You may have heard of the case of Alex Sodiqov, a University of Toronto political science graduate student detained in Tajikistan. Although he has been released on bail, he is not allowed to leave the country, and is still facing charges of spying. Many of his colleagues remain very concerned about his welfare, and have made the following to ensure that the case does not lose profile. Please share or like:

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Don’t ask me why, but I was reading this goofy article by John Snobelin this morning. (Snobelin, for those who don’t remember, is the high-school dropout who became Minister of Education in the Ontario government of Mike Harris, signalling the triumph of “common sense” over the petty reign of us pointy-headed intellectuals.)

In it, Snobelin tells us about a meeting he recently attended, “a small gathering of business leaders from across North America. We huddled for a couple of days in New York to work on our futures.” There is a bit more blah-blah, until he gets to this part: “Extraordinary leaders, they share three characteristics: They have had great success, they embrace big risks and they are highly self-aware.”

The bit about “embracing big risks” is what caught my eye. This is a line that I must have heard a thousand times, in stuff on leadership and success. People are constantly being told to take bigger risks.… Continue reading

Unlike some of my co-bloggers here on In Due Course, I will admit to having some sympathy for the Christians who have been dragging their heels on our society’s recent embrace of gay marriage, and of gay pride more generally. This is not to say that I have any sympathy for their position — I don’t. But I have sympathy for them in the sense that I feel bad for them. The reason I feel bad for them is that I can see how, intellectually, they’re in a really tight spot. They are under intense social pressure to change a particular moral belief that they hold, but they can’t see any reason to change this belief, other than that they’re under intense social pressure to do so. Should they buckle under and change the belief, this would reveal a deep truth about morality that they are unwilling to acknowledge, and that in many ways undermines the point of having religious beliefs at all.… Continue reading

As I pointed out in Part 1, the debate about the impact of having children on well-being or life-satisfaction is ongoing in our cultural conversation. This is surely due to the fact that for many, especially among the educated upper class, becoming a parent is now an option rather than a taken for granted life-stage, and a highly deliberate and reflexive decision. Like many of my friends who benefited from the democratization of higher education, my partner and I came in relatively late in the game of making and raising children. She was 34 and I was 36 when we had our first one. My perspective on parenthood is different from my younger cousin who lives in the countryside and who had her kids more than 10 years before me. A significant number of adults decide for a variety of reasons to be childless, and some on both sides of the existential fence enjoy discussing the respective value of both lifestyles.… Continue reading