I’ve always been struck by how our most inflammatory issues directly affect a tiny number of people.
Let’s take gender transition. Five years ago, StatsCan became the first government agency anywhere on earth to count the number of transgender people. It found 59,460 Canadians aged 15 and up, or 0.19% of our population, were trans. Yet op-ed pages and school board meetings can’t get enough of gender transition. Nor can Pete Hegseth, who’s drumming all of America’s transgender service people out of the military, while his boss simply utters the word “trans” and Trump’s MAGA base bays like wolves at his moon.
But actual transgenderism in sports is even tinier. The president of the NCAA, Charlie Baker, told the U.S. Senate that of 510,000 college athletes, fewer than 10 were transgender. Which is 0.0002%, leagues less than the 6% to 25% some Americans think are trans.
This brings me to MAID. In 2024, 16,499 Canadians received medical assistance in dying.
That’s one in 20 deaths, or 5.1%. It’s taken Canada 10 years of MAID to even approach the level of the Netherlands, at 5.8%. If you’re the family at the bedside, this is no small number. But 95 of every 100 Canadians who died last year did so in some other way, and MAID eats up far more of our moral bandwidth than its share of our deaths.
In fact, this pattern of thimble-like reality vs cauldron-like noise exists everywhere. It’s a real-world version of the old 80-20 rule where 80% of the particular result is produced by 20% of the people or money or effort to get the result. For example, in Ontario, 1% of residents account for a third of healthcare costs, while the healthiest half of us account for 2%. And when it comes to murder, Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos found that in Chicago 70% of gunshot victims fell within networks of people arrested together that made up less than 6% of the city’s population.
In other words, the big risk and cost sit with a small, findable group of people.
This brings me to Malcolm Gladwell, Elmira, Ontario’s most famous export, whose new book, The American Way of Killing, applies the same arithmetic to the bloodiest problem in his adopted country. He wants to know why in Canada, “a young boy like me can grow up without any first-hand experience of lethal violence at all, and in the U.S., a young man can bury more than a dozen of his close friends by his 30th birthday.”
He starts by clearing away the headlines. Mass shootings dominate the news, but over the last 50 years, “there’s been two million people killed by guns in America and maybe 15 hundred people killed in mass shootings.” Gladwell says most killing isn’t planned. “It’s kids with beefs, trapped in cycles of revenge and retaliation,” he told Time. And those kids are few. “At any given time, even in a very large community, the number of people who are engaged or at risk for gun violence is very, very small,” Gladwell says.
So Baltimore stopped trawling the whole city and went looking for young men at high risk of killing someone. Its Group Violence Reduction Strategy starts from the premise that violence “is often driven by a very small number of groups and people.” When one of those young men gets shot, police, pastors and outreach workers visit his friends with a blunt message, which Gladwell paraphrases as: “Dude, don’t retaliate. We got this. We’re watching you.” The strategy is working. In three years, Baltimore went “from 330 homicides to 130.”
None of this is new. “We’ve known this for 30 years,” Gladwell says, and he’s blunt about the payoff: “If, for the next five years, we focused only on the behavior of those people who are likely to use guns in an irresponsible manner, we would bring the homicide rate down by a huge number.”
So can we please try to inject a little more reality into our own fight clubs?
Toronto is now North America’s fourth-largest city, smaller than Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles, but larger than Chicago. Because we’re Canadian and not Mexican or American, our murder rate is much lower than in these big cities. Indeed, it is vanishingly smaller despite the fear of rising crime.
Last year in Chicago, 416 people were murdered, and in Toronto, that number was 45. In other words, 1.5 in every hundred thousand Torontonians and 15.3 in every hundred thousand Chicagoans. Even better for everyone, in 2024, 587 Chicagoans were murdered and 85 Torontonians met their death by murder. Two years doesn’t make a trend, but it can start one.
Let’s just hope that when it comes to being murdered, most of what we have to fear is fear itself.
Meanwhile…
1. Stayin’ alive. Siddhartha Mukherjee and Peter Attia on the stunning changes in cancer’s diagnosis, treatment and nature. One reason is, personalized medicine has come to cancer immunotherapy, as with the melanoma vaccine. Also, yes, the children of centenarians live longer, plus the one-minute test that predicts your death. Speaking of, what happens when you stop exercising? And finally, getting off Xanax and coping with man-boobs.
2. The world today. First, a table of today’s war deaths. And Ukrainian soldiers on the new face of war. And France’s long history of taking to the streets. And in a very different corner, the Dutch Prime Minister and his male partner have engaged two women to get a baby. And the World’s Emotional Health is…strained, but okay.
3. The meth lab. First, a message from “Your beloved Exxon experts.” Then Paul Krugman on how Trump is even more dangerous now that he’s got nothing left to lose. Then Ronan Farrow on America’s new way to pay for war. And how Pete Hegseth’s staff broke Eisenhower’s globe. And the Pentagon investigates a massive fridge hack in France.
4. Premier Primer. The basics on BC’s newly-elected Premier, Lorne Doerkson. Also, how exactly will Ottawa’s Bill 39 get projects built faster in Canada? And in Toronto’s election, The Local found many of the campaign materials for the 600 candidates in Toronto, Mississauga and Brampton looked and read suspiciously similar. The culprit? AI.
Also, Air Canada often claims a flight is cancelled for safety-related maintenance. This makes passengers ineligible for compensation. But CBC revealed the airline just wanted the planes for other routes. And “you quit your job to do what?” Debunking the myth that Canadians don’t take risks. Finally, who are the best educated people in the world? We are. Oh…and here are the 100 best universities outside the U.S. U of T is 9th, McGill, 23rd and UBC 24th. And finally, Steve Paikin and Edward Fishman on how Canada can survive America.
5. You have until 5:00 p.m. ET today, Saturday Oct. 31. Already, 53 of our friends have signed on for an epic voyage through the Northwest Passage in 2028. 20 days, one expedition ship, two helicopters, expert speakers. So join our happy gang of gentle adventurers, and if you register by today, you’ll save $2,700+ per person. Do it tomorrow and you won’t. Read all about the trip here.
6. Cautionary Tales. Do jurors write to the people they convicted? In Windsor, Ontario, yes. Two months after a first-degree murder trial, a juror sent the convicted man a letter asking to meet and share his observations. Speaking of murderers, Jeffrey George Ewart was out on day parole taking courses at McGill’s law faculty. Some students were alarmed, others supportive.
Meanwhile, Bob Woodward’s new memoir reveals another big source for over two decades, his best friend, Richard Darman. And New Yorker reporter, Patrick Radden Keefe, discusses “the publishing phenomenon of the year,” his forensic and novelistic London Falling.
7. Can money buy class? Here’s a peek into the people who chronicle them both in Britain.
Plus, five women students at The Ivey Business School at Western University have founded Get Rich, Girl, a community and media platform to help women build their financial literacy, overdrive their careers, and…get rich. Also, the 25 richest countries in the world, from 1900 to today. And finally, JetBlue and Virgin Voyages are selling a guaranteed kid-free flight from JFK, plus an adults-only Caribbean starting at just under $3,000 for two. Silence is not just golden, it’s cheap.
8. Tech Tox? Anthropic’s IPO filing on NASDAQ is 240,000 words long. Its “Risks” section alone takes up 94 pages. Among the risks are that AI will act on its own: it “may behave in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways, including by taking harmful actions that no user or third party directed.” It says this gets worse as the models are given more autonomy. Another: Because of its public positions on AI policy, Anthropic could be singled out for investigations, security-clearance trouble, or “targeted immigration or visa actions affecting our personnel.” As Paul Krugman noted: “…Anthropic tells me that AI may well wipe out the human race, which is why I should invest in the company’s IPO.” Anthropic lost more than USD $80 billion in the first half of this year.
9. Back to nature. And the fact that fish nap during the day too, and some cells are left-handed. Plus the mushroom that makes you see tiny people, and it’s not a psychedelic. And – Here, Rover! – are the most popular dog breeds by U.S. state. And both this Hummingbird and this Peacock Spider were created by AI, but their biology is sound.
10. Waste your life? How not to. Put marbles on piano strings? And please sweat the small stuff. And check in on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts, and a new whale museum in Norway.
Speaking of time well-wasted, Season 4 of the Belfast police procedural, Blue Lights, is coming soon to Britbox (Prime). And here’s not only the data behind every movie, but every frame. Plus Canada’s $300 million conman, and finally, the man who had breast cancer and joined a women’s support group.
Read what you will – and pay what you can.
For the past few years, the Omnium Gatherum blog has opened your Saturday morning InBox with news of intriguing people, odd places, and new things that may have escaped your glance.
These blogs have been free for you to receive and read. However, they aren’t free to produce and never have been. So I’d like to ask if you could help cover the costs of this little venture – and ask you to pay what you can to receive it.
If you don’t want to pay anything, that’s fine too. We’re not going to withhold our affections, and you’ll keep getting your blog on Saturday no matter what. But if you do think what you read here is worth your time, then please pay what you think it’s worth.
Many thanks, and here’s to curiosity and the freedom to pursue its joys down any lane.
Bob Ramsay
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