“A fascinating life story told with verve and authority.” - Toronto Star

“Hopefully it achieves wide readership simply because Jewison’s story rates big-time treatment. Indeed, to read Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life, is to wonder why this most consequential of directors wasn’t better known. A big thanks to Ira Wells for giving biography treatment to a major Hollywood creator who strangely never became a legend.” - Forbes

“Ira Wells makes the persuasive case that Jewison deserves more fame than he has received, and along the way delivers a rollicking tale of Hollywood during Jewison’s most active years and plenty of backstage trivia.” - Air Mail

“[A]n exhaustively researched look at the career of the country's most prolific, but least understood, filmmaker. The book is an ambitious, and frequently essential, endeavour.” - Globe and Mail

“A thoroughly enjoyable and detailed look at a memorable life in film.” - Library Journal

“Prismatic… Wells’s biography also doubles as a historical tour of show business in the second half of the 20th century.” - Zoomer

“Wells gives this fine filmmaker his due. It’s the kind of book that’s going to inspire anyone reading it to go back and watch one, two, or 10 of the movies.” - Broad Street Review (Philadelphia)

“[Giving] the reader a vast sense of Jewison’s decades-spanning career… In Wells’s hands, Jewison’s body of work becomes a series of case studies revealing an ever-changing America.” - Quill and Quire

With humanities subjects increasingly marginal to the interests of students, donors, and universities, it is worth thinking through some the larger consequences of the STEM-ing of higher education. If current trends hold, the Canadian workforce will be increasingly ignorant of history, philosophy, and literature. We will be less capable of learning from the past. Less able to apply ethical frameworks to advances in machine learning, biotechnology, and nanomedicine. Less able to communicate without the assistance of machines, which will also do our thinking for us.

Globe and Mail, January 27, 2024

Jewison had grown up on vaudevillian variety shows, and his filmography was, in a sense, the variety show of a lifetime. He directed hard-hitting social dramas, slapstick comedies, musicals, science fiction, and a children’s film (the underrated, Fellini-esque Bogus); he was fluent in every film genre except horror. He directed 24 films and not one sequel. Was there, at bottom, a sensibility holding it all together? Poitier, in the mid-’80s, argued that Jewison’s filmography shared a “value frame” that reflected the director’s artistic integrity. “He runs to the things that stand as challenges,” Poitier said. “He can no more make a simple film about unimportant things.” If you wanted Jewison to direct The Nerds Strike Back, Poitier said, “you would have to whip him, tie him to a stake, and bury him in an ant hill—and he would choose to die there.”

The Atlantic, January 25, 2024

Canada’s fondness for monopoly is an effect with multiple causes, from our history and geography to a small ruling class that has sympathized with the biggest players in business. Yet beneath these factors lies an unacknowledged story about the nature of Canada. This story, which the famed professor Northrop Frye once called the “garrison mentality,” emerges from the imaginative depths of the Canadian wilderness. It is deep within our bones and in our blood – the belief that forming dominant organizations is inherently virtuous…

Globe and Mail, September 4, 2023

The world’s major autocracies look less formidable today than they did a year ago. The Chinese people have discovered that audacious defiance of the CPC is not only possible, but that citizen-led protest can force Mr. Xi to change political course. Revolutionary force is gathering in Iran—many believe it is when, not if, the regime will crumble. Yet no authoritarian regime suffered greater repetitional damage in 2022 than Russia…

Globe and Mail, December 31, 2022

Your right to life, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion should not be contingent upon my vote… “Democracy” is one of the things human rights are supposed to defend against.

The Walrus, December 12, 2022

One sunny morning in late May, armed with my TDSB Equity Toolkit, a checklist to guide our work, I joined a handful of sheepish parents in our school library, and we began pulling books from the shelves. I was — however unwittingly — writing myself into a history of literary censorship that is nearly 500 years old.

Toronto Star, November 27, 2022

Read

A War on the Rich?

We shouldn’t criticize the 1 percent, In Defence of Wealth insists—we should thank them

The argument that we should be grateful for whatever the super-rich do—for jobs in the gig economy or on the warehouse floor—reveals the spiritual debt not to Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth but to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “White Man’s Burden,” which attempts to justify imperialism as a noble duty. Where the rapacious nineteenth-century empires cloaked their pillage and exploitation of colonies in a rhetorical skein of generosity, offering progress and salvation to locals, the contemporary identity politics of the super-rich present them as existing primarily for the benefit of those they exploit for profit. We shouldn’t criticize the 1 percent, they argue—we should thank them. We should want more of them.

The Walrus, May 4, 2022