Aaron Nava

Society and Culture
In a digitized world where you can connect instantly with almost anybody – often by mere voice command – it seems hard to imagine anyone could ever feel alone. Nevertheless, our era’s widespread and chronic sense of loneliness is inescapable. Despite our natural human drive to seek happiness and fulfilment through contact with others, Canadians find themselves suffering from the physical and mental damage wrought by social isolation. But is this a problem government can fix? Aaron Nava lays out the evidence of our “other” pandemic – loneliness – and why some experts think we need a national strategy to help Canadians make friends again.
Family Life
From its origins flogging patent medicines in the early 19th century, corporate advertising has never been just about the product. Rather, it is meant to promote a sense of awareness and desire. With this in mind, what should we make of the recent deluge of TV commercials that suggest Canada is populated almost entirely by mixed-race families? With the fantasyland of advertising as his starting point, Aaron Nava probes the state of intermarriage in Canada, looking closely at our statistical record, what it means on a personal level and what it holds for our country’s future.
Fighting Cancel Culture
Politics may divide us, but what brings us together? With traditional cultural institutions such as religion in decline, sports and entertainment were filling the breach – generating a set of shared experiences crucial to a cohesive society. Lately, however, these pastimes have become poisoned with the same partisan rancour and division familiar to politics and the news media. But as conservative entertainers find themselves cancelled by corporate wokeism, their fans are finding new ways to push back. As right and left seek their own separate sources of entertainment, Aaron Nava ponders whether our future might even include a common culture.
Political Moves
Threatening to take your ball and leave because you don’t like how the game is going is the sort of selfish behaviour we discourage in young children. So why do we celebrate it every four years when apparent adults do the same thing? With the U.S. presidential election only days away, American Democrats are once again vowing to move to Canada if Donald Trump wins. Don’t hold your breath. With bracing realism, Aaron Nava looks at how this electoral petulance always plays out, the hypocrisy it embodies and what it means for democracy in the U.S. and Canada.
Politics of Pleasure
It was the left that dragged things long considered personal into the political realm. Not even the basic acts of breaking bread and pouring wine are exempt – not when there are hard-done-by serving wretches to be shielded from the rich or callous. And that certainly covers the once-subtle art of deciding whether to leave a little (or a lot) extra. Aaron Nava navigates the surprisingly treacherous shoals of tipping – its social, moral, transactional and political features. Relying on his good heart and sunny optimism, Nava steers his way to the sincerely personal and soundly conservative bases for tipping, reasoning that preserves the free choice of the customer and protects the dignity of the recipient.
Coronavirus Isolation
No postwar generation has endured more delays and interruptions than the Millennials. A lack of permanency − in jobs, housing, education, relationships and everywhere else – is often considered their defining characteristic. So how are the cataclysmic disruptions of the coronavirus affecting Canada’s Millennials? Aaron Nava offers a revealing personal take on the generational costs imposed by social distancing and economic shutdown. And manages to find a welcome message of hope.
Just Boomer Things
The view that social media are a wasteland of trivia and irrationality that’s making everyone dumber has become so common as to form an example of the very genre it condemns. In truth, decidedly non-trivial things are being communicated, just not in ways that older generations – or not-yet-clued-in members of current ones – quite understand. The current meme-war over the political and economic legacy of the Baby Boomers, for example, may well define how this generation is remembered as it fades into dotage and beyond. Millennial Aaron Nava shoulders the almost superhuman burden of working with a boomer editor to illustrate one skirmish in the eternal inter-generational tug-of-war.
Movies
Who’d have thought the rotary-dial phone and kung fu could help save late 22nd-century humanity? These were just a couple of the charming wrinkles in a sci-fi thriller that captivated audiences with its innovative special effects and ambiguous religiosity and mysticism. The oddness of the combination perhaps helps explain The Matrix’s staying power. Aaron Nava first saw the film at age nine, triggering a lifelong devotion that, two decades and many viewings later, continues to nourish his moral reflections.

Social Media

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