Listen to today’s podcast People are either foxes, who know many things, or hedgehogs, who know one big thing. That 2,700 year-old idea comes from the Greek poet Archilochus. He’s wrong. People are foxes and hedgehogs, especially on the weekend when our foxes emerge and when the Ramsay Writes blog…

What’s the one thing we all remember about the 94-page bill passed by the State of Georgia last week to “comprehensively revise elections…

Heinrich Heine said that when fees to attend Harvard in the mid-1800s were $250 and not the $48,000 they are today. He didn’t mean that kind of school, of course, though in America the cost of getting educated is as high as the cost of getting sick. But for everyone…

The Globe and Mail is not where I’m used to seeing “snakes in your bed” headlines. But this one came close last month: “Catalyst offered up to $11-million to Israeli firm that launched sting on Ontario judge.” Catalyst Capital is a Toronto private equity company that sued one of its…

THE STRONG, SILENT, PSYCHO TYPE In 1966, Harvard researcher Timothy Leary would spend weekends with his students at a mansion in Dutchess County, New York where they’d smoke dope and drop acid. Now Dutchess county was and is one of the most right-wing counties in America, and the good burghers there didn’t take kindly to…

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What are high-performers going to do now that addictive overwork is losing its allure?

None of us was alive for the original Jim Crow laws back in the 1920s which made racial segregation legal in the southern United States. “Colored only” washrooms, poll taxes, “back of the bus” and IQ tests asking “how many bubbles in a bar of soap?” weren’t just the…

Until the late 1800s, people worked six days a week, with Sunday their day of rest — and in many places, church. The idea of a weekend as two very different days “in which we can do what we please” was lovingly chronicled by Witold Rybczynski​ in Waiting for the…