For some reason the cold seems to release them. As I move through the frigid streets of Toronto, the noisome fumes of the city’s underground digestive tract spew up through the sewer covers and grates into the windswept streets above. What would normally be a minor unpleasantness in urban life becomes for me— knowing that I will be writing an appreciation of Jamie Benidickson’s The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage—an occasion for reflection on the dirty world that heaves and flows beneath the visible urban…
David Cameron
David Cameron is chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He has divided his time between public service and academic life. Among his most recent publications is Street Protests and Fantasy Parks: Globalization, Culture and Society (University of British Columbia Press, 2002), edited with Janice Gross Stein.