Bird on Sunday • Buttondown

What is this? Bird on Sunday is a weekly newsletter written by me, Christopher Bird. (Hence the name.) It is a newsletter about news, which probably sounds kind of redundant, but there you go. I've got about a decade of experience as a journalist in Toronto, and I won a Canadian Magazine Award in 2014 for my work covering municipal politics and policy with Torontoist. I'm also a lawyer, so I have a lot of experience studying and understanding law and policy.

Why are you doing this? Because most people don't follow the news as closely as I do. I like reading the news, and I like reading about public policy (which is what creates about 90% of news; the other 10% is mostly Kanye West). And, when I post about a thing that is political or policy-driven (wherever that happens to be), I often get "I didn't know anything about this" as a response. Which is fine! People don't need to know everything about everything! But I think it's a good thing if people at least try to know a little about most things - if only to be able to know how much you don't know. (Which is most of it.)

How does this work? Every week, on Sunday, I post the newsletter via the email subscription list and on Facebook (although the FB version ends up looking more basic due to lack of font options). It'll usually be about four to seven items that I think people should know a little more about, either because they're important or because I think they're interesting from a policy standpoint. I'll try to divide each item into "these are hard, indisputable facts about what happened" and "this is what I think about each of these things." There might be more facts in the opinion section, though, that's just how I roll sometimes.

Oh, and I'm pretty left-wing; I probably wouldn't call myself an outright Das Kapital-waving socialist, but I'm definitely a social democrat at least.

What won't show up here? Lemme put it this way: remember when there was that mine collapse in Chile in 2010 and it dominated the news for weeks? Well, the Chilean mine collapse - while certainly awful - wasn't a sign of bad policy in any particular way (there was an inquiry afterwards, and lots of minor changes to safety policies were implemented, but there wasn't any "THIS IS WHY THE MINE COLLAPSED!!!!" smoking gun sort of thing - sometimes bad things just happen, and the best we can do is find ways to make them slightly less bad when they do) and didn't really lead to any serious changes in how Chilean mines operate, much less other mines. So I'm not gonna write about that sort of thing, mostly. Except when the minor fixes are interesting, which sometimes is the case.