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A Non-celebratory Anniversary: He was born one hundred and fifty-one years ago today, on April 23, 1870, to a solid middle-class family. His father, a liberal-minded educator, was not aristocratic, but kept life pleasant enough for Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanovis...

Forever wishing he was fishing, an urban teen could wade the creeks of Burnaby, angling for mischief and trout. For me, the once pristine city streams were the fascinating wrong-end of demographic flow. Trickling past concrete pillars holding millions...

On TV the other night, the male lead, played by a beefy-looking Russian, was portraying a rugged outdoorsman. He was believable enough until he had to split a few pieces of firewood for his damsel -- and then the fourth wall sort of just fell on him....

Good afternoon. It’s almost Good Friday. I’m passing along a fairly readable COVID/economic update that speaks to the massive injections of liquidity filtering through the markets, and the latest COVID news. From the report: Terminal Terminological Drift?...

Friend of Seeds: Last week I wrote about Russian scientist Nikolay Vavilov. The storied agronomist had toured the world collecting a vast store of seeds and documenting their highest and best uses, in what he called a “mission for all humanity.” Like...

Rational disagreements, even heated ones, can be constructive if honest ground rules are shared. But shaming and political maneuvering haven’t been helpful in COVID-and-finance debates. Our choices will be judged by history, but we’re better off to embrace...

Good afternoon, News from the Front: This week at RBC we received a COVID update from our team, covering infection data, the pace of reopening, and vaccination news. Overall, it’s more positive than negative, even though Canada’s vaccination rate has...

Good afternoon. Yogi Berra sounded sort’a like an old-fashioned father when he said: “I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school.” And in one of his more famous quotes he quipped: “The future ain’t what it used to be.” But maybe...

Driving to school, my daughter glanced puzzlingly at an in-progress real estate development near us, then asked: “How come the government is letting them build more houses -- I thought our population wasn’t growing?” Woven in to her question was a solar...