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Reluctant Radio Silence
It’s been almost a full month since my previous post. I haven’t lost my interests or my voice. The problem is that I am teaching three courses this semester. Preparation time (because I always update my content), classes, grading, and student contact take up most of my work week. By the way, the courses are…
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Trade Ms. Meng for USMCA?
I haven’t seen this discussed by other commentators, but it seems to me that Canada holds a tremendous bargaining advantage because Parliament has not yet ratified USMCA. President Trump has told us that USMCA is a fantastic agreement and would replace the worst trade deal ever. And he desperately wants USMCA to take effect before…
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Remember Auschwitz
Yesterday was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I visited Auschwitz some years ago and published an op-ed about my visit in the Globe and Mail. Here is a link to the Auschwitz article. In a post a few years ago, I wrote about an exhibit entitled The Evidence Room, an artistic representation…
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Innovation under Populism
Populism has become a topic of great academic interest, particularly after the Brexit referendum and election of Donald Trump in 2016 (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018, Norris and Inglehart 2019). As a long-time student of public sector innovation (Borins 1998, Borins 2014), I have become interested in the impact populism is having on it. I have…
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Richard Jewell: Eastwood’s Medal Shot?
In this time of sharp political polarization in the US, it is well known that many television programs and movies tend to appeal much more to one side of the spectrum than another. It is therefore reasonable to ask, regardless of the intentions of the creators, to whom a particular work is most likely to…
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Mackenzie King at Midnight
I just saw director/writer Matthew Rankin’s satirical bildungsroman about Mackenzie King, entitled The Twentieth Century. The film is based on two premises, the first indisputable, the second debatable. The indisputable premise, anchored in King’s diaries – a gift that truly keeps on giving – is that King was one weird dude. The debatable premise is…
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Reviewing Shiller’s Narrative Economics
Robert Shiller, 2013 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, has always challenged convention. A critic of rational expectations modelling, he demonstrated that stock prices were much more volatile than those models would suggest. And he was among the few who predicted the Internet stock bubble and the housing bubble a few years later. A few months…
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Just Not Ready Once More
The backstory for this post is longer than the story, but still worth telling. My Harvard undergraduate class (1971, truth be told) maintains an active list-serv that has become increasingly active as more of us retire. A recent hot topic has been whether the Joe Biden “mockery” ad about how world leaders view Donald Trump…
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Trump’s Toxic Innovations
Advocates and students of public sector innovation, myself included, usually assume that it is a good thing. But if innovation is a means to an end, it ultimately must be judged by the value of that end. The 9/11 attack embodied a classic innovation, taking two previously well-known terrorist tactics, airplane hijacking and suicide bombing,…
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My Graduate Students Publish!
This post is an announcement that would make any professor proud. Two of the students in my graduate seminar on Narrative and Politics two years ago have had their term papers published by the academic journal Public Voices. The most recent issue begins with a mini-symposium on Narrative and Public Administration (that you can read…
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Updating My Website
With the assistance of the very talented web manager and designer Kerry Wall, I have updated my website in several ways. Here is how it differs from the previous version. I’ve added a box on the right hand side of every page outlining the value proposition in subscribing to my blog posts. On the one…
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Answering Don Cherry
Don Cherry’s ugly racism has backfired spectacularly. His ouster is long overdue and entirely justified. Last Saturday I witnessed the best possible answer to his attempt to weaponize the poppy. I was at a mall in suburban Toronto. A group of air cadets was distributing poppies. Everyone in the group was a member of a…
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Turandot: A MeToo Disrupter
Turandot was my first opera, forty-five years ago, in Rome. I saw a poster announcing that it would be performed at the Baths of Caracalla the day I arrived, and I found my way there. To this day, I vividly remember the open-air setting and the dramatic conclusion. Last Saturday I saw the Metropolitan Opera…
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Pierre Trudeau: In a League of his Own
Yesterday was the hundredth anniversary of Pierre Trudeau’s birth. To mark the occasion his former Principal Secretary Tom Axworthy organized a day-long conference with the intriguing title “The Leadership Arts of Pierre Trudeau” at the University of Toronto’s Massey College This blog post is a brief summary of what we heard and what resonated most…
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YouTube Viewcount Stalemate
I had another look at YouTube viewcounts for the major parties and little has changed since my post a week ago. For the Conservatives, the totals for the most popular ads haven’t changed at all: “How did we get here?” stays at 851,000; the “Not as Advertised” Trudeau/Trump comparison at 501,000 in English and 213,000…