Why you should build your own goddamned book index

After publishing more than twenty works of non-fiction, I’m here to tell you that indexing is good for you. Doing it is time-consuming, unpaid labour, but doing it well will improve the book.

Are land acknowledgments working?

Land acknowledgments—that semi-ceremonial rite that precedes many public and academic gatherings, noting in some manner the Indigenous presence on the local landscape that preceded colonization—has been having a commentator moment in the United States. Writers in The Atlantic and the New York Post have weighed in lately, on the negative side: the New York Post's...

Vasari’s words o’ wisdom

I've been re-reading Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, but this time the abridged E.L. Seeley translation of the main biographies in what was a three-volume mid-sixteenth-century work. You can read along too, thanks to the digitized edition at archive.org. Vasari is a standard reference for art historians, and...

Jackson’s Wars: pre-order!

You can now pre-order Jackson's Wars, scheduled for May 2022 publication, at a 20 percent discount! So why wouldn't you? Note that pre-orders must be done using the telephone number or the email address, using the discount code MQFA. Online orders can only be made once the book is released. Call 1-800-565-9523 or email utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca

So…what was a late 15th-century English coin doing in the ruins of an early 17th-century English settlement in Newfoundland?

An example of a half-groat silver coin, minted at Canterbury during the reign of Henry VII from 1493 to 1499. By The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54926198 There's been a bit of archaeological buzz over the recently announced discovery of probably the oldest English coin ever found...

“Uninvited”: by whom, and to what?

The exhibition catalogue for Uninvited There's a big exhibition now open to the public at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Movement runs until January 16, 2022. If you're at all interested in what Canadian artists period were producing, mainly in the between-war years, I would...