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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…
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Fairly Quiet on the YouTube Front
In the better part of a week since my last post, I’ve been revisiting the ads posted on YouTube by the Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP. First, a bit of background. Viewcounts for YouTube ads stop increasing after a while, indicating saturation. In effect, the ad is no longer news. But the interesting question is the…
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What are the Viewcounts Saying?
In the 2015 Canadian federal and 2016 US presidential elections, YouTube viewcounts for party ads were closely correlated with the ultimate outcomes. In the Canadian election, the Liberals had a total viewcount of almost 10 million for their ads, while the NDP and Conservatives were both far behind, with total viewcounts of 2.4 million and…
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Narrative and Politics Graduate Seminar
This winter semester, I will be leading my graduate seminar on narrative and politics. There is still space in the seminar for graduate students to enroll, so I am posting about what we will be studying. With the explosive growth of social media and the rise of Internet-enabled government, narrative has become an essential mode…
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New Article about Investigative Journalism Films
Co-author Beth Herst and I have just published a new article about investigative journalism films in the journal Journalism Practice. The article is titled “Beyond ‘Woodstein’: Narratives of Investigative Journalism.” We identify 14 recurring structural and formal elements of a fable about investigative journalism and use the fable to analyze six diverse films produced in…
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The First Federal Election Ads: Guilt by Association
I’ve started looking at the first election ads of the two major parties, and both are using the rhetoric of guilt by association against each other. The Liberals’ “Choose Forward” ad associates Conservative leader Andrew Scheer with his predecessor Stephen Harper and his colleague Doug Ford as a practitioner of the politics of backwardness. Prime…
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Gaffes by Hillary and Amy
I’ve just read Amy Chozick’s 2018 memoir Chasing Hillary. The book is an enjoyable mixture of bildungsroman and political reportage. Chozick writes about her development as a journalist over the ten years she spent covering Hillary Clinton, first for the Wall Street Journal and then for the New York Times, and also includes reminiscences of…
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Harry the Wanderer
A few years ago when anyone in our household returned from school, errands, or shopping, we often noticed a ginger cat with tiger-like markings and a beige underbelly and the name Harry on his collar. Besides seeking our attention by rubbing against our legs and meowing, he was trying to get into the house. Never…
- 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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