I’m glad at least one (1) person understands

has any institution in your life, you, the american voter, delivered harder than the biomedical research complex? a fuckin respiratory virus shows up out of nowhere you get a vaccine ahead of schedule. meanwhile we're knocking out HIV and diabetes and goddamned pancreatic cancer on the side.

NZ the one case to give us hope that anglosphere housing markets are not inevitably, irretrievably effed up beyond hope

Absolutely delighted to make my debut in @thebulwark.com — the team there was great. Total pros. Hope they’ll have me back.

but like I said the other day, NBC cast Vanessa Williams in The Odyssey in 1997 and no one gave a shit because this outrage is manufactured by racist incel billionaires from South Africa who no longer touch grass.

It’s completely insane that Apple keeps apps that can do this on the App Store. The App Store business more than anything else Apple has ever done has just completely destroyed any sense of integrity that ever existed over there.

I deeply resent that my country is regularly held hostage by people with an IQ beneath that of the median jar of mayonnaise.

It seems like, when there is a shortage, you can have high prices or you can have rationing/waitlists. And these are both bad "solutions" that don't address the underlying shortage. I wonder if there are other issues where this might indicate calamitous governance. Anyway, off to post about housing.

Fuel shortages are an indicator of calamitous governance, Exhibit A

New from me at TVO: Stratford's constitutional challenge against "strong mayor" powers probably won't work, alas, but it's important anyway. www.tvo.org/article/anal...

Again, I think it is important to keep noting that there is a complete 180 degree difference between the way the last month of actual total failure & incompetence has been covered in the press & our c.2021 breathless nonstop freakout about Joe Biden failing in Afghanistan bsky.app/profile/mcop...

I just... what... that doesn't....

Today in work: emailing a constitutional law professor to confirm that the Canadian constitution doesn't allow something I assume is obviously absurd but, you know, want to double-check I'm reading words from 1867 correctly.

I'm quite confident Holyday isn't acting in good faith here but c'mon, this is literally about the city's (currently very bad) rules regarding how much water new buildings are allowed to discharge into storm sewers. It's a serious cost driver for new homes, not "bathtubs".

The progressive alternative to Anthony Furey everyone.

PBO estimates public funding for the FIFA Men's World Cup in Canada will amount to ~$1B, which astonishingly isn't that bad given recent precedent? www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publicati...

San Diego fell from 5th to 12th most expensive rental market by building more multifamily housing per capita than any other California city. This is what happens when you actually build. The lesson isn't complicated. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/05/13/s...

Renewables are unstoppable. BNEF's New Energy Outlook for this year says solar is set to be the biggest source of electricity in 2032 and wind will be second biggest in 2034. Both coal and gas displaced from those thrones. This is the business-as-usual scenario. 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

i like how my taco bell post ended up being an excuse for a bunch of clearly joyless people to scold me about my health

Walked the dog while the sun was still out before the weather came in, wearing my UV-blocking hoodie I bought for a Mexico trip earlier this year. But with sunglasses and a baseball cap I think I look like the Unabomber?

wut www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/u...

looks like a few smart republicans are worried the war might destroy the GOP senate majority (probably too late, the pain is baked in)

We keep creating and recreating an internet that destroys all incentives for producing original information mattdpearce.substack.com/p/you-couldn...

well there's a thought that's gonna fester

Genuinely might be a me-problem but I'm stumbling on a prominent Catholic not using the word "crucifix".

"It’s not just provincial politics keeping the grid balkanized: there are actual problems of geography and physics that make a truly national power grid extremely difficult regardless of how pleasing it is to draw lines on a map." — @jm-mcgrath.bsky.social

New from me at TVO, on the impossibility of "federal electricity policy" in Canada, the latest iteration of my ongoing series titled "the provinces both exist and matter." www.tvo.org/article/anal...

The impulse to diversify canonical works like The Odyssey is the whole concept of a canon doing what it’s supposed to do — serving as broad cultural patrimony rather than as a curious foreign story. www.slowboring.com/p/a-diverse-...

Links for May 18th, 2026 johnmcgrath.substack.com/p/links-for-...

Truly nobody has ever deserved this more

They're stealing billions of your money to pay off violent right-wing psychos while doing everything in their power to spike gas up to $5 a gallon, make groceries into a luxury and hand the country over to the oligarchs who want to permanently replace you.

lol now it's neither free as in speech or beer

I keep seeing everyone going "trump will TACO because he will have to" but he too is subject to boiling frog syndrome about things. And right now the US is fine, he has no reason to scale anything back. The worry is we end up in a place where he starts doing crazy shit again, or shortages

Inside the article the county and water officials note that this was a procedural error, not some Mad Max water heist, and honestly we don’t talk about the logistical and bureaucratic support that rapid modern infrastructure demands.

I mean obviously some people choose to both be obnoxiously antagonistic people online *and* breach the (sadly!) bare minimum rules around journalistic good conduct so yes, you can do that if you want. I've just seen how it ends for people too many times.

critically this was the case in 1870 when the 15th amendment was ratified! there is literally no such thing as partisan gerrymandering and manipulation of voting rules in the south outside of the context of “white reactionaries want to neuter black political power”

In case you needed proof the "we're not against bike lanes, just not on main streets" rhetoric is bullshit, the Toronto Sun is currently losing their minds that on a short downtown collector road, some existing painted bike lanes are getting new curbs. At least a decade ago haters weren't cowards.

Don't be ridiculous, they can't make a car big enough for Godzilla to drive

Pet theory — this, too, is a housing problem: $100K in bad housing markets buys you marginal amenity value OR it buys you a sweet-ass truck and the guy at the dealership is offering you an apparently cheap loan? Not crazy to think the latter will improve your life more than former.

Overheard in Toronto Q: oh are you Greek? A: No, Persian Q: Very close though Me, in Thucydides: Uhhhhhh

this is such a great encapsulation of what the various factions of the reactionary right want. i might add that they envision themselves as slave masters and the rest of us, in one way or another, as their slaves. betterdonkey.substack.com/p/the-vra-wa...

With the greatest of respect to @kevincarmichael.bsky.social, Justin Trudeau bent over backwards for Alberta, and burned a metric tonne of political capital to build them a pipeline (to say nothing of orphan well funds, etc), all of which earned him nothing but new invented grievances in return.

The average local fire chief is indisputably an "expert" but is almost certainly wrong on matters like second egress mandates and proper ladder truck sizing. The only actual answer is politics!

The silence is conspicuous: virtually nobody in Toronto who can do anything about it, or running to be in a position to do so, is talking about the police despite the biggest scandals in the force's history of late. What's up with that? I dig into it in my @thestar.com column this weekend.

Edited for accuracy: If your instinct is to use AI to write scripts, then you are NOT a writer.

If you really can't say "AOC is better than Tucker Carlson," you are on the right-wing. You see a basket of extreme right-wing views from one of Trump's friends and find it compelling. Nothing else you say about your political orientation makes the slightest difference, you're just a right-winger.

Google tells me that under US law punitive damages are considered taxable income. I propose Dems start loudly announcing that as soon as practical anyone who accepts these payments will be taxed at 150% of their value.