Magnificent Octopus

(Weeping about many different issues simultaneously.) Helena has not been happy this week. Rather, she has been happy, but she has also b...

According to the Book Quiz , I'm The Catcher in the Rye , by J.D. Salinger: You are surrounded by phonies, and boy are you sick of th...

I liked Neil Gaiman's American Gods . In fact, the more I think about it, the more time passes, the more I like it. Read an excerpt ....

Driving home late Saturday night we heard on a French AM radio station that Osama bin Laden had been located. We scanned the radio dial for ...

Where do I start? It's infuriating, and I can't not say anything any longer. Please, go educate yourselves, and vote wisely. 1. F...

Be careful who you edit : The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers ca...

Yesterday afternoon, Helena and I headed out for a longer walk than usual. Destination: the other grocery store, because it has a superior ...

Bookninja points to a little history of Courier New 12, recently announced as banned by the US State Department.

Even though The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe was the last book standing on Canada Reads , it's the review I read this morning tha...

Helena spends a lot of time pretending these days. She's copying a lot of behaviour, including dance moves, which are particularly ch...

Friday evening we headed to the mall for reasons I won't get into here, but I am so very excited about the black turtleneck sweater I bo...

We rented In the Cut the other night. The Meg Ryan porno. For all the fuss about this movie, it was all a little too uncomfortable to be tr...

Flanagan's latest, " How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement ," is now online. (Or just read this commentary — "There...

Mel's dad is having a little bit of a reality problem . "They claimed that there were 6.2 million (Jews) in Poland before the wa...

They're tricky. It's no wonder they've fallen out of favour. The LA Times ran this piece the other day (which I'm reprod...

Caitlin Flanagan will be writing for The New Yorker : "If it were possible to splice the DNA of Mary McCarthy and Erma Bombeck witho...

Still more media coverage of the movie it was feared no one would go see (The Passion of the Christ), and about its media coverage. The ...

I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be in this just-posted piece in Salon , but at least I'm not alone in finding Mel's b...

We've been busy. J-F collected Helena from his mom's place and got her home just in time for my sister's visit. She was flying t...

I had to watch Diane Sawyer's interview with Mel Gibson last night, but there was no new insight into the director or his new film, Th...