"The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."
When you live in a well-off community, it’s all too easy to ignore the reality of drug addiction. We look at the two thousand homeless addicts in Vancouver with contempt or with pity, but very rarely with understanding. Some vote for politicians who advocate harsh minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders. Some comment that drug … Continue reading What I Learned from “Beautiful Boy” by David Sheff
It’s become commonplace to frequently be confronted with a flurry of angry (and frequently ungrammatical) posts filled with buzzwords every time Trump posts something stupid (so, fairly often). In fact, it’s become so accepted that people appear to view posts on social media as a legitimate alternative to tangible contributions to the community, such as … Continue reading “Slacktivists:” a Critique of Social Media Activism
Recently, the largest ever election in global history occurred in India, with 600 million voters casting ballots all over the nation. In light of the rise of authoritarian right-wing governments in the past year, India’s election is a refreshing reminder that democracy is very much alive. In fact, democracy has never been as vibrant as … Continue reading Technology’s Role in Democratization
While a cultured literary connoisseur likely already agrees with me on this matter, amateur grammarians may be wondering what the necessity for Oxford commas is. Consistency? Clarity? An insatiable thirst for punctuation, even when excessive? The answer is all of the above.
Edward Lear's nonsense poem "The Jumblies" is among the most lighthearted pieces of poetry in history, describing a group of playful creatures who go to sea in a sieve. But could there be a deeper meaning to this poem?
Replace the proletariat with mindlessly subordinate children, replace Room 101 with an ordinary classroom featuring routine torture branded as “education”, replace telescreens with the watchful eyes of cutthroat administrators, and the dystopian regime of 1984 is recreated every day in the ordinary school.
This problem is not limited to the sins of Becky from Full House: Just because we don’t pay off our admissions officers, it doesn’t mean we haven’t bought into the message that Ivy League universities are the goal of life and getting into them is key to success.
Developed or developing? It’s very tempting to utilise this simplistic dichotomy as a worldview and as a means of analysing social and geopolitical issues. I’m certainly guilty of using these labels myself. However, the truth is that the world doesn’t fit neatly into these two boxes of progress and that to use these labels may hinder our ability to solve global issues.
Since March of 2015, conflict in Yemen has left an estimated 2.2 million people without resources, without family, without a place to call home, making Yemen the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. Despite being a champion of human rights globally, Canada continues to fuel Saudi’s horrific atrocities against human rights through arms deals, which is both deeply damaging and hypocritical. To be respected as a human rights leader globally and to preserve the foundations of basic moral decency, it’s imperative that Canada stop giving arms to Saudi Arabia.
