A funny thing about the book that Andrew and I wrote, The Rebel Sell, is that it was a bestseller in Spain. We recently did an interview with Manuel Mañero to mark the 15th year anniversary of the publication of the book: 15 años después, la contracultura gira a la derecha. Here is the English-language, unabridged version of that interview (answers by both of us). Q. First inevitable question: if you had to remake The Rebel Sell today, from what idea or theory do you start it? A. It ...|
Another World Cup, another wave of concerns about the plague of diving (or “simulation”) that afflicts the beautiful game. Every four years the most casual and ignorant of soccer fans become obsessives, and suddenly everyone notices that some of the best soccer players in the world are… a bunch of fakers. This World Cup actually started out ok, but a week into it and it is business as usual, with the flow of the game regularly interrupted by a charade of flopping, writhing, grimacing, r...|
We live in an age of ratings systems. On any given day, many of us interact with any number of schemes that involve the rating of movies and restaurants, Uber drivers and Air BnB owners, online retail transactions from Amazon to Ebay, and professional service providers including doctors and professors. Sometimes we are the ones being rated, sometimes we are the ones doing the rating, but more often we use the crowdsourced ratings to guide our behaviour and our choices. Some of these systems a...|
One of the reasons that my colleague Jordan Peterson has become such a celebrity is that so many of his critics are so confused. On more than one occasion, he has come out of debates looking like the guy who brought a gun to a knife fight (if one can excuse the metaphor). One area in which this is particularly apparent is in his various discussions of social constructivism, some of which have a “shooting fish in a barrel” quality. This is largely because so many people – both academics ...|
Those who pay attention to the “republic of letters” in Canada will have noticed that Tanya Talaga’s book, Seven Fallen Feathers, has been cleaning up the awards for literary non-fiction, having won the RBC Taylor Prize, and now the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing (announced yesterday at the Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa). Since I was a member of the jury that awarded it the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, I thought I might say a few words about why the book stands out amon...|
Race, as I and many other academics never tire of reminding people, is a social construct. Many people who say this, however, do so in a perfunctory manner, before going on to treat it as though it were a natural kind, eternal and unchangeable. For me, the point of emphasizing the “constructedness” of race is to emphasize that is it not an inevitable social category. It is a particular way that many people have of framing certain aspects of individual identity and social interaction. It i...|
My children are a bit older now, so I don’t shop at The Children’s Place as much as I used to. I happened to stop in the other day though, and I found myself worrying about the sort of messages that we are sending to boys in our culture. For those who don’t know, it’s a clothing store. The layout is always the same: they are split right down the middle, with girls’ clothing on one side and boys’ clothing on the other. This provides a particularly convenient opportunity to compare ...|
There’s a little semantic game that’s being played a lot these days, which seems to me worthy of analysis. (And since philosophers are so often of accusing to getting hung up on “semantic questions,” who better to comment on it?) It has become quite standard in many quarters to condemn Canadian society, along with all of its institutions, as being thoroughly and systematically racist. There is however an important ambiguity in the way that the term “racist” is being used, with cri...|
At first blush it is tempting to just assign #MeToo and #NeverAgain to the growing pool of hashtagged social movements that happen to get their teeth into the media cycle for an extended period of time. They both benefit from being related, in one way or another, to the infinite-scroll train wreck that is the Trump presidency. And most importantly, both are at the spearpoint of what looks to be rapid and in many ways shocking social change. But these two movements are interesting for another ...|
Back in the late nineties and early 2000s, I worked in various capacities for This Magazine, a spunky little lefty magazine in Toronto. I wrote for it, helped edit the front of the book, and served for a while on the editorial board. The magazine’s slogan was “nobody owns us”, by which they meant two things. First, there was no corporate owner calling the shots, and second, there were no advertisers to speak of. | In Due Course