A painting of me

#TIFF50

   19 September 2025, late afternoon

Twenty years ago I would manage to make it out to way more films at TIFF. I would buy a ten pack of tickets, at least. It’s harder to find the time for TIFF nowadays. I miss the sheer amount of movie watching I would manage to do. I’m lucky my friends still take the time to look through the programmes and find movies to watch. Nowadays I’ll latch onto their picks, my friend Mezan grabbing me tickets for a few films that look good. This year I watched two: The Furious, and Dinner with Friends. Two completely different movies. The Furious was a midnight madness screening of one of the most bananas martial arts films I’ve seen in a while. Dinner with Friends was a super-low budget (though it didn’t look it!) drama about a group of friends navigating adulthood in Toronto. I loved them both. A great way to enjoy the 50th anniversary of the festival.

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  • Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning. 

    There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

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  • The Condo Crash. 

    A great article about the rise and fall of Toronto’s condo market. Some of the quotes and stats in the article are bananas.

    On the advice of a realtor he’d met through a friend, Tajdin made a 10 per cent deposit on an $855,000 pre-construction condo. It was a 468-square-foot, one-bedroom unit in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood, a wealthy enclave not far from downtown. … But Tajdin didn’t intend to move into the condo, or even to close on the deal. … If he couldn’t sell in time, he’d have to close on the property himself, and he knew he’d never be approved for such a steep mortgage. … By the first quarter of 2024, average condo values in the city had dropped by nearly $100,000 to $696,000. As his closing date neared, Tajdin panicked; his only hope was that the market would unexpectedly rebound. But in February of 2024, the worst-case scenario became a reality. Tajdin’s closing date arrived, and he couldn’t seal the deal. He didn’t even bother trying to secure a mortgage; after multiple discussions with banks, it had become obvious that it was futile. The developer, CentreCourt, kept his deposit. Then it went a step further, suing Tajdin for $860,000 in damages, interest and legal fees for breach of contract. It sold the unit to another buyer for $420,000, less than half of Tajdin’s agreed-upon purchase price only two years earlier. Tajdin, in turn, filed his own lawsuit against Hirji, seeking indemnity from liability with CentreCourt and damages equal to his deposit.

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Fight against the theft of your soul

   13 May 2025, late afternoon

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

I finished reading One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad last night. The book is incredible. I was reminded a lot of Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. The main difference is we are living through the events of Omar’s book. Omar uses death and destruction in Gaza to frame his scathing criticisms of the West. Things have gotten worse, not better in Gaza. The world watches, as it always seems to, as genocide unfolds once again. It’s refreshing to read someone speak clearly about what is happening, what your eyes and ears lay witness too, while politicians or the media tell you what you understand to be true is not. It is frustrating and depressing to see how cyclical everything seems to be. These are dark days.

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  • The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans by Jeffrey Goldberg. 

    I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

    So, quite literally.

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  • It Is Now or It Is Never. 

    Rachel Cohen’s resignation letter from her law firm, who is capitulating the Trump, is a good read.

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