Rick Salutin

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.

Pete Seeger, who died this week at 94, embodied a radical version of alternative culture. He was alt as an artist because of how he did it: in total interaction with his audience.

So Stephen Harper finally got his Birthright trip to Israel. Good for him, even if he pushed the 26-year-old cut-off date. And it ended as such emotional excursions should.

The spread of surveillance has acquired the unstoppable aura of climate change. The amorphousness seems to overwhelm people and undermine their ability to fight back, or even flail in rage.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is closing seven of its 11 libraries and dismantling their contents, not just books but maps and journals of rare quality.

Today newspapers aren't the dominant journalistic force they were in Karl Kraus's Vienna. But they can still play a vile or almost angelic role in the grand drama of public life and debate.

Rick Salutin considers his "person" -- and "not person" of the year in his final column of 2013.

Teaching is how a society passes on, formally and informally, what it has achieved to the future. It's the basic project of our species. It justifies our passing, individual existences.

Tim Hudak is a great example of the damage a good education can do. So is Stephen Harper. Both are products of university economics departments in the late 20th century.

Mandela presided over a total, noble victory against apartheid -- from his cell! Personally it convinced me to never make historical predictions, or despair about anything political.