So it looks like we're going to have a second wave, or are already in one. And it looks like Edmonton might be locked down tight again. I hoped this wouldn't happen, but it is happening. I have options for how I respond to the fact that we're heading back into the tunnel, but not one of them is a good option. I can deny, refuse, and pretend it's not happe...  Read this >>

As I write this, I'm on a layover at Pearson Airport in Toronto - first trip by air since March 13. I have never seen an airport with so few people in motion. I had time on my hands so I walked around Terminal 1 (domestic) and Terminal 3 (international). Domestic traffic looked to be down about ninety percent from what I remember as normal, and internatio...  Read this >>

In month six of the pandemic, I find myself pulled to nature - trees, ravines, shrubs, wildflowers and grasses - the less I see signs of people, the better. I don't need to go very far from buildings and streets and cars, I just need to be out of sight and hearing of them, for even a short time. I've never felt the pull this strongly before. I've always ...  Read this >>

I like to read pop neuroscience and so I'm familiar with the idea that during prolonged stressors such as the covid pandemic, our survival-wiring gets jacked up and hyperactive, and bypasses the front part of our brain, where abstract thought and concentration reside. This is why I can't seem to get high-level cognitive work done - either I can't re...  Read this >>

The pandemic is messing with my sense of place as well as time. By “place” I don’t mean anything topographic (for instance, the fact that I’m writing this in the Bonnie Doon Community League Park as opposed to Casablanca). I mean the building blocks of spatial awareness - what is here, what is there, what is near and what is far.&n...  Read this >>

Two days ago I was waiting for the bus. Public transport is free during the pandemic, and even as the outside world lurches back towards normality, the buses, with "please board at the back" signs and yellow tape marking off alternating rows of seats, are an ambulatory reminder that we are not yet back in normal times. These visual cues play on my pandemi...  Read this >>

In the June 29th issue of the New Yorker, there’s a hybrid book review/personal essay by David Denby about re-reading Crime and Punishment. I read that in high school a million years ago and had forgotten that it ends with Raskolnikov in prison in Siberia, dreaming of a plague. Denby quotes: Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be in...  Read this >>

In the June 29th issue of the New Yorker, there’s a hybrid book review/personal essay by David Denby about re-reading Crime and Punishment. I read that in high school a million years ago and had forgotten that it ends with Raskolnikov in prison in Siberia, dreaming of a plague. Denby quotes: Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be in...  Read this >>

Bruce Chatwin's grandmother had a cabinet of curiosities, according to Chatwin biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, which fascinated the young Chatwin. The cabinet was a late-Victorian assemblage of minor exotica, bits of human artifact and the natural world, preserved under glass because they came from places that were far away, set apart from mundane life i...  Read this >>

As the pandemic proceeds through numbered opening-up stages, the future is fracturing into a spectrum of divergent times-after, like the Pink Floyd album cover with one ray of blackness going into a prism and seven colors going out. First there was "we're all in this together", with a collective holding of breath and a radical leveling of public experienc...  Read this >>

On March 15 I had just come back from a four-day meeting in Ottawa. I spent most of those four days in a meeting room with academics from across Canada and a few from Europe. Over the course of the meeting, seeping into the conference rooms, the news of the virus got worse and worse, and furtive checking of phones during sessions increased. At coffee brea...  Read this >>