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On the CBC’s Ideas podcast, I’m currently listening to “Canada: Nation or Notion” (MP3, 25 MB, 53:46), a debate between two Canadians who live in the US: Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell. They’re both very smart, eloquent speakers, and it makes for an hour of enjoyable listening:

The talk was sponsored by Maclean’s, and there’s text from the debate on their site. It’s not an exact transcript, though, because I couldn’t find this self-effacing joke that Gladwell made:

I thought I would begin by drawing on an example that may seem a little far fetched. But trust me, I will circle around and make it make sense. And that is to talk about the success of ethnic Chinese immigrants throughout the world.

Now, those of you who are familiar with my writing will know that this practice of talking about X by discussing Y is my only rhetorical move.

I gather this is just one in a number of discussions that Gopnik and Gladwell have been having over the years. Here’s the text from a 2000 debate about American vs. Canadian healthcare systems.

If you haven’t read Gopnik’s beautiful book Paris to the Moon, I highly recommend it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Canada, The Long View. Tag Testing Project: No Tags. Photo by . You can skip to the end and leave a response, or trackback from your own site. If you don't see your comment within a day or so, drop me an email. Sometimes my comment spam filter gets overly zealous.