Tag: Canadian government
Elon Musk’s Antisemitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather
In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”
But
Canadian Truckers Polarize American Commentators
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely, intriguing conversations and solicits reader responses to one question of the moment. Every Friday, he publishes some of your most thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
With another Valentine’s Day just behind us, I’m reminded of the profound changes in social conceptions of love, marriage, sex, and romance across centuries, and the smaller changes that I’ve witnessed personally during
The Next Pandemic Could Start With a Terrorist Attack
In 1770, the German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele performed an experiment and noticed that he’d created a noxious gas. He named it “dephlogisticated muriatic acid.” We know it today as chlorine.
Two centuries later, another German chemist, Fritz Haber, invented a process to synthesize and mass-produce ammonia, which revolutionized agriculture by generating the modern fertilizer industry. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918. But that same research, combined with Scheele’s earlier discovery, helped create the chemical-weapons program that
Unearthing the Legacy of Native American Boarding Schools
Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on November 24, 2021.
North America’s Indigenous peoples carry a painful past. This truth was laid bare when the mass graves of hundreds of Native children who died while attending residential schools were discovered in Canada this summer. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of Native children in the United States and Canada were forced into assimilationist boarding schools that sought to strip them of their culture and heritage. Many died from disease,