The lesson we learn from the 14th century is that the world does not tolerate insupportable ideas. Modernity is one such idea and, although it may take generations, it will pass away.
Tag: Covid-19
The Great Reset, Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret
Although The Great Reset has become the flashpoint for conspiracy lunatics, it is important to ignore the noise they produce. Push through. Read the book in its intended spirit: as the start of a wide-ranging conversation about our collective future.
A City Boy Meets A Country Bug
My wife and I live in antiseptic circumstances. High above the city streets, shuttered in our condo, it’s easy for us to self-isolate. Covid-19 is not the only thing we keep at bay. We’re high enough that we don’t get bugs either.
Cities And Pathogens
More people live in my hometown than lived on the entire planet when humans first organized themselves into large communities. Yet that was all it took to produce most of the diseases that have afflicted us even to the present day.
Toronto Photo Walk In Mid-November
Oddly enough, successful street photography is a bit like catching a virus. I say this because, as with catching a virus, street photography requires a lot of exposure. Not camera sensor exposure, but exposure to people interacting in public places.
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, by Olivia Laing
As in The Lonely City, Laing views today’s funny weather as a continuation of gusts we felt in the early days of AIDS when the Reagan administration chose not merely to do nothing but actively to make life miserable for hundreds of thousands of those infected.
Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
This tetralogy is a remarkable achievement, offering a clear-eyed view of the times without resorting to the usual maudlin emotions—outrage, disbelief. Instead, through her wise art, she offers us reassurance.
Does the way we Structure Time Make Us Unkind?
After lunch, I ran across the road to get a few things for supper and as I stepped through the entrance to the mall, I noticed an older man lying on the floor stretched out on his side. In particular, I noted his blue mask which gave an odd splash of colour to an otherwise…
tl;dr
Too long; didn’t read. Like LOL when Facebook became a thing, TL;DR is a viral acronym that has taken on a sudden relevance. Once an occasional rat scampering from a sinking mass of text, now the TLDR rodent is everywhere. Typically, it’s offered as a complaint about the length of a text, but its resurgence…
Making Art in a Pandemic
It has become a commonplace to observe that the Covid-19 pandemic exposes some of the weaknesses inherent in the way we organize ourselves as social beings. For example, through the mechanisms of the capitalist labour market, we have collectively agreed that certain modes of work are not terribly important. We know this because we don’t…
Microbe Hunters Then And Now
Through offhand remarks which strike us today as thoroughly gratuitous, de Kruif allows his own personality to infect his stories with sexism, racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and a wide assortment of other bigotries that, were he alive today, would make him the darling of Trump’s White House.
Self-Control in the Age of Covid-19
There are 478 new infections in Ontario, the most on a single day since May 2nd. This includes 153 new cases in Toronto.There is something about this I find dispiriting. The number itself is not dispiriting so much as what the number tells me about human nature.
Zadie Smith and Intimations of “Real Suffering”
Popular discourse has thought closely about privilege, but is utterly vapid when it comes to suffering. While it’s true that writers almost universally address suffering as an experience, almost none address it as a discursive category.
Neowise – The Covid Comet
It’s hard to say much with certainty about Shakespeare’s life at that point, but there is one fact we know with absolute certainty: in 1607, Shakespeare saw a comet. Everybody saw it and spoke about it. It was Halley’s Comet.
Wear A Face Covering
I used to think masks were for badasses, protesters during the G20 summit who didn’t want to get ID’d by police, or graffiti artists trying to hide from surveillance cameras. Now, masks are what sensible people wear, like Birkenstocks or sunscreen.