John Allemang

National anthems are tricky things. As enforced relics of a previous age, they’re a bad fit for an enlightened era that doesn’t feel the need to conform to an older generation’s invented traditions. Words offend, ideologies become outmoded, regimes change, friends morph into enemies, native lands turn into contested domains, patriotic death is seen as a waste of…

Fame is a funny thing. People we don’t know will win Olympic medals in Paris this summer and suddenly find themselves at the very centre of things. In an instant, they’ll have become famous — but what’s the point of fame if it doesn’t last? Nothing had prepared Percy Williams for the transformative moment, measured in fractions of a second as a sprinter’s victory must…

In the fall of 2022, archeologists ­digging through the clinging mud in an abandoned vegetable garden near the Tuscan spa town of San Casciano dei Bagni poked at a layer of tiles and made a startling discovery. Hidden under a protective cap of terra cotta was a bronze thunderbolt, the emblem of the almighty god Jupiter and a sacred object from the first…

Walking may be the closest thing to the universal human activity, but every walker, like every footprint, is unique. Some people saunter and wander and ramble. Others plod along, blocking the path for those trying to power ahead. Many just proceed onward in their own sweet way, one foot pursuing the other, indifferent to the pedestrian fact that they are doing something worth…

No one could accuse Bruce Kidd of peaking too soon, not after reading this rich and fascinating memoir of a teenage sports celebrity turned global traveller, educator, activist, historian, political strategist, community builder, creative university administrator, social critic, and perpetual gadfly. It’s hard to believe that the author, a vital, joyfully argumentative man, was named Canada’s Athlete of the Year a full sixty years…

Decline is relative. It took Edward Gibbon 3,180 pages in six volumes of my small-print Everyman edition to describe the Roman Empire’s slow and inevitable collapse over nearly one and a half millennia. Andrew Potter manages to dispatch our current screwed-up society in a mere 128. Because a short attention span is one of the most damnable characteristics of our particular decline — the simple answer: blame social media — we should be both grateful and unsurprised that Potter can take us down so…

Why should we believe in the orderliness of memory? Memoirists, whose soul-baring genre is thriving as never before, have convinced us that daily life has a clean structural shape, that writerly remembering can impose meaning and inspiration on all those bygone highs and lows and in-betweens through the symmetrical logic of storytelling. It’s a pleasing…

The creation of a newspaper — the fat, opinionated, story-filled scroll of repurposed pulp that used to hit the front door with a thud each morning — was rightly known as the daily miracle. Anyone who talked their way into the biz back when print held sway couldn’t help but be amazed by the warp speed of journalistic transformation: A few hours…

We need to talk about white identity, says Eric Kaufmann at the start of this prickly, panicky book about the anxieties felt by pale-­faced conservatives fearful of being swamped by people who look different. How is your typical liberal Canadian, immersed in the modern ideals of multiculturalism and unafraid of a beige-­tinted future, supposed to…

Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis By Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky Spoiler alert: We’re all going to die. It’s just a matter of when. That’s the problem with climate change, and the seemingly hopeless discussions around it. If individuals aware of their own mortality still treat living as the norm and death as a…

As a fluent and artfully plain-speaking sports columnist for the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, Cathal Kelly has attracted readers who aren’t instinctively drawn to the swings and misses of his subject matter. He stands apart from the inbred culture of professionalized athleticism with an aloofness that feels…