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"That’s fitting for the scion of a Quebecois dynasty and son of former prime minister, the late Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau. He didn’t do better because he didn’t 'know better,' and he didn’t know better because no one ever taught him. Justin Trudeau sounds a bit like the adult version of the notorious affluenza teen who drunkenly drove a Ford F-350 into more than 14 people and killed four, then had a psychologist testify that his permissive upbringing in a world of wealth had left him ignorant of the ramifications of his actions. You see, your Honor, he was never told 'no.' That Trudeau is a relatively liberal politician living in a relatively liberal country — one that markets itself as a haven of multiculturalism and tolerance and, in many ways, actually is — likely amplified the problem. He never learned a lesson because he was always getting gold stars for doing relatively liberal things...." From "Justin Trudeau says his privilege

But here it is: "Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?" Smashed stereotypes ... God help us. This is an idea for a column that should have been considered for 5 to 10 seconds and laid to rest. Some text, to give you the idea: The two are separated by race, gender and more than 100 years of history that forged an America that would probably be unrecognizable to Douglass. Still, experts say, their use of photography collapses the distance: Douglass sat for scores of pictures to normalize the idea of black excellence and equality, and Warren’s thousands of selfies with supporters could do the same for a female president. This is like some nitwit celeb saying that Hollywood is reminiscent of a slave plantation. As Yale professor David Blight writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” Douglass used the photos — in which he appeared elegantly dressed, his hair perfectly arranged — as “a

Why travel all over the world looking for things to see when you can see so much on repeated walks through the same place? It's like marriage...

Writes Michelle Goldberg in "Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, and Ours" (NYT). You could argue that all this is melodrama; living under Trump may be degrading, but American women are incomparably freer than those in, for example, Saudi Arabia, a society that seems far closer to Gilead than our own. Then again, in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” America hadn’t crumbled all at once. Recalling her old existence, the book’s heroine wondered at how normal life went on even as horrors filled the newspapers. “Nothing changes instantaneously: In a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it,” she says. And in a world of gradually heating bathtubs that boil you to death before you notice, you'd never be able to take a bath. But who sets up bathtubs to heat gradually to the boiling point?! Oh, that Margaret Atwood, she's quite the comic writer! Except that wasn't a joke. She really did take that old trope of a frog in a pot of water on the stove — a stove , wh