Politics & Current Affairs

The Next Supper: The End of  Restaurants as We Knew Them,  and What Comes After

It’s been challenging to read during this global pandemic; I’ve lost my attention span for anything beyond a long-form essay or some short stories, so when I was asked to review two books about “the ... Read More »

January 4, 2022 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

On Property

By Rinaldo Walcott

Rinaldo Walcott locates his contribution to the Field Notes series on current issues, On Property, in the present political moment, while using historical references and events to argue for the abolition of police and property. ... Read More »

May 10, 2021 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

★ Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada

By Samir Shaheen-Hussain

Samir Shaheen-Hussain’s Fighting for a Hand to Hold explores how a policy in Quebec disallowing Indigenous parents to accompany their sick children on medevac flights resulted in significant, actively constructed barriers to care. These barriers ... Read More »

December 14, 2020 | Filed under: Native Peoples, Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

Field Notes from a Pandemic: A Journey through a World Suspended

By Ethan Lou

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended everything we know. Isolation, fear, and confusion reign; for many, the world no longer makes any sense. Journalist Ethan Lou’s non-fiction debut serves as one possible map for this fog ... Read More »

December 10, 2020 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

★ Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System That Failed Toronto’s Queer Community

By Justin Ling

Toronto’s Bruce McArthur was a regular feature in the city’s gay village. He regularly met other local men for purposes of intimacy. When circumstances permitted, he also strangled them to death. The circuitous manhunt that ... Read More »

October 8, 2020 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence

By Jonathan Manthorpe

By now, everybody knows that Francis Fukuyama got it wrong. When he declared, in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, that the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the Berlin Wall ... Read More »

September 28, 2020 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

★ Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril

By Thomas Homer-Dixon

“We’re doomed.” Thomas Homer-Dixon, a university research chair in the faculty of environment at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., has been ... Read More »

September 14, 2020 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

★ Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age

By Nora Loreto

In Take Back the Fight, Quebec City writer and podcaster Nora Loreto has crafted a meticulous look at how we can address barriers in contemporary Canadian feminist organizing. She defines her feminist framework as one ... Read More »

September 3, 2020 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?: Public Transit in the Age of Google, Uber, and Elon Musk

By James Wilt

“Today everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles,” wrote Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. “At present public transportation languishes, but not from a lack of ... Read More »

June 18, 2020 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews, Science, Technology & Environment