Brotherless Night – Go Read
I grew up in Chennai in the 80s and got to witness the Sri Lankan civil war from just across the border. I read about it mostly from the Indian…
My kid loves statistics and 15 minute cities
We have started this simple diary where my 7 yo tracks each of her trips and categorizes them as car or not car. I find the analog simplicity of this…
Choices for 2024
When your phone does a thing I’m not much of a resolver, resolutioner, whatever the word may be. But my phone did show me these very interesting choices of app…
Fresh approaches to skepticism
The skeptic social movement has been a big part of my social and intellectual world. In a world full of bullshit and liars I appreciate the posture of “show me…
Journalism is a variety of public relations
Journalists complain about the rise and impact of public relations. It’s the “dark side”. Public relations (PR) “exerts a pressure” on journalism. It has a “distorting influence”. Journalists find themselves…
Big Wool and Fast Fashion
Cute sheep or not, factory farming is always impactful According to one analysis of wool production in Australia, by far the world’s top exporter, the wool required to make one knit…
Leftover milk solids chocolate balls
When you make ghee, and are careful enough not to burn the batch, the milk solids that are filtered out are great to use up. This site has a bunch…
Roasted rutabagas are awesome!
This week unlike other weeks, I picked up that rutabaga I usually avoid at the grocery store and it paid off 🙂 It’s so good! And the right amount of…
Why Deport Jaskirat Singh Sidhu?
A federal judge has dismissed applications from the truck driver who caused the deadly Humboldt Broncos bus crash in Saskatchewan and was fighting deportation back to India. Source: Federal judge…
American Caste and ’90s flashbacks
Always like when I’m validated for something I said 25 years back Wilkerson rigorously defines eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, heredity, and dehumanization. She…
To Read! Dark PR by Grant Ennis
In his new book, Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment, Grant Ennis — a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia — identifies the “nine…
Masturbation: A Short History of a Great Taboo
This film by Lori Malépart-Traversy is a fascinating peak into the legacy of the Graham Cracker guy, Sylvester Graham, And the Kellogg’s guy, John Harvey Kellog, and other Presbyterian and…
Stuff I read 04-Sep-2023
An occasional roundup of news I found interesting, with even less occasional commentary! How a mere 12% of Americans eat half the nation’s beef, creating significant health and environmental impacts…
How BC Could Tax Soaring Property Values for the Public Good | The Tyee
The vast majority of B.C.’s residential property wealth — $1.5 trillion — is in the value of the land rather than in the buildings on it. Unlike the value created by…
Back to School and Covid
Will Back-to-School COVID Crush Families? BC’s status quo approach is not good enough, says a grassroots organization of doctors and teachers. With new variants of covid hitting hard, we’re all…
Reality testing: measuring the long term impact of journalism
When Margaret Wente was getting busted repeatedly for plagiarizing, her publisher, The Globe and Mail, more or less defended her. Critical commentators’ noted that no one spins harder or better…
Some notes on microblogging
This week Twitter continues to burn money by rebranding to X. I’m still at Twitter at @sherwinarnott. But I don’t know for how long. Twitter remains more or less functional,…
Cognition trick: the Google Effect
The Google effect is a kind of digital amnesia that permeates this internet age. Explored by Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner, this variety of cognitive bias reveals the fascinating relationship between…
Five kinds of compassion, according to Gabor Maté
I’ve been reading (listening to) The Myth of Normal, by Gabor Maté. It’s a fascinating look at the role of trauma in our selves, but also in our collective selves….
The stickiness of so-called “reverse racism”
“Reverse racism” has been debunked many times. It’s a bogus idea. Unfortunately, it is also a bogus idea that is widely believed. Like other rightwing tropes such as “the nazis…
Municipal election recommendations for #YYJ
I live in a family of three with a young kid, downtown adjacent, in a condo. Here are my voting recommendations.
Research notes on defunding the police, from Halifax
The hard work of an important committee in Halifax has recently come to fruition. The Subcommittee to Define Defunding the Police have finished their research, their surveys, and their deliberations…
The state of hyperlinking in journalism, a case study
From time to time I like to check in on how news orgs are doing with their online publishing practices. In particular, I like to review how they handle reports…
White supremacy, doing journalism, and the explanatory comma
This particular Code Switch episode on the explanatory comma is itself a kind of extended explanatory comma, or perhaps an interrogatory comma, because Demby and Marisol Meraji take time to really discuss and think about their own discomfort with this practice.