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Public Representations is Now Online
My co-author Beth Herst and I are pleased to post that our new book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, is now online. It is available to anyone on the University of Toronto Press website at this link. You can download it as an e-Publication for your reader, or as a pdf,…
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It’s Not “Just a Movie”
When young children are frightened by a story they’re watching on screen, we comfort them by reminding “It’s just a movie.” An expanding body of research is telling us that’s not actually true. Like our kids, we know that screen stories affect our emotions. Scholars are demonstrating that they work powerfully on our public memories…
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A Bureaucratic War to Save Lives
The Swedish Connection is a recent Swedish docudrama, now available on Netflix, about the efforts of a team of Swedish public servants – the Legal Department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry – to save European Jews from the Holocaust. The title of the film signals the bureaucrats’ strategy, which was to allow European Jews who…
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Getting the Book Club Scam
A few days ago, I received an invitation from one Jim Held, the organizer of the Union Square Reading Group (USRG), who wanted the group to discuss my 1997 book Innovating with Integrity. Held said he was “drawn to its exploration of ethics in public service” and that “the themes and ideas at the heart…
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Fame and Recognition at the AGO
I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario last weekend to see two exhibits. One captures a young artist encountering sudden global fame. The other makes the case for recognition of an artist whose work has been neglected for decades. I’m referring to the two recently opened exhibits at the Art Gallery of Ontario about…
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Is Electoral Reform in Ontario Possible?
I recently listened to a webinar sponsored by Fair Vote Canada entitled “Towards a Multi-Party Approach to Electoral Reform in Ontario.” Fair Vote Canada is a citizen’s group that advocates for proportional representation (PR). The speakers included representatives of the three left-of-centre parties: Mike Schreiner, Green Party leader and MPP for Guelph; Chris Glover, NDP…
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Captivated, Again
This week I have the opportunity to write about something personally gratifying, an infrequent occurrence given the political focus of many of my posts. The University of Toronto at Scarborough held its fourth annual student digital storytelling competition a few weeks ago and has now posted the winning entries. The awards for which the students…
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East Berlin 1983, Okay; Boston 2026, Not Okay?
I usually don’t continue to think about a blog I have posted, but I have been thinking about my previous one, in which I concluded I would boycott travel to the U.S. Part of the impetus was recent events. The day after I posted, Trump called off his threats of invading Greenland and imposing tariffs…
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The Whole World is Watching
When I was a student in the U.S. in the Sixties and Seventies, a slogan we shouted was “the whole world is watching,” which was an attempt to shame the Johnson and Nixon Administrations by reminding them of what we assumed was their obligation to preserve the U.S.’s standing in the eyes of the rest…
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Resisting Domination
The extraordinary rendition of Venezuelan President Maduro last weekend, coupled with the release of the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) last month, have riveted the attention of Canadians. These two events are closely linked, as the unidentified authors of the strategy must have been aware of the Administration’s military plans regarding Venezuela and wrote…
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A Song for the Next Ontario Election Campaign – or Sooner
Recently my Harvard classmate Peter Sage, who blogs in Oregon and occasionally reposts some of my blogs, did a post with an AI-generated folk song criticizing the 73 year-old Republican member of Congress for his district. I took Peter’s lead and went to Chat GPT for a protest song about Doug Ford. Ford is no…
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Is Ontario Still a Democracy?
Earlier this week, I spoke to this provocative question at a panel discussion organized by Ontario NDP MPPs Chris Glover (Spadina-Fort York) and Jessica Bell (University-Rosedale). I provided a broad historical and comparative perspective – what academics are expected to do – and the other speakers gave their reactions to the Ford Government’s policies from…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- My latest book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, co-authored with Beth Herst, was published in April 2026 by University of Toronto Press (open access).
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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