While Others Downsize Literary Coverage into Oblivion, We’re Launching a Books Section

IF YOU’VE BEEN following us online, you’ve likely noticed our aggressive pivot toward politics and breaking news coverage. Partly, it was an overdue overhaul for a media landscape that, from search engine optimization to aggregators, has reshaped itself around hard news. Partly, it was about meeting the national mood. Blame Trump. Alarm over Canadian sovereignty has produced a surge of interest in how the country works—or doesn’t. Readers are nerding out on industrial policy debates they would have skipped just a few years ago. Somewhat improbably, the civic nuts and bolts of institutional life have become a kind of clickbait.

But even as our audience has embraced this shift in commissioning—engagement has never been higher—we’re faced with the question of what a current affairs magazine should even look like in this moment. For a long time, The Walrus allowed itself to drift into something closer to a literary journal: reflective, essayistic, stylish, largely insulated from the forces actually shaping everyday life. There was value in that identity. But the country changed. And increasingly, it felt artificial to maintain such a sharp distinction between thoughtful long-form narrative and urgent reporting on drone procurement or the market psychology of potash. More than artificial, it seemed a failure of imagination. Couldn’t readers be interested in both? Why assume intellectual curiosity stops at the edge of the news cycle?

In that sense, the increase of daily reporting feels less like we’re abandoning an identity than finding new uses for it. So much of our federation is siloed. We’ve invested in local reporting precisely to help readers from different parts of Canada discover each other. But the fragmentation is intellectual too. We’ve become specialists of our own grievances, talking in narrow vocabularies that don’t take into account there are others around us.

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To thrive, The Walrus needs to think bigger—bigger than a traditional general interest magazine and bigger than a conventional newsroom. We have to become an intermediary for a national conversation that doesn’t currently exist in one place: between trade experts, political operatives, climate policy geeks, constitutional obsessives, and AI contrarians who might otherwise remain sealed off in separate worlds. That also means not abdicating our responsibility to that larger cultural life we still represent. It does mean, however, doing it differently.

Starting this issue, at a time when other outlets are downsizing literary coverage into oblivion, we’re launching a new books section. But it won’t be an arena of artisanal centrism. Instead, alongside voicey reviews, each edition will feature an intensely argued, indefensibly opinionated essay. I want the section to not just point to the latest interesting reads. I want it to be the spearpoint of a broader return to a kind of consensus-testing commentary that is harder and harder to find. I want more reassessments, more polemics, more manifestos, more feuding. I want the spectacle of people publicly wrestling with ideas they care about too much. I want everyone, at some point, to end up a bit offended.

Countries hold themselves together not just through tariff-proofed supply chains but through encounters that force citizens to sharpen and defend what they believe. I want The Walrus to become a place where those arguments can still happen—whether it’s about critical minerals or that novel everybody suddenly feels compelled to pretend they’ve read.