of my books made the report on Portuguese TV on our May 15 reading at Casa do Alentejo. Full report: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyCe... 28s

Applications for the @bookcritics.bsky.social Emerging Critics Fellowship are currently open, which may be of interest to some of the literary types on here... nbcc.submittable.com/submit

Peter Magyar: Hungary condemns in the strongest terms the Russian drone attack that caused injuries in Romania According to the Prime Minister, this incident highlights that the unity of Europe and NATO is more important today than ever.

The Commonwealth debacle shows you can no longer run a litmag on trust. www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-litera...