Summer of 2020 saw left and right go head-to-head over COVID-19, George Floyd death

It may seem difficult now, five years on, to recall just how dramatically the world changed in 2020, and the tragic convergence of forces that fuelled that transformation. “Americans,” writes Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Summer of Our Discontent, “spent the summer and fall of 2020 coming apart spectacularly.”

Between the lethal (yet bizarrely politicized) COVID-19 pandemic and the global protests in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, Minn., 2020 would prove to be a year of unique fragmentation from which the world has yet to fully recover.

For Williams, there is “something deeply wrong” with American society, a profound sickness in the body politic of the nation. While he calls the second Trump administration a political disaster for America — invoking nothing less than a 9/11-based metaphor to suggest a Trumpian jumbo jet bringing down the skyscraper of American democracy — Williams nonetheless levels most of his criticism at what he calls “the social justice left.”

Williams shows the extent to which left-leaning and influential cultural institutions have, since 2016, treated the autocratic threat posed by Trump as a “state of exception” justifying their own campaign of illiberal, anti-democratic rhetoric and practices based on a host of presumed certainties — such as positioning Americans as either white or racialized, or oppressor or oppressed — and shutting down speech they oppose. He argues persuasively — with multiple explanatory footnotes on almost every page — that this collision of illiberalisms over the course of 2020 contributed to Americans losing trust in their institutions.

Théâtre Cercle Molière's hundredth season opens with nod to past artistic director

The defining figure of the country’s oldest active theatre company is celebrated in Pauline Boutal, entre les toiles et les planches (Between Canvases and Boards), the opening production of Théâtre Cercle Molière’s centennial season.

Boutal, who was born in France in 1894, was an active participant in the troupe from Day 1, working alongside her artistic peers — including her husband Arthur, her costume designing mother and her handyman father — to establish a lasting tradition of francophone theatre in St. Boniface.

As artistic director of Cercle Molière from 1941 to 1968, Boutal, who also was a fashion designer, Eaton’s catalogue illustrator and nationally acclaimed portraitist, broke new ground.

In Boutal’s life, which ended at age 97, playwright Lise Gaboury-Diallo found for herself a dream character whose influence spanned centuries.

King’s love of architecture largely ignored

“Give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”

So spoke our present king, Charles III, to a British audience in 1987.

Constitutional norms dictate that the British (and thereby, Canadian) monarchy doesn’t involve itself in political or commercial matters.

Charles, when monarch-in-waiting as Prince of Wales, honoured that protocol — except when it came to architecture.

Poker’s NBA-and-Mafia betting scandal echoes movie games, and cheats, from ‘Ocean’s’ to ‘Rounders’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The stakes. The famous faces. The posh private rooms. The clever cheating schemes.

The federal indictment of a big-money poker ring involving NBA figures on Thursday, in which unsuspecting rich players were allegedly enticed to join then cheated of their money, echoed decades of movies and television, and not just because of the alleged Mafia involvement.

Fictional and actual poker have long been in sort of a pop-cultural feedback loop. When authorities described the supposed circumstances of the games, they might've evoked a run of screen moments from recent decades.

Poker in ‘Ocean’s Eleven,’ ‘Molly’s Game’ and ‘The Sopranos’

Greek singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos buried in a state funeral

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Popular Greek singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos was buried Saturday at Athens’ First Cemetery in a state-sponsored funeral, four days after his death at age 80.

Savvopoulos had died of a heart attack after battling cancer since 2020.

Thousands came to pay their respects to a well-beloved, if sometimes controversial, artist as he lay in state at a chapel of the Athens Metropolitan Cathedral Saturday morning. Hundreds made the nearly 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) walk behind the hearse to the cemetery.

The presence of a Greek navy band playing mournful music was indicative of the change in Savvopoulos’s status, from someone lionized by anarchist-leaning leftists in the 1960s and 1970s and dismissed by the establishment as a long-haired freak, to a figure embraced by the same establishment and cultural mainstream.

True grit lacking in Canadian collection

Some things sound great in theory but flop in practice.

Take this mixed bag of patriotic Canadian essays responding to Donald Trump’s obnoxious “51st state” taunts last winter.

At the time it was a no-brainer: collect the musings of a range of cultural figures as they react to the “existential threat” to our national sovereignty posed by the trolling of the newly installed U.S. president.

And what better title to use than the hockey metaphor Toronto-born comedian Mike Myers employed on NBC’s Saturday Night Live: “Elbows Up.”

Shoalts digs into British explorer’s life and disappearance in Canada’s breathtaking north

Canadian explorer Adam Shoalts, author of a half-dozen books about his northern adventures, expands his range in this new volume by combining wilderness trips, biography and cold-case detective work in an intriguing tale of little-known but well-respected solo early 20th-century explorer Hubert Darrell.

It was while reading historical records in 2011 that Shoalts first encountered a reference to Darrell, who disappeared in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories in 1910; he became enchanted by the life of the solo prospector, guide and explorer, and drawn to solving the mystery of how he died.

“I often felt as if I were chasing a ghost,” Shoalts writes. “He’d vanished not only literally, but from the pages of history.”

A cold case in a cold, cold land, if you will.

Couple’s emotional stakes put to the test

London-based Irish author Eimear McBride pulls no punches in her latest novel The City Changes Its Face. Set in a London flat over a long autumn night in 1996, two lovers — the book’s protagonist, acting student Eily, and her actor and filmmaker partner Stephen — expose the foundations or architecture (including sex, family trauma and addiction) of their relationship, re-living meaningful events, conversations and revelations over their first two years together. The novel is a gritty ode to the early passion of a lasting love affair.

At the novel’s outset Eily is particularly fragile; while many readers may intuitively anticipate the open secrets that shadow and conclude the book, the journey that takes us there is never easy or boring. Eily’s interior life is as embodied and as real as the tip-tapping of nervous fingers on the Formica counter, the fought-over ripped duvet, the city noises outside of the couple’s Camden flat and the tube, the Underground, shuddering below their feet.

Shirking convention, McBride presents her characters’ dialogue without tags and with unusual line breaks and spaces, forcing the reader to slow down and backtrack, to hang and consider the words and the heightened emotions and meaning that permeate these words. She also uses smaller font for interior monologue or asides that complement and contradict the words Eily shares with the other characters and the reader.

McBride revels in the subterfuge and esthetics of the performance that Eily and Stephen — as actors and artists — engage in presenting to each other and the world at large.

Candian actor’s autofiction an earnest ode to late art teacher

Marc Bendavid is a 43-year-old Toronto-born actor, seen in Reacher, Murdoch Mysteries and more, who has written his first book, called The Sapling (metaphoric for “young man”). The book is billed as a novel and its main character Marc tells the story in the first person — a signal the book is autobiographical. The Sapling presents very few scenes, instead taking the form of a monologue addressed to a woman named Klara, telling her what it has been like to know her.

On the opening page of Marc’s narrative (which follows a brief prologue from Klara), we learn Klara has died. This is Marc’s motive for reflecting on all the years of their friendship. Once his school years ended, he didn’t see her very often, but she stands out in his mind as his favourite person.

Living in Toronto with his parents and two sisters, after Grade 5 Marc transferred to an arts-based school three blocks east of Yonge Street. There were five teachers — one each for dance, vocal music, band, drama and art. Klara Bloem was the art teacher, had a South African accent, was vivacious and funny and generally regarded as cool. She was 43 and Mark 11 — and the pages documenting their friendship in his school years are the best in the book.

The format of The Sapling differs from many novels. There are no indented paragraphs, likely meant by Marc to best reflect his musings, intended for Klara as if she were still alive to hear or read them. Blocks of text vary in length and are separated by plenty of white space.

Albom’s magically uplifting love story melds fantasy, time travel and suspense

Alfie’s story begins when he’s in his 50s in an interrogation room with a determined and hardened detective. He had just been arrested for allegedly cheating at a casino in the Bahamas and suspiciously winning millions of dollars. Also, it turns out, Alfie is dying.

His life story unravels slowly through a journal Alfie has meticulously kept for his unnamed boss to read upon his death. But he gives it to the detective to read as his only means of trying to defend his actions.

And so this magical, uplifting and mysterious story begins — part fantasy, part time travel, part suspense and mostly about a woman Alfie loves.

Twice is the newest of about a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction by Michigan-based Mitch Albom. One of Albom’s most beloved books is the beautiful Tuesdays With Morrie, reported to be the bestselling memoir of all time.

Bad Bunny didn’t miss the Billboard Latin Music Awards, he was the top winner

MIAMI (AP) — His presence had remained a mystery, but Bad Bunny was there in person Thursday night to receive all the 2025 Billboard Latin Music Awards that were given to him, including the special Billboard Top Latin Artist of the 21st Century Award.

Puerto Rican star Rita Moreno presented him with the accolade, and flirtatiously noted that the reggaeton singer is “good” and “whole.” Then, in a more serious tone, she told him that she identified with him.

“Today I see an artist who takes the whole world,” Moreno said of Bad Bunny. “That same strength, that same passion, that helped me to never give up.”

Taking the stage to his song “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” Bad Bunny, 31, danced a bit of salsa with Moreno, 93.

June Lockhart, beloved mother figure from ‘Lassie’ and ‘Lost In Space,’ dies at 100

LOS ANGELES (AP) — June Lockhart, who became a mother figure for a generation of television viewers whether at home in “Lassie” or up in the stratosphere in “Lost In Space,” has died. She was 100.

Lockhart died Thursday of natural causes at her home in Santa Monica, family spokesman Lyle Gregory, a friend of 40 years, said Saturday.