International-Affairs Columnist, The Globe and Mail. Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy. Author of Arrival City, Maximum Canada, etc.
Toronto, Canada
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New edition! New cover! New content! New low price!
Out this week. The history you never learned in school; the argument you never thought you’d make
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This is actually a good ranking — I’d make a few swaps in the top 20 but weirdly matches my perception. The sole major exception, ironically considering who I’m QTing here, is the inclusion of LOST anywhere on that list
The New York Times’ final list of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century is now complete.
What do you make of the final ranking? Which placements surprised you the most?
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When television was developed in the 1930s, the Times of London complained that you can’t have a product that’s a Greek prefix attached to a Latin suffix and then asked readers to decide what we’d all call the people who watched television and settled with “lookers-in”
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TRANSLATION GUIDE
“They live in the countryside”
North America = they’re poor and rural
UK = they’re very wealthy gentry or aristocracy
“They’re a middle-class family”
North America = they’re not wealthy
UK = they’re quite wealthy
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Of course the one bad thing about Canada is the trigger for his maple-infused nationalism
The sight of that Crown, and of the Queen’s face on the blue and purple money, brought home to me that I was now in a monarchy with a parliament, northern and stern but with limits.
✍️ Peter Hitchens on how he became a Canadian nationalist
trib.al/XdvNSJ7
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The “how could you have a Canadian Mujahadeen when your country has gun control” question is easily answered by examining the sorts of Canadians who wish to personally possess handguns and assault rifles, and understanding which side they’d likely be on
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Xi Jinping’s international politics are driven by domestic insecurities and a fragile hold on popular legitimacy to an equal and sometimes even greater extent than any U.S. leader’s, @Ethan_Lou writes in this wide analysis
theglobeandmail.com/opinion/…
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Doug Saunders retweeted
The language of annihilating an entire state and its people should never be accepted as "the language of war". Ever.
Reporter: But do you think that Mr. Trump goes too far when he says he is considering destroying Iran?
Mark Carney: Well, there is a war underway, and he's speaking the language of war.
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Doug Saunders retweeted
Canada claiming a spot at the forefront of AI sounds like a joke until you realize the entire modern AI industry came out of one Toronto lab.
Geoff Hinton spent the AI winter at the University of Toronto, funded by a Canadian government program that kept backing neural networks when every US funder had written them off. In 2012 his students built AlexNet, the model that started the deep learning era. One of those students was Ilya Sutskever.
Then the drain began.
Google bought Hinton's three-person startup for $44 million in 2013. Ilya went with it, then co-founded OpenAI, which is now fielding investor offers at $1.2 trillion. Aidan Gomez, a University of Toronto undergrad, co-wrote the 2017 transformer paper that every frontier model runs on, the same architecture underneath Anthropic, whose investors expect a $2 trillion IPO next month.
Add it up and Canadians built the foundational architecture, the breakthrough model, and helped start the labs racing to be the first $2 trillion AI company. Almost all of that value sits in San Francisco.
What Canada kept is Cohere, Gomez's lab in Toronto, reportedly raising at $20 billion right now with Ottawa itself in the round. Put $20 billion next to $1.2 trillion and $2 trillion. The country that invented the field kept about 1% of it.
So Carney's line is funny in a way he didn't intend. Canada has been at the forefront of AI for twenty years. It just kept exporting the forefront.
Canadian PM Mark Carney:
There are only four countries at the forefront of AI: France, Canada, China and the United States.
We must join forces to ensure an appropriate framework so that AI is safe and effective.
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Will they ever again have a president capable of saying this?
Barack Obama at his last press briefing with reporters, 2017:
"I have enjoyed working with all of you. That does not, of course, mean that I've enjoyed every story that you have filed, but that's the point of this relationship. You're not supposed to be sycophants. You're supposed to be skeptics. You're supposed to ask me tough questions. You're not supposed to be complimentary, but you're supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power."
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This is pretty hilarious at a moment when Canada is being hurt economically by low intake numbers that have fallen into the net negative
Trump: "Canada is destroying itself by allowing millions and millions of people into the Country, essentially unchecked and unvetted, and who are causing problems that will soon be too big to handle. It is a Liberal takeover that will end very badly. Already showing up in their numbers. Big unemployment. ‘Oh Canada! President DJT"
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That’s me in the corner
To the surprise of nobody, in a car dependent nation like Canada it's almost impossible to find a region where the car isn't the main mode of transport. Source: buff.ly/g7MsRPx
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Doug Saunders retweeted
How cool is Zelenskyy….casually strolling the scary streets Mamdanistan to meet with Macron
Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський
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Doug Saunders retweeted
I listened to UNGA proceedings from my mother's Manhattan living room. A university professor preparing for her classes, she just forwarded me these lines from Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure":
But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
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