Good reads: Dale Smith, John Ivison, Maggie Helwig, Tod Maffin, Paul Krugman, IFLOZ, James, Katharine Wilkinson, Sherman Alexie, Cole Haddon

Norman Rockwell's tribute to Carl Spitzweg's The Bookworm

Good reads about politics

Now that Carney has a majority, the Liberals were able to take control of Parliamentary Committees for the first time in seven years. And they immediately took away a platform for opposition grandstanding by moving the Ethics committee and the Health committee to closed-door sessions. From the reaction of opposition parties, you would think the sky had fallen:

Chantal Hébert on Liberals moving to go in camera in four committees: "Of all of the things you can think that were smart to do this week, getting a majority and using it to do this is probably one of the dumbest moves that one has seen in a long long time."

- Scott Robertson

Read on Substack

In Routine Proceedings, journalist Dale Smith writes:

....the two committees in question have been in the throes of attempted witch hunt studies that the Conservatives have been trying to orchestrate (with the gleeful assistance of the Bloc, who are happy to embarrass the government any day of the week)...
...Suffice to say, I’m not convinced that moving procedural wrangling in camera is a sign that democracy is under threat, and there was a whole lot of this very same thing when the Conservatives had a majority on committees (and they turned those committees into branch plants of ministers’ offices). They may try to cast themselves as heroes for inventing scandals, but I remain unconvinced that this is a danger to parliamentary democracy just yet.

In Fly Straight, journalist John Ivison writes about Canada's auto sector:

Of all the industrial problems facing the federal government, the plight of the automotive sector is the most chronic.
Production has tumbled in recent years - just 1.2 million vehicles built in 2025, down by one third from 2019. Since over 90 percent are exported to the United States, the imposition of a 25 percent tariff by the Trump Administration is a potential death sentence for the industry north of the border....
...The industrial strategy is to keep what production we’ve got and use tax credits and direct support to attract new EV manufacturers. But since the EV market in Canada is still under 200,000 units annually, domestic demand cannot sustain a dedicated EV plant.
The Canadian economy has proven remarkably resilient and there are opportunities to diversify trade in many industries. But the auto sector is not one of them. An integrated North American manufacturing system is the only reason cars are built in Canada and its future relies on stable and predictable access to the United States. It is easy to say Canada must reduce its dependence on U.S. market access but in this case, it is difficult to see an alternative....

Here are a couple of good videos
The Reverend Maggie Helwig’s extraordinary book Encampment has won the 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

The Globe and Mail reports:

...Her award was announced at the annual Politics and the Pen gala, which was stuffed with powerbrokers in evening clothes, including the Prime Minister. Ms. Helwig did not waste the opportunity to say her piece.
“There is a tendency among politicians these days to speak as if you were helpless, as if you had no real volition or power, but are only slaves of the god of the economy,” she told the ballroom at the Fairmont Château Laurier. “But the god of the economy is a human creation, and you do have power, and you do have choices about how you use it.”...

Tod Maffin says "Turns out "you'll be back" was the wrong thing to say to us."

Catching up with United States
Paul Krugman has two substack posts this week that are both worth reading:
The Logic of NACHO:

...what is preventing the reopening of the Strait? Three factors: Trump’s ego, his ignorance, and the Iranians’ unfortunately justified belief that any agreement they reach with America would be effectively worthless....

and Who Are You Gonna Believe, Trump or Your Lying Eyes?:

...Over the past few days multiple prominent Republicans have gone on TV to insist that gas prices are falling...
... what’s the purpose of these MAGA lies? The answer, of course, is that they’re aimed at an audience of one. Voters know that gas prices are way up and that inflation is elevated, but Donald Trump, swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble, doesn’t. Trump says that we have no inflation. He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned...

While I was watching a little bit of a US Senate hearing on MSNOW earlier this week, I happened to catch a Senator telling Pete Hegseth that a Pentagon briefing was "convoluted bullshit". But I didn't know who was saying this or why. 

Now I have found an excellent piece by I Fucking Love Australia about what that remark referred to:

There’s a particular kind of stupid that thinks a presidential pardon is a magic forcefield. The kind of stupid that runs the Department of War Crimes. The kind of stupid that thinks if your mate in the Oval Office signs a piece of paper, the rest of the planet has to forget you executed shipwrecked civilians on camera. The kind of stupid that finished its run on Fox and Friends and walked straight into the Pentagon thinking the rules of war were optional, like pants on a Zoom call.
Pete Cocksbreath is about to find out, sometime in the next 4 years, that he was wrong.
This week the House Armed Services Committee dragged him up to Capitol Hill, and Bill Keating from Massachusetts, who has spent 14 years in Congress and seen approximately every flavour of bullshit on Earth, looked the Secretary of Defense dead in the eye and called the classified justification for the boat strikes “the most convoluted bullshit I ever heard in my life.” That is a man with full security clearance telling the public, without telling the public, that the secret evidence is so transparently fabricated he is willing to risk a contempt charge to flag it on camera. Read between those lines and you are reading a war crime.
Let’s walk through what we now know...

The story that follows is absolutely terrible. It seems that the racist attitudes and utter ineptitude of Trump's ICE Gestapo have now spread throughout the US armed forces.

In War By Other Means, the philosopher who writes as James writes "In Defense of Chaos" and why predictions about the Ukraine War have been so wrong:

...When we ask experts and analysts for their views, there is quite a lot they can tell us. They can tell us in the moment what a battlefield looks like. They can tell us what capabilities are important to provide right now. They can explain to us a theory for understanding how a historical failure or success occurred. They can tell us about current constraints. They can tell us what may occur in the near future based on continuity with the present.
But what they can’t forecast is something as fickle as the start or outcome of a conflict, and the problem is asking them to do it in the first place.
Analysts will never be able to give policymakers these answers. It’s why we prepare contingencies. It’s why we invest in capabilities. It’s why it’s necessary to have leaders who can summon the political will to act even when they’ll never really know what the outcome will be....

Some good reads that AREN'T about politics
At The Ink, climate writer Katharine K. Wilkinson says its OK to start small:

...As I stood on that sandstone bluff on a recent visit, watching day yield to night, I did not feel insignificant. I felt connected—one being knitted into life on Earth, one person among many who care deeply about what comes next. No individual carries change alone. Movements endure because communities tend them. If we want sustained engagement, on climate, democracy, or any of the challenges ahead, we will need more than big moves. We will need small rooms that can hold us. Within them we realize: Small is not the opposite of power. It is often where power begins.

In his marvelous newsletter, Sherman Alexie writes "The Sense of a Friendship - an essay about Herman Melville, the Dewey Decimal System, ghosts, mobile phones, and loss"

...As a Native American who in his youth was often celebrated as “one of the good ones,” I strenuously object to that binary. Even now, as an adult, I can be identified by the political left or right, and by other Indians, as a “good one” or “bad one” based on whether my opinions conform to racial expectations—to racial demands.
To all of that, I say no, I say no, I say fuck no.
And again, no matter what else I write, I’m angry at my friend. I’m disappointed in him. I’m hurt by him....

And another:

During the pandemic, my wife and I went on a long neighborhood walk, entering into other zip codes, and met a man sitting on the front steps of his house. His hair and clothes were maybe 57% disheveled—signs of epidemic loneliness. We greeted one another and then he launched into a twenty-minute monologue about space and time and physics and literature and theology and coincidence and fate, all of which ended in him insisting that the very interaction we were having with him wasn’t really happening. He said, “We are only the dream inside the dream inside of the dream of a toddler God who has only just begun to understand creation.” And maybe it was our collective Covid madness, but I walked away thinking, “Oh, shit, I think that disheveled porch pontiff is telling the truth.”

- Sherman Alexie

Read on Substack

In 5AM Storytalk, screenwriter Cole Haddon says "'Project Hail Mary' Is the Blueprint to Save Hollywood (and Our Future)":

... It’s why watching firemen, police, and paramedics rushing into the hell of 9/11 brought tears to our eyes and filled us with such profound admiration for them – but also, maybe more importantly, what human beings are capable of. They made us want to be better people ourselves. They made us, if only briefly, feel like we were truly united — even across many borders.
Moral beauty isn’t only found in major acts of courage like the ones I just described either. We might find it watching a mother somehow soldier on after losing a child or in soldier suffering from PTSD finally asking for help.
And there you go, that’s it. That’s the answer to my son wept through the final acts of both Deep Impact and Project Hail Mary and why, out of nowhere, he suddenly wants to watch more films that will make him feel the same.
I think he’s waking up to his potential – to humankind’s potential. That’s important because he’s grown up in a world that he’s only understood – spiritually, I guess you might say – as dystopian. ...

Finally, if you have time to read about how to be educated, check out:
Culture Explorer - 12 Books That Shape the Western Canon
The Culturist - Where to Start With Opera