Low Speeds, Celebrating Eid, and Criticizing the Critics

Plus the problem with “pretendian” exposés

Many Canadians celebrated Eid this past week. Like with most holidays, food plays a big role in festivities. In an essay exploring her fraught relationship with cooking, Hina Imam remembers different experiences of Eid:

During an Eid lunch when I was around eleven years old, I remember my mother had opened up our apartment in Jeddah to the entire building. A young aunty, who lived next door, was sharing an account of her tumultuous childbirth while chopping carrots. There were at least four other aunties with us in the small square kitchen. One of them watched the rice; the other one fried samosas; someone washed the dishes; one of them was telling the kids to stop running around so fast; and my mum stirred the haleem on the stove. They all quickly came to console the young aunty by offering up stories of their own labour. The older women embraced the younger one. [Read more]

Vancouver and Kingston, Ontario, are both looking into lowering speed limits for the sake of safer streets. Frustrated by how kids have to run a life-threatening gauntlet on the way to class, Taras Grescoe wants cities to go one step further: banning cars on school streets.

Paris now has 180 of them; cars are either completely banned or are prevented from approaching by movable barriers during the times kids are arriving at or leaving school. In London alone, there are now over 500 school streets. One study from 2021 showed that 81 percent of respondents believed a school street was suitable for their school; the same study found that the measure “reduced nitrogen dioxide by up to 23 percent” during morning drop-off, and—this is crucial—nearly one in five reported driving their kids to school less often because of the change. [Read more]

It feels like the number of stories about “pretendians” has ramped up in the past six months or so, with the CBC, Toronto Life, The New Yorker, and Texas Monthly running big investigations into individuals who pass themselves off as Indigenous. In “What’s the Point of “Pretendian” Investigations?,” Michelle Cyca explored the problems with exposing such people:

As a contributor to the genre of pretendian investigations—someone whose own career has been advanced by one such investigation—I have become increasingly uncomfortable with how these stories reinforce the idea that justice can be reached by discrediting an individual’s claims rather than by dismantling the systems and cultural mechanisms that reward and reinforce such deceptions at scale. In the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many institutions sought to “indigenize,” doing so by rewarding self-identified Indigenous people with jobs, grants, awards, honours, and titles. This was often done on the basis of how well those individuals performed to expectations of what an Indigenous person should be, or who offered a non-threatening version of Indigeneity that served the interests of the institution. In short: organizations and institutions incentivized identity fraud. [Read more]

Lauren Oyler just released a book of criticism and essays called No Judgements, which in turn has attracted censure from book critics, with literati gossiping over a pan in Bookforum and whether it was too mean. CanLit has a different problem, according to Steven Beattie. We have few critics and shallow book reviews:??

By cutting off the oxygen from discussions of how writers achieve their effects, what traditions they are working in (or subverting, whether consciously or otherwise), how their use of language reaffirms or breaks with what has come before, we lose out on an important level of understanding. In The Death of the Critic, Rónán McDonald writes that “treating literature as social document, though it momentarily gives critics the more primary aura of the social historian, undermines the disciplinary ground on which they work.” [Read more]

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