Rick Salutin

Mad Men starts its final season on Sunday. It's ironic that it happens at a time of serious decline for advertising itself, which for over a century was the linchpin of the capitalist system.

There's much to learn from Justin Trudeau's brief moment of obscenity at a charity boxing gala last weekend about politics and the skills that make for an effective politician.

All bookstores, big and small, face the tech challenge. Books as we know them won't be around forever, even if it used to seem they had and would.

Another golden moment is slipping away. I don't mean the Leafs (not only). I mean the Ontario election we might have had, the one about taxes, with a debate on what it means to be a society.

What's the best that can be said of 20th century politics? It was a learning experience. There must be something better out there.

If you designed a computer program to react "rationally" on the model of great power leaders pursuing what's consensually viewed as the National Interest, it would probably "behave" as Putin has.

The fine Canadian painter with a Ukrainian heritage, Natalka Husar, dropped by with her book Burden of Innocence. The work is figurative, kitschy, classically iconic, exotic yet disturbingly familiar.

Theatre could never compete with film's spectacle but what it had was the live presence of actors, in a room, interacting and co-creating with an audience.

It's the shots of British Prime Minister David Cameron slogging through the floods there in wellies that convinced me: fatalism is back.

Rick Salutin reviews former rower Silken Laumann's memoir 'Unsinkable' in preparation for Olympics coverage and determines that success and winning in sports isn't always the best metaphor for life.