Rick Salutin

We'd be nowhere on the Ford story without print media, it wouldn't exist, along with its ever-widening ripples of insight into how our society functions.

Could the current embarrassment surrounding Rob Ford be an opportunity to move beyond that ever-revolving bifurcation between roughly equal blocs toward a more complete civic consensus?

I'll miss Peter Worthington, Canada's archetypal right-wing journalist, who died this week at 86. I say that without irony or subtext. I'll just miss him.

Our governments have become largely a sales force, trooping to Washington to beg the U.S. to buy our oil and build pipelines for it. Resources Minister Joe Oliver is the Willy Loman of this drama.

The Hot Docs film festival is a phenomenon. In just 20 years it's become huge. Built around documentaries. How does that happen? And why here?

In the echoing words of the late Susan Sontag: "Let's by all means grieve together, but let's not be stupid together." It applies maybe quadruple after the Boston bombings -- and to us as well.

It's richly ironic that New Democrats, who laboured for years to shed the albatross of "socialism," finally succeeded last weekend just when the word may no longer be cursed.

Personally I think the whole emphasis on leadership in our politics is embarrassing. If we were democratically more evolved, leadership would hardly matter.

We ought to consider R.A. Dickey, who's now No. 1 in the Blue Jays' starting rotation, not just a pitching asset but a cultural one.

This year, Easter and Passover, despite being reckoned by different calendars, coincide in the same week.