Spencer Morrison

In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected French president, scandalized his country’s intelligentsia by going jogging. To Alain Finkielkraut, a public intellectual and television talk-show host, for a head of state to engage in such unseemly exertions signalled societal decline. “Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade,” he said. “Walking is a…

At the bar of the Princeton Hotel, in northern British Columbia, sits a middle-aged woman who has just abandoned her oafish, self-centred husband and skipped town. Now she drinks solo. Dave, “a short fireplug of a man,” approaches and strikes up a conversation, prompting her to ask him his line of work. Dave, unaware of the woman’s recent…

Many times in the months since March 2020, the politicians, pundits, and boosters have assured us that the pandemic presents us, if we squint hard enough, with a golden opportunity. The mounting misery offers the chance to build back better — whatever that means. Usually, the “building back better” crowd flesh out their slogan by itemizing rousingly ambitious projects that have long filled the dreams of policy wonks: investments in…

At first, Geoffrey Morehouse, a federal clerk in the 1980s, resists the occult contagion that has overtaken his cubicle-hived floor at Transport Canada. His fellow bureaucrats have been voraciously reading a mysterious red book, with troubling results. They have begun speaking in fragments, omitting the words “I,” “eye,” and “aye,” and sticking out their tongues. The pressure to conform…

It being Wednesday morning, I’m set to lecture on Don DeLillo. And I’m in a child’s playroom. This room, you see, is the quietest in the small apartment that my partner, Anna, and I recently rented from another professor, who’s on sabbatical. My plan is to explore with my students some ethical quandaries in recent American…

Of all the phrases to gain traction in our language in recent times, is any uglier than “human capital”? Even as the term suggests an imperative to nurture and educate (capital, after all, must be developed), it financializes the human. Education appears through its frame as an investment opportunity, personal life choices as a series of risk…

When I run past Coal Harbour or drive along its Dunsmuir Viaduct, I experience the results of what’s arguably the most consequential policy choice in Vancouver’s history. In February 1973, the city’s eleven-member council voted overwhelmingly against constructing a freeway through the downtown core. The decision arose from powerful forces beyond municipal institutions: namely, local opposition that impelled the Pierre Trudeau government to withdraw federal support for the…