Late Breaks, Bad Covers, and Working at McDonald’s

Plus: The election that wasn’t but may be

For a moment there, it looked like we were headed for a federal election, but the Conservatives’ non-confidence motion in Parliament failed. Pierre Poilievre’s popularity had us wondering: What if he wins? We asked twelve essayists, including Michelle Cyca , Paul Wells , Jen Gerson , and Justin Ling, to explore his policies—or lack thereof—in our special series.

The fact that the Conservative leader isn’t in a hurry to offer solutions to the resentments he’s stoking isn’t a sign of inattention or carelessness. It’s the whole strategy: tap into the collective desire of an unhappy electorate desperate to turn the page on Justin Trudeau. Poilievre is generating high hopes with pledges deliberately light on substance, and he has found his stride by not worrying about it. Win over voters first, figure out the details later. At The Walrus, we wanted to start figuring it out now. [Read more]

Beverly Glenn-Copeland will be playing his final Canadian show after announcing that he’s been diagnosed with dementia. Simon Lewsen explored the musician’s late-career break, in “Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Late Bloom”:

Julia Hotler, a Los Angeles composer, is part of a cohort of leading musicians who are now avowed Glenn-Copeland fans. (The list also includes Romy Madley Croft, co–lead singer of the indie band the xx, and Justin Vernon, the hip hop producer and songwriter who records as Bon Iver.) Hotler attributes Glenn’s popularity to the way his songs convey hope. “His music has a rare positivity,” she says. “It’s not simply happy but expansive and enveloping. Music that invites you to feel magic or wondrousness—I believe this is what young people want and need.” [Read more]

Literary Hub has a roundup of the best book covers of September (including Kevin Lambert’s May Our Joy Endure, recently reviewed by André Forget). We are happy to see nary an amorphous blob in the designs. Tajja Isen recently pointed out the prevalence of visual stereotyping, in “The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design”:

Of the design options [for my book] that later landed in my inbox, most were pink and purple. One had a stock photo of a white girl throwing her arms around a Black girl. Another, a drawing of variously shaded Black and Brown people in a style reminiscent of Corporate Memphis, like a DEI graphic. Yet another had variously shaded black and brown letters, like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom had been updated for the BLM era. “A good cover tells a story,” someone at the press said when I begged for a less literal treatment. What story, I wondered, was this: People of colour exist? You have no voice here? It doesn’t matter what you say or how elegantly or intelligently you say it—how we see you is and always will be the precise way you insist on not wanting to be seen?? [Read more]

Time noticed a trend in the US election campaign: Democrats highlighting Kamala Harris’s time working at McDonald’s, a possible shift in the party’s views on the working class. Emma Buchanan pointed to a similar change in their people-focused rhetoric, in “Wait, Is Kamala Harris a Populist Now?”

For Democrats, [Erik] Nisbet points to populist pushes to raise taxes on high earners, antitrust regulations to break up conglomerates, from corporate landlords and big tech to oil and gas companies, and subsidies for working-class people (some of which Republican VP pick J.?D. Vance has actually co-sponsored and may even be in line with Harris on—he wants to boost the child tax credit to $5,000 per child). Despite populism’s strange historic and current bedfellows, Nisbet says its strategic positioning may be both geographically and demographically advantageous to Democrats in this election cycle. [Read more]

Check out our new podcast, What Happened Next, hosted by Nathan Whitlock . This week’s conversation is with David Bergen, about Away from the Dead and his other novels.

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