“Are you a Buddhist or a Capitalist?” asked my friend a few weekends ago when we were scaling the heights of “so-called success” – a state you could shiftily define as the best a person can be at a given time in a world of bounded rationality or limited means. “What?” I shot back quizzically.…
Coincidence found me racing rush-lane hour at this wonderful artsy blockbuster Call Me By Your Name, a film based on the eponymous novel by Egyptian author André Aciman, with the screenplay by James Ivory and director Luca Guadagnino at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Monday night. A gorgeous film set in a town called B – “Somewhere in…
Got a hold of The Zero Dollar Car: How the Revolution in Big Data will Change your Life, a few weeks after a scintillating market research event at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre (NAC) last year on the impact of self-driving cars and autonomy on roads, but also at a time when I was marvelling at…
In the summer with great joy I helped a very innovative #MR team publish their research and findings on the impact of the overheated housing market in the Toronto-GTA precincts and how it was turning away millennials. As a god-deigned forever renter, with millennial friends (and older) who already own homes, this book struck me…
If you have ever hoped to beat heteronormativity or longed for a more gender-equal world, Stephen Marche is here to shatter that dream for you. The Unmade Bed (with commentary – in footnotes and edits – by editor and wife Sarah Fulford, the youngest Editor-in-Chief of a magazine in Canada he proudly shares) exfoliates the notion of…
Nine years ago I interviewed Palestinian film director Annemarie Jacir for her film Salt of this Sea when it premiered at the OSIAN film festival in Delhi. This year at Toronto’s TIFF, I was lucky to meet her again and watch her latest film Wajib. As with all her scripts, Wajib bleeds with generosity, tensions…
Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “race is the child of racism,” (among other denigrating labels), challenging the fabric of the Dream engineered by those “who see themselves as white” as it feeds into the portrait of a nation built on this falsehood, damaging the bodies of men and women who have been victims of this lie for centuries,…
A book that surprisingly does not feature in this nifty list of Election Reads is the 2013 non-fiction bestseller The Big Shift: The seismic change in Canadian politics, business, and culture and what it means for our future. Co-authored by influential pollster and CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, Darrell Bricker, and renowned journalist and biographer John…
Read more Why Canada’s—or the next government’s—success lies in leveraging “the Big Shift”
Much evocative of Marjane Satrapi’s wonderful, moving tale of growing up in revolutionary Iran in the Persepolis series, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home shares an equally trenchant narrative arc about a girl’s portrait of her family, drawing from strong influences of her father who created a Fun Home, “treating his furniture like children, and children like furniture,” their repository of family…
[This review was first published in the Marketing Intelligence and Research Agency (MRIA)’s Ottawa Chapter Newsletter in their August 27th issue.] Migration Nation is a highly topical book about multicultural marketing today. Canada, which has an aging demographic, low birth rates and labour shortages, welcomes around 300,000 new immigrants each year and this intake is…
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