“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004

In my latest Mercatornet article I ask people who call themselves rational and civil to look at COVID-19 through some less politicized and more edifying lens than boo hiss down with Trump.

In my latest National Post column I ask how we can be at yet another crucial “make or break” tipping point in the pandemic, and what exactly happens if we “make” it or fail to this time… and the next… and the next…

“Leola had just joined the great company of the walking wounded in the battle of life.”

Robertson Davies Fifth Business

“I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner.”

Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays (edited with Introduction and Notes by F.G. Selby)

“’Your chief trouble,’ he [a mid-rank gangster to the narrator, Archie Goodwin] said, not offensively, ‘is that you think you’ve got a sense of humor. It confuses people, and you ought to get over it. Things strike you as funny.... but someday something that you think is funny will blow your g****m head right off your shoulders.’ Only after he had gone did it occur to me that that wouldn’t prove it wasn’t funny.”

Rex Stout In the Best Families