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The Battle Over Back Campus
Mark McConaghy breaks down the political stakes involved in the University of Toronto’s decision to turf a vital piece of green space in downtown Toronto. Although seemingly a simple issue of field...
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On Rehtaeh Parsons
By Mark McConaghy Last week our nation was shocked by the suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons. The details of the story are so grim they remain difficult to summarize: at the age of 15 Parsons was allegedly...
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There is No Batman: On Terrorism in Our Time
By Mark McConaghy Like many in North America and around the world last Friday, I was riveted by the manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers. I watched with surreal fascination as the entire city of Boston...
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Acts of Forgetting after Boston
From the Boston Globe, April 24th, 2013 By Sean Callaghan After the Event The dust and wreckage have been swept clean from Boylston street, the soiled carpets torn up and replaced in front of Marathon...
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RBC’s Apology and the Limits of Capitalism
Before we all became riveted on the problem of terrorism over the last 2 weeks, I had planned to write about another story that garnered much national attention here in Canada but has, since Boston,...
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On Watching Game 7 in Toronto
By Mark McConaghy The Scene Monday Night. 7:30 pm. The pub in the tony part of Toronto, the neighborhood known as Rosedale, was packed with people young and old. They were there to cheer on the Toronto...
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Everything is Fine: Rob Ford and Existential Exhaustion
By Mark McConaghy I will start by stating an obvious but important fact: the irony of doing political or creative work is that, above all else, one must have the time to engage in it. If you want to go...
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The Scandal We Knew All Along
By Mark McConaghy Hundreds of news pundits and editorial columnists declared outrage last week over the revelation that the US government’s National Security Agency has direct access to the servers of...
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A Politics Without a Name
By Mark McConaghy For the last couple of years we have heard nothing but glowing news reports about Brazil’s rapid economic growth. This was South America’s answer to China- a regional dominant that...
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Lego Utopia – Building Block 1: Being
We can do it! One block at a time… by Sean Callaghan The Screw It Principle We have gone on at some length on this website about the problems we face today in our economic, social, cultural, political...
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Opinion: The Fate of Demo- cracy in Egypt
Is this what democracy looks like? By Sean Callaghan The Problem What happens after the revolution? How does a people move from their desire to overthrow a regime to the concrete practice of governing...
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Why Read Literature Part 2: We Still Need Scalpels
By Mark McConaghy In part one of this series, I asked the question: why read literature in this day and age? What can literature actually do to better humanity? While intellectuals, professors, and...
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On Happiness
In this essay, Mark McConaghy asks the question: what is happiness in this day and age of bourgeois normalcy? Is being happy possible? And should it be considered the very point of existence itself?...
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On Sadness (Part 1)
By Mark McConaghy In his magisterial work The Political Unconscious, noted cultural theorist Frederic Jameson asked us to consider why we seem to be so unhappy despite, paradoxically, having so much...
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Reading Excess: On Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street
By Mark McConaghy In a past life I once spent some brief time roaming the halls of the investment bank Lehman Brothers looking to get a sense of what the world of finance was all about. I’ll spare you...
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The Urgency of the Unknown Future
Readers have been asking me for a conclusion to my post On Sadness, and to be fair I did promise a part two. I am, I admit, guilty of doing the same thing that I often critique academics of: diagnosing...
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Digital Fracture: How We Mourned Philip Seymour Hoffman
The headline flashed upon us on Super Bowl sunday: Philip Seymour Hoffman dead at 46. First, there was the disbelief- What? How? No way. Then, as more news outlets confirmed the reports, and the unreal...
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Apartment Sells for 88 Million, 8th Grader Shoots Bystander on Bus
Readers of the venerable New York times were greeted this week with two stories whose general incongruence deserve some reflection. First, over the weekend the paper published a story regarding the...
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Reading Crisis: Ukraine and our Search for Knowledge
Over the last two months we have been inundated with news stories concerning Ukraine’s domestic political crisis and the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the fate of the eastern provinces of the...
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Why Do Politicians Seem So Fake?
Back Against the wall at odds With the Strength of a Will and a Cause Your pursuits are called outstanding You’re emotionally complex Against the grain of dystopic claims Not the thoughts your actions...
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