Editor’s Letter

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, author, and educator — and, for the last few years, he has been a member of The Walrus Educational Review Committee. The ERC is a group of academics from different disciplines working at universities across Canada; they meet annually, review the editorial content of the magazine and The Walrus Talks, and suggest areas of study from within their expertise — which include Indigenous issues, international relations, philosophy, visual art, and the law. When I heard that Smolin, a founding faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, would be stepping down from the ERC, I called to ask him, in this time of fake news and attacks on the media, for his thoughts about the role of research in journalism. “I think right now it’s really hard to be a journalist,” he said. “The moment we’re in — and it’s clearly not just the United States, and it’s not just Donald Trump — is the rising up of a culture that doesn’t have the same orientation [it once did] towards objectivity and fact.” Smolin’s upcoming book, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, explores the intense disagreements about theoretical interpretation that continue to plague quantum physics. What does he make of the general state of discourse in the world? Smolin mentioned seventeenth-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz’s ideas about reconciling multiple perspectives. Smolin proposed that “if we make the honest effort to discuss and criticize each other’s opinions, we can come to agreement about the basic facts. In the areas where we overlap, there is only one story, and we should find it.” The Walrus may be unique among general-interest magazines in having an ERC — part of the educational mandate adopted when our organization was established as a charitable non-profit, in 2005. Our mandate doesn’t require that stories be didactic. Instead, in the words of the contract sent to our writers, it requires us to publish work that is “meaningful, relevant, and useful from a social, political, cultural, and/or scientific perspective.” In the past, we have applied this editorial filter to stories about everything from Céline Dion’s wardrobe to Canada’s role in the age of Trump. In this month’s issue of The Walrus, we’ve trained our educational mandate on the topic of education itself. Katrina Onstad’s story “Class Divide” started out as a look at the popularity of specialized public-education programs. Over the past year, as educators and academics in Ontario — home to North America’s fourth-largest school board — began to debate the role and success of specialized streams, such as gifted programs, Onstad uncovered much more expansive philosophical questions about the nature of public education and the best way to school a kid (gifted or otherwise). Harley Rustad, having chronicled the fate of a sixty-six-metre Douglas fir in a recent book ( Big Lonely Doug), this month turned to tinier things; in “Man With a Plant,” he reports on his own tutelage at the hands of Nigel Saunders, his “bonsai master,” who also happens to be a Youtube celebrity. One of the fiction pieces in this issue has an implicit theme of education as well. “The Arithmetic of Common Ground,” by Ottawa-based writer Scott Randall, which won last year’s Writers Adventure Camp fiction contest, examines boyhood friendships through the lens of math. One of the most unexpected of educations in this issue is from Patti Sonntag’s “The Cat Who Ate Like a Lion.” After I saw the huge response to a picture that Sonntag — also the director of the new Institute for Investigative Journalism at Concordia University — posted on Facebook, I asked her to profile her family’s very large feline. We thought it would be a story about fat (cat) shaming, about the way that we humans tend to project our own values and issues onto animals. As you’ll see, it turned out to be a much richer story about love and the ties that bind us to our pets. The editorial team will miss Smolin as he moves on to The Walrus National Advisory Council, which includes people who have made a substantial contribution to The Walrus in our fifteen years of operation. I asked him for some parting advice. “I think you should actively ask a question: Who are the new voices in Canada who need a home — whether in politics or in literature or in science or in art? Who has things to say which are new and powerful and worth listening to?” In the coming months, we will do just that. —