Cats – Ramsay Inc.

AT 25, YOU WERE BARELY YOU.

Ask anyone to write a letter to their 25-year-old self and they won’t be kind.

Indeed, given the responses to our writing contest last month – we asked you to write a 100-word letter to your 25-year-old self — being 25 is one of the most arrogant, unknowing, unseeing and cringeworthy times of our lives. Did I really spend all that money on a watch? Hook up with a known psychopath? Treat my best friend like dirt? And don’t even talk to me about drinking and drugging. We’re lucky to be alive.

I remember back in the 80s my film festival friend, Helga Stephenson, asked if I would help her ‘chaperone’ a party for TIFF’s young financial supporters. They were all under 30. They were smart, attractive, fit and cocksure. They beamed with certainty. Helga said as we left: “Life hasn’t happened to them yet.”

True that.

Clearly, the older you drift from 25, the younger 25 looks. By the time you’re twice that age, life is often a muddle, or a slow-motion leap off the cliff. Get to threescore years and ten and it can be a tragedy in the making. Get to 80, and more tires are coming off the car than staying on.

Read on…

November 21, 2025 January 2, 2026

WILL BOYS BE BOYS?

For years, I’ve yearned for The Economist’s 16-page supplements, which I could rip from the magazine and read on my flight to Ottawa and emerge an hour later awash in knowing lots about something I knew nothing of before, like nanotechnology, quantum mechanics and iambic pentameter.

I remember the first sentence of the report on Japan, published in November 2011: “If you’re a baby girl born this morning in Tokyo, the chances of you living to be 100 are one in two.”

In 2015, The Economist issued a special report on Men Adrift. It was subtitled: “Badly educated men in rich countries have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism.” Little did I know then that I would be reading the first distant early warnings of a concern whose reporting has risen a thousandfold since: What to do about men and their juniors, boys. Especially white men, and pointedly undereducated white men whom it’s clear now that AI will consume like whales do krill.

Today, it’s hard to read a magazine, stream a Netflix series, see a newcast or talk show, scan a blog, hear a podcast, scroll an Instagram post or buy a book on how young men are not only in huge trouble, they’re creating existential peril, not just for us, but for all of Western civilization. Last month, Janice Stein spoke to a group of wealth managers and their clients and said, “Boys are the most urgent problem the world faces today.”

Read on…

November 14, 2025 December 19, 2025

THE ENDURING RESILIENCE OF SEXUAL MONSTERS.

On October 5, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Meg Twohey broke the story of Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator in The New York Times. Just days later, Ronan Farrow (Woody Allen’s son) expanded that story in The New Yorker.

Those two pieces sparked a revolution in how men should behave with women
at the office and on the shop floor. It was just months before the #MeToo movement swept dozens of men from their jobs and rewrote the rules of engagement between men and women, especially men and women with vastly different degrees of power.

Here in Canada, soon after The Times pieces, The Globe and Mail tried to get the goods on our own business leaders who were thought to act like Weinstein. (All our media had been stung by the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi, but he was fired eons before in 2014, and then found not guilty at trial two years later).

The Globe wasn’t able to turn up much.

September 28, 2024 November 15, 2024

OUT-OF-OFFICE, OUT-OF-MY-MIND.

Composing an out-of-office message used to take 30 seconds and was usually written minutes before you headed to the airport on vacation. As a friend’s OOO noted: “I am offline until Sept. 29. Off the grid. No email. No phone. No texts.”

In a very few words, this sent a big, clear message.

Now, out-of-office emails have become Rorschach Tests for our relationship to our inbox, our friends and ourselves. True, fewer of us have an office to be out of anymore. But email, far from being dead, is gobbling up the world. We now send and receive 361 billion emails every day.

My first clue that emailing was becoming a platform for pearl-clutchers and virtue-signalers came last year when I read on the bottom of a friend’s email: “I am sending this email at a time that works for me. I don’t expect you to respond to it until normal business hours, or when it suits your own work-life balance. I encourage you to make guiltless work-life choices and support flexible working.”

September 21, 2024 November 15, 2024

WOKE NEEDS AN AWAKENING.

It’s fun and easy to mock the dervishes of politically-correct language.

But the thinking behind it masks a righteousness that would hang anyone who says ‘lumberjack’ instead of ‘woodchopper’ for fear of offending millions of marginalized female lumberjacks.

This week I stumbled across the WIPO Guidelines on Inclusive Language, issued by the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Here I learned to say “faithful dog” instead of “man’s best friend”, a “person who has had a stroke” rather than a “stroke victim”; and “a person with a drug addiction” rather than “an addict.”

Read on…

September 14, 2024 November 1, 2024

Zero Tolerance for Cancel Culture.

On October 5, 2017, The New York Times published shocking allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation. Four months later I hosted a RamsayTalk with the co-author of that piece, Jodi Kantor. She noted that the pendulum had already swung from silence to zero tolerance.

She told a story of a notional office party where the CFO drank too much and made an unwelcome advance to a female colleague. She complained to HR. He was immediately fired, couldn’t get a job, lost his accountant’s license and left his family and life in ruins.

Some would say he deserved all that and more.

Jodi Kantor said, before #MeToo became a movement, and long before she co-wrote She Said, and won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Weinstein story: “Likely all the woman really wanted was an apology.”

Read on…

August 17, 2024 October 18, 2024

Tags: Cats

AT 25, YOU WERE BARELY YOU.

WILL BOYS BE BOYS?

THE ENDURING RESILIENCE OF SEXUAL MONSTERS.

OUT-OF-OFFICE, OUT-OF-MY-MIND.

WOKE NEEDS AN AWAKENING.

Zero Tolerance for Cancel Culture.

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