As literary lives go, Plimpton’s was a doozy. Well born, well bred, the father of four, a witness to the great, the good and the gifted, he epitomized the ideal of the life well lived. He sparred with prize­fighters and competed against the best tennis, football, hockey and baseball players in the world, and along the way he helped create a new form of “participatory journalism.” He palled around with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and William Styron, and drank with Ernest Hemingway and Kenneth Tynan in Havana just after Castro’s revolution. He also edited and nursed that durable and amazing literary quarterly, The Paris Review, which published superb fiction and poetry and featured author interviews that remain essential reading for anyone interested in the unteachable art of writing. For someone like me, who grew up in the Canadian provinces, Plimpton was, like Bennett Cerf before him, the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as “Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan."   more »

We understand that, this afternoon, thinner budgets means fewer people working in the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition. At least eleven staffers have been let go in the OLO.

Rae is popular among Liberals in many parts of the country but in Ontario, there are LIberals who worry his tenure as the NDP premier who had the misfortune of presiding over a rough recession that left a big hole in the provincial treasury will not be remembered fondly by Ontario voters. Sunday's meeting will be Rae's first chance in this relatively short leadership contest to convince his Ontario colleagues that his name can indeed win more seats for Liberal brand in Ontario.