Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements The worst part of living through the era of doomscrolling, AI slop and endless, valueless content is getting to witness the final, pyrrhic triumph of the pundit. News and information overwhelm us with little in the way of filters except for the ever-mutating algorithm and its indifferent, inscrutable need to either enrage us [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Rick McGinnis Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy When the writer Walker Percy wrote to explain why he converted to Catholicism for the forward of a book about Catholic converts, he began by stating that “my tradition was scientific.” Born into a Presbyterian but essentially agnostic Southern family and trained [...]
Rick McGinnis: A nagging question has been percolating through what passes for the conservative movement these days: What, if anything, has conservatism conserved? At its finest point the question asks what conservative politicians and governments have succeeded in preserving – in society and domestic policy, never mind in economics and foreign policy? But essentially, it’s a question about just what conservatism means [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements At the end of last year Helen Andrews (whose book Boomers I reviewed here five years ago) published an essay in the online magazine Compact called “The Great Feminization,” looking over the world now that women have achieved parity and are edging into dominance of certain professions and institutions. It was a sensation [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements You have to wonder if Paul Ehrlich ever thought he’d live to 93. The biologist and writer – his initial specialty was butterflies, though his ambitions proved much broader – had his death announced this March to what can only be described as a mix of tributes and mockery. We should, according [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements At the core of Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s new book Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk is a simple truth that doesn’t get repeated enough. “Canada is not a love story,” they write. “It is a marriage of convenience, a survival strategy conceived a century and a half [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Some of us might have woken up with a shock recently to discover that we are already a quarter of the way through the 21st century. By this point in the last century the old monarchies of Europe had made themselves extinct after a world war of unprecedented carnage, one of them had embarked on [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements If you go by what you read or the cultural mood today, we’re doomed. In spite of improvements in life expectation, overall wages, quality of life, consumer goods and nutrition – among a dozen other benchmarks – the sense that we are on the downward slope of a decline persists, a subjective intimation [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Last month, critic Ted Gioia published an article on his Substack site, The Honest Broker, titled “Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?” He begins by responding to an Atlantic magazine story about the writer John Cheever, once a major figure in American literature until his death in 1982, though as the writer [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements On May 20, 2020, just two months into the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, New York governor Andrew Cuomo gave one of his daily press conferences – a “state of the plague” address of sorts, reliably covered in the legacy media. (He would win an Emmy for “masterful use of television to inform and calm [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements With the recent announcement that government employees must return to their work in office, the physical remnants of the COVID-19 lockdowns are mostly gone. Do you remember where your vaccination documents are? The arrows on the floors of stores telling us which direction to walk are gone, as are the stickers on subway [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Lately I’ve been getting served a rush of media asking the question “Is the world getting worse?” in the form of online articles, Twitter/X threads, blog posts and YouTube videos. Most of the blame goes to social media and the spread of “misinformation,” which has made us angrier, less hopeful and increasingly distrustful [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Canada has just undergone an election – endured is a better word; suffered through even better – but before we collectively consign the experience to the memory dump (it’s unlikely we’d have another one if we remember what they’re like) I think we should make this what they call a “teachable moment” and [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements First Nations issues are evergreen in Canadian politics, rising to prominence regularly, like during the battle over the Meech Lake Accord in the late ‘80s, when Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper and his eagle feather helped scuttle any attempted constitutional amendment (and got Harper elected as an MP shortly after). It was a major [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Reviewing journalist Barbara Amiel’s memoir here a few years ago, what struck me most was an observation she made about her time in transatlantic high society, when her husband Conrad Black’s success and fame was at its peak. She was adopted by a circle of rich women, the wives of rich men – [...]