Canada’s Cultural-Appropriation Tempest, Five Years Later A few weeks ago, I was approached by Indigenous journalist Robert Jago, who was looking to do a podcast episode about cultural appropriation—with a focus on Sasquatch as his main case study. He asked me for an interview, and sent me a list of questions, some pertaining to my Jonathan Kay 20 Sep 2022 · 8 min read
Captiongate: How a Single Zoom Call Propelled Canada’s Greens Into Pronoun Meltdown Amita Kuttner claimed that online text reading ‘she’ instead of ‘they’ illustrated a ‘system of oppression.‘ Now the party’s president has resigned, and the movement is in chaos. Jonathan Kay 15 Sep 2022 · 7 min read
Denouncing The Diagolonoids A Canadian right-wing nut is peddling a satirical meme about a diagonally-shaped North American superstate. Needless to say, much of the country’s intellectual class is terrified. Jonathan Kay 2 Sep 2022 · 6 min read
The Line Between Anti-Racism and Racism Keeps Getting Fainter How an antisemitic bigot named Laith Marouf built a lucrative career as a Canadian government-funded ‘anti-racist’ Jonathan Kay 25 Aug 2022 · 12 min read
Apple’s Depressing Denouement A review of ‘After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul,’ by Tripp Mickle (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2022). Jonathan Kay 11 Aug 2022 · 9 min read
A Media-Fueled Social Panic Over Unmarked Graves Not a single body has been unearthed. But Canadians wouldn’t know it from the false information reported in The New York Times. Jonathan Kay 22 Jul 2022 · 16 min read
Critical Race Theory Wasn’t Always Like This The version of CRT that I studied in the 1990s offered a useful critique of American institutions—rather than a moral condemnation of American souls. Jonathan Kay 20 Jun 2022 · 5 min read
The Case Against Hate-Speech Laws: a Canadian Perspective It is not science fiction to imagine that Section 319 and other as-yet-undrafted Canadian “anti-hate” laws will metastasize. Jonathan Kay 4 Jun 2022 · 5 min read
When Disagreement Becomes Trauma How does one deal with those who claim that debate itself represents an agony beyond human endurance? Jonathan Kay 8 May 2022 · 7 min read
The ‘MoonSwatch’ Made Me Rethink My Relationship with Wristwatches I spent a lot of time discussing the Oscars online last week. But my friends and I didn’t waste time on Will Smith and Chris Rock, or even on the awards themselves. Instead, we focused on what the celebrities were wearing on their wrists. DJ Khaled sported a magnificently Jonathan Kay 6 Apr 2022 · 8 min read
I Didn’t Care About Crypto—Until a Fake Canadian ‘Emergency’ Showed Me Why We Need It A few weeks ago, I visited my new favourite financial institution. It’s a Toronto corner store with a big rusted out air conditioner over the front door, and windows plastered with ads for drumstick ice-cream cones and lottery tickets. Near the back door, nestled under old cardboard boxes full Jonathan Kay 18 Mar 2022 · 14 min read
Quillette Podcast #182: Jacob Mchangama on His New Book, ’Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media’ Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with Copenhagen-based think-tank scholar and podcaster Jacob Mchangama about why so many human societies have such a difficult time tolerating dissent and heresy. [https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-History-Socrates-Social/dp/1541600495] Jonathan Kay / Quillette 7 Mar 2022 · 1 min read
Vladimir Putin’s Medieval Mindset In 1338, the story has it, a notorious French exile named Robert of Artois strutted into the London palace of King Edward III, bearing a stuffed heron on a silver platter. “Clear the way, you miserable failures,” he said to the assembled lords. “I have a heron … the most cowardly Jonathan Kay 3 Mar 2022 · 4 min read
The Ottawa Trucker Protest Was Disruptive. The Hysterical Reaction to It Was Worse In some cases, drawing the line between permissible and impermissible forms of public protest can be difficult. But the Canadian “Freedom Convoy [https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/meet-the-truckers]” that occupied downtown Ottawa until Sunday wasn’t one of those cases. Thousands of anti-vaccine-mandate protesters, many of them driving trucks, took Jonathan Kay 21 Feb 2022 · 11 min read
We’re All Going to Get Omicron My friend Fred (not his real name) is one of the most conscientiously COVID-avoidant people I know. In the pandemic’s early days, he was the guy at my health club who investigated mechanisms we could use to sterilize tennis balls in real time, during play, lest virus particles make Jonathan Kay 11 Jan 2022 · 8 min read
