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Peter’s Restaurant is one of the loveliest spots on the planet, albeit one of thousands of such places across Canada and much of the world. Twenty or so tables and booths, gallons of hot coffee, sweet servers, hearty menus, what’s not to like? Karen and I show up most Sunday mornings for a late breakfast…

Ginawaydaganuc (pronounced jin-away-daga-nuk) is an Anishinaabe (Algonquin) word or expression which means, well, it means quite a bit. In fact, it’s more or less an entire world view. In simplest terms, it means that everything is interconnected in space and time, and that everything we do is impacted by what is already done, and in…

You know what drives me wild? Legalese. And I’m a lawyer. Let me be clear– carefully used legal language is not only necessary, but in good hands can be an art form. But in the hands of legal hacks and wannabe lawyers, an awkward pidgin called legalese passes for communication when in fact all it…

Don’t get me wrong– I’m a huge fan of Grammarly and Spellcheck, and without predictive typing I would not even attempt texting on the small screen. These are amazing and highly useful technologies. To be sure, these technologies are used in producing the Friday Briefing and Norm’s Notes, but from time to time I worry…

Everyone knows the name and reputation of Nelson Mandela. Few of us know much about a perhaps even greater contemporary South African, F. W. de Klerk. Frederik Willem de Klerk was the last President of South Africa under apartheid, and in many ways the most surprising person you might imagine to take such momentous steps….

The human mind is an amazing thing, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit. Take something as simple as reading and understanding text. In our English speaking world we take for granted that sounds can be transliterated into phonemes formed by (more or less) predictable combinations of letters, that the phonemes can be jammed together…