The whole thing is exquisite ribbed (for your pleasure) concrete. Yet it’s soft and quiet, a moon safari in the sky. Hotel Bonaventure. Built above the rail lines even. Canada: once great.

Lovely, spirited piece.

O Canada! Prefer Szalay's dank and very British early work but will take the win.

A Sorel Barbour collaboration feel very Carney's Canada (not least as it doesn't look as good as it sounds on paper)

'Police open office inside Amazon HQ' - Vancouver intensifies dailyhive.com/vancouver/do...

Renting an apartment in Plaza St Hubert this week but must come back for this next time.

I wrote about literary festival nationalism for @jacobinmag.bsky.social jacobin.com/2025/11/elbo...

Fowler's abhorred elegant variation in the Globe's ostrich piece

BBC really burying the lede there

Watching the Mamdani celebration from Vancouver, a city whose mayor is a corporate droid who loves cops and crypto

the police are defunding us bsky.app/profile/jmce...

Vancouver could be a real city but ABC would rather give cops $465 million a year. www.cnv.org/City-Hall/Ne...

One Halloween tradition of mine is to reread this brilliant meditation on what it means in Vancouver by @bychrischeung.bsky.social thetyee.ca/Culture/2018...

Honestly gobsmacked by ABC's referral of my road safety motion to staff. Halloween is the most dangerous night of the year for CHILDREN. This was an attempt to use an existing process to keep CHILDREN safe, and ABC punted it to staff w/o offering an alternative. Really, guys?

They really abandoned the commonwealth hey

New article from me in @macleans.bsky.social The “Poet of Confederation” Thomas D’Arcy McGee helps us understand why not being American IS at the heart of being Canadian. I’m very proud of this. Please share if you enjoy! #CdnPoli #Election2025 #polQc macleans.ca/politics/the...

What he said.

Learned from Richard Holmes that Holst set Tennyson's songs from The Princess for a capella female choir (1907). They are wonderful: the Edwardian afterglow of Victorian Britain. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KBI...

Reading that there's a big rainstorm timetabled for Halloween.

An excellent essay from @michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social

One more scoop

Writing about this

A box of books from Renaud Bray

dear US friends, when a sitting president (re)builds the seat of government, it almost always means the president has no intention of leaving at the end of term. your African friends with decades of experience

Toronto the Good

A last repost for this one

Sad to lose this great historian. I learned a great deal from 'Skyscrapers' www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

Biology rather than democracy strikes me as the main reason why this is fairly unlikely to happen

Shows how much the English middle classes yearn for Victorian terraces with original features that The Modern House is now selling them (a million quid for a rather bleak road near Queens Road Peckham! But let that pass). themodernhouse.com/sales-list/l...

What was Ford thinking in commissioning this?

The Ontario tariffs vid is extraordinary youtu.be/f389hIxZAOc

Doug Ford may be a corrupt and useless premier of Ontario, but at least he....oh

Spend a hundred bucks at Macleods to get thirty percent off - not a very difficult challenge.

I like to imagine Jesus popping up like Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall: I'm the Risen Christ and you know nothing of my work.

‘It was death that drove Cecil Rhodes, not sex. Two heart attacks in his twenties prompted him to write the first of seven testaments, in which he left his then modest assets to the secretary of state for the colonies to advance the empire’s aims.’ Michael Ledger-Lomas www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

It is interesting to see UK academics, who are Good Students trained to think that success in life comes from diligently meeting The Requirements, realizing that they live in an essentially random universe.

Aloysius O'Kelly, Mass in a Connemara Cabin (1883)

I wrote about Amrith's book for @jacobinmag.bsky.social last year jacobin.com/2024/09/envi...

Green Coast!

'The Birch Grove, autumn.' Tom Thomson was a great colourist; he painted blood-red sunsets, ominous storms and clouds of every shape and kind; he had a concentrated way of seeing, a Wiliam Blake kind of vision, which made the ordinary extraordinary. This is from 1915.

‘Controversy over Cecil Rhodes began long before the recent campaign to remove statues of him from the University of Cape Town and the front of Oriel College, Oxford.’ @michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social on the ruthless Rhodes: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Just catching up with that AI Trump video

Editorial, The Vancouver Daily Province, May 17, 1933:

Very special to catch the very end of the age of sail in North Vancouver: Kipling's world and Joseph Conrad's.

Rhodes - Size Queen

‘His “foible” was said to be “size”. “That’s my dream – all English,” he once said, gesturing at a map of Southern Africa.’ @michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social on the ambitions of Cecil Rhodes: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Although Rhodes talked of securing the future, power for him was not a means to an end but the expression of a need to treat people as objects to “quicken and control”.’ @michaelledgerlomas.bsky.social on what motivated Cecil Rhodes: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

How has the government got itself into the position of standing up for Israeli football hooligans, while criminalising peaceful supporters of Palestine Action?

No further questions. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...