The Globe and Mail—the newspaper I saw my father reading every day when I was growing up—published a profile of me this past weekend. In it, a familiar Canadian story was told: Canadian artist, neglected in Canada, finds acclaim in the States, and only then at home. While there is certainly some truth to this, and a lot of what I said in the piece seemed to corroborate it, I made a point of telling the journalist that my story feels different to me, as does the story of my latest book’s publication, and that I think it’s time for a new story.

Of course, what one says in an interview is always used to support the myth the journalist has—or in this case, that Canada generally has of Canadian artistic success. But it’s not precisely the case that n+1, or the article in the Observer, or the piece in the Guardian, caused the success of the book. Especially in a place like Canada, the ones who facilitate success are primarily the other artists.

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as "racially charged" even in those cases when it would be more honest to say "racist"; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative.
[...]
The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage.

That all sounds pretty complex, messy, even. You end the book saying that it looks like from here on in, we'll have to improvise, echoing what you wrote earlier in the book that, in Toronto, "messiness is kind of our thing." Could it be that our messiness is a little like Homer Simpson's beer, the cause of and solution to all our problems?

The part of the brain needed to make safe left-hand turns largely shuts off during a cellphone conversation — even if the phone is a hands-free device, a group of Toronto researchers have found.

Parenting a young baby is essentially dehumanizing. It’s learning how to live with the basest version of yourself and how to accept that version of your partner.

I get around by bike more than any other means. But I drive a car sometimes and I’d be very surprised if I’ve never cut someone off, not out of design but out of carelessness. When someone cuts you off, that becomes everything you know about that person and then you’re like, That person sucks and they’re everything that’s wrong with this city and they’re all motorists and they have no respect… when in fact what they are is, they’re just a person who made a mistake.

This gets to the crux of the problem with hackathons—there is a disconnect between the people with real-world problems and the people who can build solutions. The industry experts don’t know how to identify and articulate their problems and the hackers don’t bother or don’t know how to extract them. Collectively, we must improve on this if we A) want hackathons to continue to thrive and B) want them to actually be useful.

Policy and “Solution” “Labs” are popping up informally, taking cues from Finland and the UK. What if these came from within our government? What if we had a shop that was mandated to be more inclusive, experimental, and daring – to engage Canadians in developing and work-shopping solutions to our most urgent policy problems? What if these activities were part of government instead of in opposition or outside of it?

One of the features of the Obama years is that we get to witness an enormous race, which you might call the race between meritocracy and government. On the one side, there is the meritocracy, which widens inequality. On the other side, there is President Obama’s team of progressives, who are trying to mitigate inequality. The big question is: Which side is winning?

It doesn’t much matter in the private sector if you get it wrong 40 per cent of the time so long as you turn a handsome profit and increase market share. It doesn’t much matter in the public sector if you get it right 99 per cent of the time if the 1 per cent you get wrong becomes a heated issue in Question Period and the media.