Roaring Lion Uncaged

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 […]

Moccasins in Sandals Country

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 […]

When society imitates fiction

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 […]

The Iceman Cometh Not

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 […]

Les ruines Thomas “Carbide” Willson – Chelsea, QC

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 […]

Montreal wants my stuff

In shipping my grandfather’s 200-pound desk from my cousin in San Francisco to me in Ottawa, we found, too late, that Ottawa is devoid of bonded warehouses. This matters because customs can only be cleared for large objects like this through a warehouse bonded for such a purpose, and the nearest of these facilities is […]

Free AI Lesson Plans

I’ve been playing around with the AI text-to-visual generator Midjourney, whose iterations on human words make the user feel they are working alongside a true collaborator. The results are impossible to direct but full of ideas that are a few associative leaps away from the prompts I give it. There’s no other way for me […]

The forbidden boat

In the early mornings now, instead of scrolling the news or mulling over a Wordle, I check the wind speed and direction. If it’s from the East, I multiply by two. I run along the Rideau Canal, watched by the same worryingly-tame heron every day, and by the time I get to the lockmaster’s house […]