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Nov 30, 2024 | 
nationalpost.com | Allan Stratton
Recent penalties against Emo, Ont. and its mayor for not flying the Pride flag have undermined public confidence — and understandably so • • You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account. Article contentIn 2020, Borderland Pride asked the township of Emo, Ont. (pop. 1,300) to proclaim Pride Month and fly the Pride flag. In a 3-2 vote, the council declined.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton
A review of Sonny Boy by Al Pacino, 384 pages, Penguin Press (October 2024)When I’m reading celebrity memoirs, I’m usually tempted to skip the first few chapters. I generally don’t care about the family history, the toddler years, or the misadventures of adolescence. I want to jump to the parts of the story I know best—the books they wrote, the films they made, the songs they played, and so on. I’m glad I overcame that temptation when reading Al Pacino’s new autobiography, Sonny Boy.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |Bradley Strotten
A review of I Will Live by Lale Gül; 320 pages; Virago (August 2024)Lale Gül’s autobiographical debut novel Ik ga leven (“I Will Live”) was first published in Dutch in 2021 when the author was just 23. It became an immediate bestseller and was published in English translation last month. The story follows the dramatic unveiling of Gül’s fictional counterpart, Büsra, a twenty-year-old Muslim rebel living in the Netherlands and chafing against religious and cultural authority.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |John Lloyd
After Quillette published an essay by evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven titled, “Why Do Men Dominate Chess?,” a number of friends asked me if her essay explained a similar phenomenon in my own field of mathematics. After all, aren’t many of the traits that Hooven identified as crucial to excellence in chess—innate spatial ability, competitiveness, obsessiveness—similarly crucial for excellence in mathematics? And don’t men dominate mathematics for some of the same reasons?
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |John Lloyd |Holly Lawford-Smith
Introduction: My guest this week is Jack Despain Zhou, also known by his alias Tracing Woodgrains. I first encountered Jack’s work when he was a research assistant on Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog’s excellent podcast Blocked and Reported. Blocked and Reported | Jesse Singal | SubstackA Podcast About Internet Controversies. Click to read Blocked and Reported, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers. Now, he is an independent writer and law student.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |John Lloyd |Holly Lawford-Smith
Note: The following essay contains spoilers. On 22 December 1984, four teenagers, all of whom had previously been arrested, boarded a New York subway train with the intention of robbing a downtown arcade. Two of them cornered a mild-mannered loner named Bernie Goetz and demanded five dollars. They did not know that two previous muggings had left Goetz with a permanently damaged knee, and that he’d taken to carrying an unlicensed gun for self-defence.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Julia Friedman |Sonny Loughran |Benny Morris |Allan Stratton
In his most recent book, The War on the West, British conservative polemicist Douglas Murray describes a revealing episode that occurred in the United Kingdom. In late 2020, the Tate Britain gallery announced the permanent closure of its restaurant, which is decorated with a wrap-around mural painted in the late 1920s by Rex Whistler and titled Pursuit of Rare Meats. Two years prior, some members of the public had complained about the mural’s “stereotypical” representation of people of colour.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Sonny Loughran |Benny Morris |Allan Stratton |Andrew Glover
Russia currently exists in a state of economic purgatory. Since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Western powers seeking to limit his nation’s warmaking capacity have instituted one of the harshest sanction regimes the world has ever seen. Imports of Russian oil, above a certain price, have been outlawed, as have exports of sensitive materials, such as semiconductors, engine parts, and communications equipment,that might find their way into Russian weaponry.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Benny Morris |Allan Stratton |Andrew Glover |Matt Johnson
On the evening of 1 October, I was sitting in my living room watching television—instead of cowering in my home’s reinforced concrete “safe” room, as per government instructions—when I saw two streams of blazing projectiles pass by my window. They were five minutes apart, more or less horizontal, and moving southward slowly and in an orderly fashion.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Allan Stratton |Andrew Glover |Matt Johnson |Brian Stewart
Twenty years ago, a former agent told me that my upcoming young-adult novel, Chanda’s Secrets, about a teenager whose mother is dying of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, would be lucky to sell a few hundred copies to local high schools. Instead, by some freakish miracle, it was translated, published, awarded, and taught internationally, including in sub-Sahara.
