Bert Archer

It was the Siberian site of the Russia’s gulags—a remote region for those in exile or seeking safety. But with Dostoevsky, Eisenstein and Solzhenitsyn among its residents, willing or not, Kazakhstan’s unique cultural history can’t be ignored. 

Can you imagine a pope who doesn’t scrunch up his theological nose in disgust at what people of the same sex sometimes get up to? One that doesn’t think women should just sit down and shut up?

I, for one, cannot. But—and it’s a shock to my system, I can tell you—I may not have to.

Walmart would like to move in down the street from a little market in downtown Toronto called Kensington. There is, as you might expect, a fuss—a fuss I’m quite pleased by, because it lays bare a few things that are of much greater than local concern. It’s about a pernicious preference for the idea of the working class over the actual members of that class, a refusal to see one’s middle-class fetishes as middle-class fetishes, and a predilection for protecting the interests of the unborn—conveniently in very little conflict with our own current ones—over those of their grandparents trying to make ends meet today.