Readings

On the 20th anniversary of the Spice Girls' first album, I reflect on two decades of defending their commercial approach to feminism. 

You can stare at something for a decade and still not see it for what it is. Like, say, your therapist, whose charming spiritual community might be a cult.

Speaking with the author of the Neapolitan Quartet novels and Frantumaglia about why readers have trouble with challenging portrayals of women, the supposed sin of narcissism, and smoking cigarettes.

Leonard Cohen was our man, a guy who joked about eternal life and died a month later.

Reading The Favourite Game made him into my first sex symbol. 

He laid out every root cause and exposed every broke-ass dream that might spirit us away. There was no continuum, no sliding scale of happiness, just confusions that needed untangling.

The General and author on living with PTSD, normalizing mental illness and the Don Quixote bent to his life. 

Friends I trust, who have their lives more figured out than I do, swear by camping. It nagged at me like all unattempted things in adult life: can I actually do this?

The author of The Candidate on pissing off the CBC, the future of the NDP and whether he'd run for election again.