Rick Salutin

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.

Consider this column a Canadian afterparty for last weekend's 50th anniversary show of Doctor Who. In a charming film prelude, the final acting credit reads, "Bryan Cox as Sydney Newman."

We keep count: over three recent days, U.S. media reports on Rob Ford were mentioned 200 times in Canada and 700 times in the U.S. That's reports of reports, not the story itself.

I enter the Rob Ford discussion solely for what we can learn from it; not, God forbid, because it's totally, morbidly mesmerizing.