Wayne’s Picks | ★ Click here to read what are, in my judgement, among the best posts on this blog
Personal Essays
If it weren’t for my education, I’d be merely normal | READ “HOW I SURVIVED MY EDUCATION”
When I was a teenager, my grandmother told me: stay in school and don’t get married until you are thirty. Her advice guided my entire life | READ “MY GRANDMOTHER“
As I look back across the years and over the landscape of my childhood, one egregious figure visible on the distant field is the school bully | READ “THE BULLIES“
My grandfather rarely referred to his years at the Mush Hole, where hunger drove him to dig for potatoes by moonlight | READ “THE MUSH HOLE”
Humor
Having 150ish followers on Twitter is basically like finishing in last place on the Internet, behind egg-gravatar people who tweet nothing but emoticons and Lolz. | READ “HOW HARD COULD IT BE TO HAVE A BILLION TWITTER FOLLOWERS?“
Some genius entrepreneur came up with an idea: let’s make cigarettes electric. This genius entrepreneur called his invention an e-cigarette, which I guess meant up until that point the cigarettes we’d all been smoking were acoustic cigarettes. | READ “CIGARETTES WERE BETTER WHEN THEY WERE ACOUSTIC.“
The upside of being old is that you’ve learned from experience. So today I’m going to tell all you kids a few things. | READ “DON’T DO DRUGS, YOUNG PEOPLE. THAT IS MY JOB.“
Kids take everything as it’s presented to them, and with music this makes for some interesting experiences. | READ “THIS WAS MY BRAIN ON 70s SONGS.“
The Arts
What did the peasant literary genius really think about Russian society? | READ “READING CHEKHOV’S STORIES“
Why I’ve had a life-long fascination with Goya | READ “GOYA AND ME“
Hemingway is said to have read his obituary each morning with a glass of champagne | READ “THE OBITUARY“
Whether you love him or hate him, he changed popular music | READ “JOHN LENNON“
History
How Canada tried to solve its “Indian Problem” | READ “INDIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS“
In the 1950s, Canada moved twenty-two Inuit families thousands of kilometres to the barren landscapes of Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord | READ “THE HIGH ARCTIC RELOCATION“
The Roma have been persecuted throughout history, and it’s time we acknowledged it | READ “ROMA AND THE DEBTS OF HISTORY“
Here’s why you won’t learn about what really happened in Indian residential schools from Canada’s archives | READ “HOW TO LOOK AT CANADA’S RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL ARCHIVES“
Politics
One usually makes you feel pretty good, and the other always makes you feel like the world is full of shits | READ “A VIEW FROM THE STADIUM: POLITICS AND SPORT“
Did you know that Disney makes leftist propaganda? Here’s how they do it | READ “DEMOCRACY A LA DISNEY“
His timeless message is that your neighbour has the right to piss you off | READ “THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BERTRAND RUSSELL“
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 