Frankenstein’s warning: the too-familiar hubris of today’s technoscience

An article in the Guardian by Richard King emphasizes how Frankenstein is more relevant today than ever. I’d always been struck by the novel: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, which is so much more than a horror or science fiction novel. Subtitled The Modern Prometheus, it tells of young scientist Victor Frankenstein’s goal to […]

Four health-conscious cities putting pedestrians first

To save time: 1) Paris, France, 2) Bogotá, Colombia, 3) Milan, Italy, and 4) San Francisco, US. I am posting this because it’s generally a good idea for cities to put pedestrians and cyclists first. What all these cities have in common is de-emphasizing one-person-per-car vehicles and prioritizing other forms of transport: bikes, buses, subways, […]

Another War in the Woods

By Michael Twist – June 2, 2021 Another spruce bites the dust. Here is the latest about the spruce log recently photographed by Lorna Beecroft as it was hauled down the island highway. She has, by the way, described herself as “not a hippie nut.” Oh good. Knowing that the tree was cut down on […]

Clean air, water, soil & biological diversity: David Suzuki

David Suzuki on why climate change is a bigger threat than COVID-19 “Clean air is a gift from nature that we have a responsibility to protect for all future generations and for the rest of the web of life.” David Suzuki: Reflections from an elder in isolation “If we could take a different path, away […]

Protecting Wildlife: Jane Goodall

“All over the world we’ve been destroying the places where animals live in order to get materials to build our homes, our cities and to make our own lives more comfortable.” One year ago, Jane Goodall spoke on Covid-19. We should listen and end the nightmare.

Winter + pandemic = Think like a Norwegian

Winter is coming… and the aim is not to “sugar-coat the situation or to deny the difficulties that we will face; we can’t hide from the shadow cast by the pandemic, any more than the citizens of Tromsø can pretend that the sun is still rising. By recognising our own capacity to control our responses […]

Skim This!

“…the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight … these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.” — Maryanne Wolf On […]

Proust as Antidote for Smartphone-Induced Attention Deficit

“Daniel Mendelsohn had a particularly modern take on the value of reading Proust’s densely written, heavily detailed, slowly unfolding opus known as In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past).: Recently I was traveling on a train next to a young man—a recent college graduate, I guessed—who was reading a hugely fat Victorian novel. […]

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

“Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul.” Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction By Mairead Small Staid

The Art of Solitude

Solitude? In this time of endless noise? Here’s an article on the importance of solitude. “If [Blaise] Pascal’s observation about our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves is true of the human condition in general, then the issue has certainly been augmented by an order of magnitude due to the options available […]