My kid is on his way to university this year, and it’s hard not to get swept into doomscrolling opinion pieces. AI is going to take over everything and there will be no entry level jobs left. Did I do the wrong thing by encouraging my child’s interest in knowledge work? Should I have nudged […]
This post originally ran in 2015. A commenter at the time had an intriguing suggestion for the solution, which I have added below! Investigative journalists seem awfully glamorous – delving into mysteries and catching those liars at their game. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the aptitudes involved, so I steer clear of it. But […]
The purity of the unchanged treble loomed large in my English childhood. It might been something to do with the 500-year-old tradition of May Morning, seen here in the earliest known recording. At the tolling of six in the morning, Oxford’s townspeople gather on the street to hear the Magdalen College choir sing Hymnus Eucharisticus […]
My first week on a real journalism job in Yellowknife, 20 years ago, my boss took me to see the old Giant Mine site. It wasn’t among the tourist traps of the Northwest Territories, but he felt this was a place I needed to understand if I was going to report on industry in the […]
This post originally appeared in 2011, when apparently I had the sensation of technology accelerating into escape velocity. I could have had no idea what was to transpire 14 years later, but looking back at this piece, the toddler still seems like an emblem of the age—our new age of AI. Little fingers swipe and […]
I could never hack it as a farmer, and the thought of living as a hunter-gatherer evokes for me the feeling of being locked out of your house. But in the ancient and abandoned indigenous villages on the coast of British Columbia, there was a mode of food cultivation that really strikes a chord with […]
I’ve suffered from migraines my whole adult life—two day-long affairs that I would slog through with an unwise amount of cumulative Advil. Until, that is, a neurologist offered me a calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP)-inhibitor, the first new pain treatment in decades. It’s solved the problem with a decisiveness I would never have thought possible. For […]
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, […]
