When things stick around long enough, you stop seeing them. They fade into the background, staying unnoticed, until one day you walk into your house, do a double-take, and realize you’ve had the same crappy Montreal concert poster on your wall since 2007 and don’t remember the band or even the year all that well and, plus, how come you never noticed there’s tiny a piece of egg (or is that cheese?) stuck there near the bottom? These moments of clarity are inevitably a bit embarrassing, but they are necessary.

This same process explains how, every few years, people idly flipping through the sports section become newly startled by the fact that, in 2013, the National Football League has a team called the Redskins. Wait a minute, they think, the Redskins? With a weird drawing of a Native American in feathers as the logo? And this team plays on television in a professional football league and not, I don’t know, in some dusty Southern prison yard for the amusement of the cruel, John-Wayne-obsessed Warden? Seriously, the Red Skins?

The biggest lesson that Ayatollah Khamenei seems to have learned from the nation-convulsing protests after the 2009 Iranian elections is that unless you’re willing to look like Robert Mugabe in the eyes of the world, stealing an election outright isn’t actually a good idea. That’s especially the case when, like Khamenei, you have so many other levers to pull to keep turbulent presidents out of power.

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird may not be wrong, then, to say that we can’t expect substantial changes after the election victory of Hassan Rowhani. Rowhani, after all, had to be unthreatening enough just to make it on the ballot. And even if that weren’t true, the man who’s been the lead negotiator with western powers as Iran has asserted its rights to a nuclear program probably isn’t going upend his country’s politics. Rowhani gives every appearance of being the guy who moves from post to post, tidying up and cooling angry tempers—not a revolutionary reformist.

Richard Poplak talks about his Hazlitt Original, Braking Bad: Chasing Lance Armstrong and the Cancer of Corruption, and Armstrong’s half-hearted confession to Oprah in this excerpt from our upcoming episode of The Arcade podcast.

In just the last 24 hours or so, the situation in Syria has gone from a bloodbath and humanitarian disaster to what appears likely to be America’s next war. That it may end up being a small one (or not) that ends quickly (or not) shouldn’t obscure the fact that what American leaders are increasingly leaking to the media are plans for war.

How else to describe the news, broken late yesterday, that the Obama administration has decided to send arms to the Syrian rebels? This came after declaring that the Assad government had used chemical weapons in its war against the Syrian people, a declaration on which the US actually lagged behind some of its European allies. We also got the news that plans for arming and training the rebels will necessarily include a no-fly zone close to the Jordanian border, reported in the Wall Street Journal.

It’s pretty simple. Poetry is over there. Fiction kind of on this shelf, with some miscellany at the end. This tiny little bit here is plays. Then music books. And then non-fiction for the bulk of the rest. And then it gets weird. These two shelves are current research stuff. These are miscellaneous large things. Some 33 1/3 books. Journals and stuff down there. And then this area is mostly books written by friends and colleagues. That’s kind of my favourite part. It’s overflowing now, so I’m going to have to figure out what to do about it. It’s such a friendly thing, like, Oh, there’s everybody!

My parents are both profs, so my sister and I spent a goodly amount of our childhood merrily running up and down the halls of the psychology department unsupervised, no doubt making a ton of noise and annoying everybody. Also, on one historic occasion, my mum went hunting all over the house for a student’s thesis on which she had written her comments (this was the early 1980s, when handwriting still existed) only to find it in our arts and crafts cupboard, where my dad had stuck it, thinking it was scrap. My mum went to her student’s defense holding a paper with squirrels Magic Markered all over the back.

You have to wonder what, exactly, the Canadian government’s temporary foreign worker program is actually accomplishing other than simply giving Stephen Harper’s Conservatives a series of low-level headaches. The latest news, reported by the Globe and Mail, is that the government will now reserve the right to conduct warrantless searches of private, non-residential property to enforce federal regulations. The legal basis for these searches was apparently snuck in to the 2012 budget, which really shouldn’t surprise anyone: At this point, it would be faster to list the new crimes and punishments that haven’t yet been introduced in a Conservative budget act. (Future headline: “Oral sex in Canada is still legal, but abortion-seeking women should pay attention in the spring of 2016.”)

Earlier this week, as Apple, Microsoft and Sony revealed their latest wares in absurd, often cacophonic keynote presentations, one could almost be forgiven for agreeing with Jonathan Safran Foer. Just this weekend, he penned another entry in that grand tradition of the op-ed piece decrying the alienating, distracting effects of modern technology. In the face of these tech giants’ bombastic, ludicrous rhetoric, Foer was almost compelling.

Of course, there remains no shortage of faults to find with the argument that technology pulls us away from what’s important. Many of the things one looks at on a screen—news about the world, messages from loved ones, art—are just as real as anything else. What was perhaps different this time, though, was a coincidence of timing, and how odd it all sounded in light of the recent stunning revelations about government surveillance and corporate cooperation. With talk of the NSA, PRISM and the delightfully named Boundless Informant, there was a very strange contradiction at work. On the one hand, cultural commenters constantly tell us that the virtual is just that—less real, less human, less present. On the other, when we learn that the very ephemera being criticised may be subject to snooping, it suddenly feels like a threat, as if very real parts of our lives have just been exposed. Something just doesn’t add up here.

Do you remember when we first crossed paths, my sweet? Me, fresh from a three-day trip crammed between two boxcars, one toe gone to frostbite. You, stepping on the gas at the intersection of Third and Briar as I pawed at your window at the red light, my saliva-drenched beard glistening in the morning sun. I could just make out the first two letters of your fast receding license plate, a “J” and an “A,” before the full force of an oncoming laundry truck sent me into a fitful brain-impaired slumber for the next three months. Oh, sweet destiny, I beg you, let us cross paths once more!