The Sunday Edition for June 16, 2019
Canada's love affair with the Toronto Raptors — Michael's essay: "Raptors are birds of prey endowed with exceptional eyesight and superior depth perception, with talons that can tear an enemy to pieces. Not that the Raptors wanted to disembowel the Golden State Warriors. It is after all a Canadian team, which means that niceness ranks with Tim Hortons in core values."
Richard Haass on the profound disruption President Donald Trump has wreaked on U.S. foreign policy: Trump has disregarded a head-spinning number of presidential conventions, but one of the most profound disruptions of his presidency has been in foreign policy — ripping up treaties, alienating allies, embracing autocrats and pursuing a brash America-first policy. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, explains the implications for the international order — and for allies like Canada.
Your reaction to: Michael's essay about the report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and our series about classroom violence.
"The working class has had a role to play in history:" Independent filmmaker Julia Reichert has been making documentaries about the labour movement and women's issues since the early 1970s. Her film Union Maids told the story of three female labour organizers during the Great Depression. Her most recent documentary, American Factory, is about what happened when a Chinese billionaire bought an abandoned General Motors plant in Ohio and rehired many of the original workers. Reichert received the Outstanding Achievement Award at the recent Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.
Next stop — high school! Grade 8 students at Toronto's Lord Dufferin Public School are looking forward to the summer. At the same time, they're apprehensive about the leap to high school next fall. They talk about their hopes, their fears, and what comes next.
The crushing power of psychiatric labels: For Sarah Blackstock's mother, being labelled led to a tragic outcome. Blackstock's personal essay is called Lunatic.
Science is revealing more and more about animals' capacity for intelligence, and their rich, complex inner lives: Marc Bekoff says it's not just companion animals like dogs and cats that have real intelligence and emotions. So do sheep, birds, octopi, crustaceans and countless other animals — and this has profound importance for humans' relationship with animals. Bekoff is professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, and the author or co-author of more than a thousand articles and 31 books, including The Emotional Lives of Animals, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals and The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion and Coexistence in the Human Age.
Fighting for the right to repair: Electronic devices are held together with special screws. Washing machines end up in the junkyard because they cost too much to fix. Most things we buy are designed to be thrown away and replaced, rather than repaired. The cost, in both dollars and environmental degradation, is immense. A new consumer movement called Right to Repair is gathering steam. Laura Tribe is the executive director of OpenMedia, a community-based organization working to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free. Its online petition demanding the right to repair has almost 12,000 signatures.
Music this week by: Empire Brass Quintet, John Williams, Sergei Prokofiev, Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Simon.