Maclean's December 2025

Donald Trump is speedily and systematically reshaping every American institution under federal control. He hasn’t been president for a full year and already he’s either gutted or fundamentally transformed the FBI, the U.S. health department, the military and even major cultural institutions. Trump’s attack on Ivy League universities seems particularly savage. He sees elite schools as bastions of leftist ideological indoctrination and centres of resistance to his authority, and he’s threatened to slash their funding if they don’t bend to his will. Some schools—including Brown, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania—have acquiesced. It’s depressing to watch. Are elite American universities perfect? Absolutely not. It’s true that, over the last decade or so, many have attached themselves to left-wing ideologies that can be so rigid as to discourage debate. But strong-arming…

THE PARENT TRAP The October issue of Maclean’s included Kayla Huszar’s essay about her struggles with gentle parenting, a child-rearing philosophy that has revolutionized the relationship between kids and parents—and enraged tough-lovers at every family gathering for the past decade. Some readers were grateful for the honesty; many others were witheringly judgmental. My heart ached when reading Kayla Huszar’s article on her struggles with gentle parenting. It seems she missed an essential source of parenting help by not accessing Adlerian works on democratic parenting, which involve respecting the child but in a structured and consistent environment with definite limits. Rudolf Dreikurs’s Children: The Challenge and Barbara Coloroso’s books and articles would be good places to start. Carolyn Bond Kingston, Ontario “The goal of parenting is to raise little people into…

IN JEREMY HANSEN’S OPINION, some of humanity’s stickiest problems are best solved from 380,000 kilometres away. As soon as T-minus two months from now, Hansen, a former air force pilot from London, Ontario, will squeeze his six-foot-two frame into NASA’s Orion capsule and head for the moon, becoming the first non-American astronaut in history to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. During the mission, dubbed Artemis II, the four-person crew will perform a figure-eight lunar flyby, along with rigorous tests to track the effects of space on the human body. That data will be quite handy quite soon. Hansen’s roughly 10-day excursion is just the second phase in NASA’s multi-step plan to build a habitable base on the moon—and yes, Elon, eventually get humans to Mars. Still, no one’s going anywhere without…

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, when my eldest daughter was three, I overheard her proudly telling a friend she was getting a smartphone for her birthday. The way she talked about it reminded me of my three-year-old self asking my mother if I could play with her high heels—it was an almost mythical marker of big girl–hood. She wouldn’t be unwrapping a phone, of course, but that moment was a wake-up call for me. I work as an associate professor at University College London in the area of digital humanities, or how the online world impacts our social lives. Yet even I’ve struggled to find truly practical and actionable advice on how to teach my children responsible digital use beyond limiting screentime. I agree with some mitigation of device use,…

EVERYONE’S SAYING IT, and I’m living it: the most educated cohort in history is also the most chronically underemployed. It can take years for new university grads to land a job in their field. And that’s if they’re lucky. I’m one of the displaced. I’m approaching 30, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Montreal with my wife, and I’ve spent more than eight years in school—all in order to break into the industry that I’m now, by every measure, more than qualified for. I have two master’s degrees, a strong GPA from one of Canada’s top universities and years of experience in finance, my chosen field. Yet, since August of last year, I’ve sent out more than 200 job applications and not one has led to even an entry-level interview…

ONCE UPON A TIME, about 5,000 years ago in southern Iraq, there lived a king by the name of Gilgamesh. According to legend, he was sexist and classist, and he mercilessly tyrannized his subjects to satisfy a restless bloodlust in pursuit of his own immortal glory. Yet every year, my firstyear students fall in love with him and the epic written in his name. They adore his bromance with the wild man Enkidu, and they’re moved to tears over their lost friendship and the dawning of Gilgamesh’s existential angst. I see 18-year-olds get completely drawn into the king’s often-cryptic, otherworldly journey from thousands of years ago—across chasms of space, time, language and culture. This is why I love teaching the humanities. I’m an associate professor in the College of the…