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From the archives

Country Music

Please stand and remove your cynicism

Bountiful Diversity

A leading Québécois scholar’s appreciative look at Canada’s biggest province

Positive-Sum Politics

Beyond entrenched divisions in the United States and Canada

Stephen Marche

Stephen Marche is an essayist and a novelist. He wrote The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future and On Writing and Failure, among other books.

Articles by
Stephen Marche

The Grey Plateau

When the world stopped five years ago March 2025
If an event is unspeakable, the general rule is that people can’t shut up about it. War, genocide, divine mystery, sexual taboo — all crowded subjects with libraries devoted to the hopeless inability of words to describe them. Covid is unspeakable another way. Nobody speaks about it. No other catastrophe during my lifetime has generated such a stark contrast between the scope of its impact and the poverty of its…

Canada Daze

Barrelling toward a strange kind of death July | August 2024
I can’t recall the first time I heard the phrase “so‑called Canada,” but I am quite sure it must have come from somebody paid by the government. It’s the kind of phrase career bureaucrats say. Several of our universities have used it in official documents. Non-profits, in their grant applications, sometimes use it. It’s the world’s most casual form of political…

Toil and Trouble

What a way to make a living June 2021
Work isn’t working anymore. COVID‑19 has thrown off the machinery of twenty-first-century capitalism, and as it stalls and sputters, turning over on its side, the gears and wheels lie open and exposed. This virus has revealed just how far economic theory has diverged from the actual process of earning a living. The unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since the Great…

The Passport

New-found meaning behind that slim and elegant booklet September 2020
The document is elegant. No one can dispute that. The deep navy blue of its slightly pebbled cover, the understated gilt imprint of the royal arms of Canada, which somehow looks faded even when new — the passport is a classic. Its cover may be harder, more durable, the pages inside more decorated than when I was a…

Northern Shadows

Literature in the age of Reconciliation and “peak” diversity November 2017
Many years ago, I was mistaken for a literary Jew. My first book, Raymond and Hannah, had just been published—a novel-in-emails about a long-distance relationship between a graduate student in Toronto and a yeshiva student in Jerusalem—and I had been invited to participate in a Jewish literary festival in Vancouver. Some moments in a writer’s life can be…

On Manhood, Marriage and the “Neo-patriarchy”

Rachel Giese in conversation with Stephen Marche March 2017
In his new book, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century, Stephen Marche explores the current state of gender relations through a personal account of his nearly 20-year marriage—with footnotes from his wife, Sarah Fulford. A novelist (The Hunger of the Wolf) and a columnist for Esquire

Here, Now

Canadian writers, living on the edge of the world, have the best view. July–August 2010
I wonder if there exist, anywhere, any writers who feel that they are full-throatedly a part of their time and place. I remember, when I was much younger, meeting Michael Ondaatje at a party. At the time, he was absolutely my literary hero—this was just before the film of The English Patient came out—and I asked him what I should read to become a better…