The Third Way I’ve had to print a correction with regard to a June item I wrote about The Third, a new weekly listings paper I had somehow understood to be a production of the CBRM. The Third, it turns out, is a free, local, 16-page print weekly, published andRead More

Author’s Note: In a future edition I hope to review Christopher Nolan’s movie of the moment, Oppenheimer, exploring the rise and fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the top-secret Allied ‘Manhattan Project’ to build the Atomic Bomb. In a July 26 interview in Nature, nuclear historian Richard RhodesRead More

Watching the video of the July 20 Public Hearing on the CBRM’s new Municipal Planning Strategy (MPS) and Land Use By-law (LUB), I had to seriously interrogate myself as to why I didn’t share many of the concerns expressed by the residents who came to the podium to offer theirRead More

Editor’s Note: I heard Oona Johnstone-Laurette interviewed on CBC Information Morning Cape Breton recently and was so struck by what she had to say about unions—she had recently participated in an all-ages panel discussion hosted by Unifor—that I reached out to her to see if she might be willing toRead More

Editor’s Note: I thought I’d revisit a few stories I’ve covered this year to see how things have been coming along.   Blowin’ in the wind Capitalize Albany Corporation (which does not, sadly, exist purely to stamp out lowercase spellings of the New York State capital but is the city’sRead More

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce, The Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man   On June 25, in the dazed wake of the aborted rebellion by a mercenary army, the Wagner Group, against Russia’s military and political leadership, the BBC’s MoscowRead More

It’s been almost seven weeks since I managed a fall that pretty much put me out of commission while leaving me (obviously) to live another day, albeit weighed down by a huge, black, velcro-strapped boot on my broken ankle. What was meant to be a week-long trip to Quebec City—withRead More

Local elites I heard Alexander Sammon of Slate magazine interviewed about this May 2023 piece he did on the annual convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) or, as he put it, of “unsung Republican heavyweights.” Sammon was a guest on This Machine Kills, one of the podcasts inRead...

Tuesday’s budget deliberations by CBRM council actually followed a regular council meeting that began at 9:30 yesterday morning, but I’m going to deal with the budget first because somebody has to deal with the CBRM budget in a timely manner and it certainly hasn’t been CBRM council. Councilors, who votedRead More

Ayn Rand Revisited I went through a brief period in high school when I thought Ayn Rand was someone you had to read to be considered well read (I blame a Sydney Academy debater who used to quote her regularly) and since being considered well-read was pretty much my life’sRead...