My best friend lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Despite meeting her over Zoom every Saturday since 2018, I’ve only seen her in person a handful of times. So when she came to visit me this Spring we decided to do something deeply silly to celebrate. Ottawa is not known for its high sophistication, but we do, […]
I’m currently reading anthropologist Alice Roberts’ book The Celts: Search for a Civilization. It’s fascinating to see how she goes about reconstructing a pre-literate culture that coexisted with the much louder (historically speaking) Romans. One way to form a picture is through the ancient stories that rise again in modern contexts and can be traced […]
Freshly back from my annual pilgrimage to TED, I’m taking stock of the brain-fizzing input that came my way all week in Vancouver. Each year has its own balance of technology, entertainment and design, and this year all three had a distinctly artificial intelligence flavor. The conference is built on ‘ideas worth spreading’, but the […]
On the eve of 1942, Winston Churchill was in Ottawa on a Zelenskyy-style rally-the-allies speech in the Canadian parliament before the next “invasion season” of WWII was to arrive, having come straight from doing the same in America (you can watch the speech here, known best by its closing line, ‘some chicken, some neck’). He […]
Navajo legends speak of angry mountains that must be calmed with tobacco offerings. It’s one of the most ancient examples of intergenerational trauma in a people who have experienced plenty more since. The memories of the angry mountain in question have been lost, but a cultural nervousness around the harmless ranges of Arizona and New […]
A snake oil salesman and some hedge funds partner up to pimp the latest ‘synthetic biology’ scam—as phantom revenue, a hocus-pocus business model, rampant related-party games, and a decade of colossal failure get shoveled into yet another garbage SPAC. Ginkgo Bioworks is a colossal scam, a Frankenstein mash-up of the worst frauds of the last […]
For near-term sea level rise, all eyes are on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Covering the vast majority of the island, the largest body of ice outside of Antarctica is responsible for one-fifth of the oceans’ current elevation gain and projected to add another 10 inches globally, whether we decarbonize or not. Much of our data […]
I’m late to the party when it comes to S-Town, the hit Serial Productions podcast about Alabama polymath John McLemore, who dies half way through the series having suffered mercury poisoning from years of back-woods chemical artisanship. It made me think about all of those passionate, brilliant people society never quite manages to harness, who […]