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The Big Short: Completing the Financial Crisis Trilogy
I watched The Big Short on its recent opening day, and together with Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award–winning 2010 documentary Inside Job and J.C. Chandor’s remarkable low-budget first feature Margin Call (2011), it forms a trilogy of excellent and thought-provoking movies about the global financial crisis. The Big Short follows Michael Lewis’s 2010 book with the…
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Political Narrative Revisited
In Plot Points, an article in the New York Times Magazine on Dec. 13, 2015 American political journalist Mark Leibovich reflected on the use of the word narrative in the current election campaign. He noted that it has become unhinged from its original literary meaning, discussed the narratives associated with various politicians, and observed the…
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Absence of Malice: Learning from Mistakes
Following last week’s post on Nothing but the Truth as a counter-fable of investigative journalism gone wrong, this week I’ll look at a much older movie, Absence of Malice, which had its debut in 1981. Thinking that the post-Watergate lionizing of heroic investigative journalists had gone too far, its screenwriter, Kurt Luedtke, a former newspaper…
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Global Spoiler Alert
As I work on Enterprising Fables, I realize that I should start it with a global spoiler alert. The plot trajectories of the texts I write about are an essential component of my analysis because they show how the texts’ creators have shaped their story material. Therefore I must present full plots, including their endings.…
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Going Deep at the Sento: Travel Wisdom of a Twelve-Year-Old
When my younger son, Nathaniel, was seven years old he announced that he was starting a travel fund. All future allowance, birthday gifts, Chanukah presents, and random grandparental disbursements would be saved for his “dream trip”. And Disneyworld was emphatically not on the itinerary. Nathaniel was the only early reader I knew whose bookshelves included…
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Spotlight: Heroic but not Triumphal
I watched Spotlight, the new movie about investigative journalism, last week. It has received rave reviews and been compared to All the President’s Men, the 1976 classic movie of this genre. In Spotlight, the Boston Globe’s spotlight team of four journalists, investigates rumors of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Boston. Spotlight focuses…
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Claiming Social Security: A Bureaucracy that Delivers
While an undergraduate at Harvard, for a semester or two I had a part-time job, which required me to get a Social Security number and to contribute. In addition, I was a faculty member at Northwestern University for a short time, and also contributed to Social Security. As I approached my mid-sixties, I wondered whether…
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Why Justin Trudeau Will be Prime Minister by Remembrance Day
The polls’ consensus prediction is that the Liberal Party will win the most seats in Monday’s election. It will gain seats in the Atlantic Provinces, Ontario, and the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The Conservative Party will revert to its status of a decade ago as primarily western and rural. The NDP will see the…
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Fifty Years, One Party, Three Generations
Is there a political gene? And if so, is it dominant? Observers of the current election, watching Justin Trudeau working a crowd, may be forgiven for wondering. In my case, the questions come even closer to home. Last week, I took my twelve-year-old son Nathaniel to the mass rally for Trudeau held at the Powerade…
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Heroes, Fools, and Knaves: Tracking Federal Election Ads
I am using the federal election campaign to do research about the role of narrative in political advertising. With the help of a research assistant, I am preserving and coding all the ads posted by the three major parties. As of the end of September, we have 27 Conservative, 51 Liberal, and 31 NDP ads.…
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Ken Kernaghan’s Lightness of Being
As the public administration community in Canada and world-wide mourns the loss of Ken Kernaghan, I’d like to offer some recollections. I first met Ken forty years ago, and we were often in touch since then. We worked particularly closely on two co-authored books, The New Public Organization (with co-author Brian Marson), and Digital State…
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A Second Chance to Get It Right
As Canadians debate our country’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis, Globe and Mail journalist Sean Fine recently recalled the pivotal decision taken in 1979 by the Conservative government of Joe Clark to accept 50,000 Vietnamese refugees, excavating a little-known backstory that lies behind it. Fine recounts how then Deputy Minister of Immigration Jack Manion…
- 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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