My father and I spent many of my childhood summers canoeing Ontario’s lake systems, counting moose and camping under the stars. Then I got into my teenage years and he saw my brain go into risk-seeking mode; We switched to whitewater. We paddled Northern rivers in areas where there were so many mosquitoes that, statistically, […]
I’m not on TikTok, so I had to be told about pregnancy nose. Whereas in the 1960s, women sat down together and discovered the political underpinnings of their personal struggles, now we do things like congregate online and discover, via selfies, phenomena we were never told to expect in ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” […]
This week came with heartening news in the frog world. An Australian study showed that if you offer frogs a sauna in a greenhouse, it allows them to recover from the fungal disease that has played a role in 90 species extinctions so far. The greatest loss of biodiversity ever attributed to a single disease, […]
These are just some of the many ways to fail at a long-term game even as you succeed in the short-term ones that make it up. It turns out this is a common mistake that arises because we live in a non-ergodic world. It’s a real problem in our decision making. You might not have […]
This piece initially ran exactly a year ago, and it’s no coincidence that the Canadian Broadcasting System had me on air again today. This time, though, it was a program called Good Question, Saskatchewan! which addressed the issue of why that province (mostly) dodged the hassle of daylight savings time. If you would like to […]
This post originally appeared in March 2012. “It is with the deepest sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of your son Norman. He died after an encounter with a lion near the Keito River in Portuguese West Africa 10/5/15. He made a very gallant fight and killed the lion with his […]
This year marked my tenth year participating in 10Q. It’s a service provided by Reboot, a non-profit whose aim is to reimagine and reinforce Jewish thought and traditions. Somewhere in the back end of their website now are 100 paragraphs I’ve written over the past decade, each reflecting on an aspect of the year just […]
On July 30th, 2014, the sky turned black in the middle of the day and a thunderstorm rained tar on our car. That was the final straw of the Yellowknife wildfire season for me; I brought my then-4-year-old son down to Calgary to attend a day camp until the air cleared up North. Back then, […]