Month: March 2025

Conformity

This is the week of the 2025 world figure skating championships. Since the next Winter Olympics are in 2026, this event is going to be particularly intense, because the placements here will determine how many competitors each country gets to send to the Olympics. I won’t be at Worlds, as much as I love Boston – it would have been an expensive trip, but now the anti-Canadian attitudes of the US government are making a lot of Canadians nervous about crossing the border.

Instead of going to Worlds, I went to a different kind of skating event this weekend. It was a performance by Le Patin Libre. Several members of this Montreal-based “contemporary skating company” are former competitive skaters who became frustrated with (more…)

David Lodge: Business and English

British writer David Lodge passed away in January, at the grand age of 89. I was sad to hear of his death, because his work meant a lot to me. He balanced two very different careers – academic and novelist – which had its challenges but also gave him a broad perspective on the world. And one of his novels particularly resonated with me as an undergraduate student, because I was trying to navigate the two different worlds depicted in that novel.

My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Business Administration, with majors in business and English. There was exactly one other person among the several hundred students in my BBA program who was also enrolled in business and English (he was doing a minor in English). The business students doing majors or minors in other subjects – and there weren’t many of them  – were enrolled in psychology, economics, or statistics.

I don’t exaggerate when I say that business students despised English students and English students despised business students. The business students thought the English students were (more…)