-
Weekly Picks – January 14, 2024
This week’s collection:
- Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?
- 2023 smashes record for world’s hottest year by huge margin
- Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis
- Is Finland’s Housing First really the miracle cure for Canada?
- The geometry of other people
- Acts Harmful to the Enemy
- I Spent the Holidays in Inheritance Capitalism
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
-
Normative Winds
Questioning the collective dream is an act of exercising freedom. Examining the basis of how one should live, who with, and who for, is the kind of amateur iconoclasm that should be widely undertaken.
Perhaps it is – and perhaps everyone is content with coming to similar conclusions. Go to school, get a job, find a long-term partner, obtain a home, bring kids into the picture, fill your physical spaces and buoy your social ones with material things, travel occasionally, and aim for those unceasing milestones. Some of these things are necessary in a world constructed around increasing labor and capital to no end. Others are choices, many subsidized or imposed. By family, culture, governing bodies, and peers.
In this context, it can be exasperating to untie oneself from the common. To face persistent doubts about not being like-minded. To remotely question basic assumptions of what may underlie another’s comfort. As though one has come to naïve conclusions with little consideration rather than reflecting on what defines their own happiness.
Defensive, distractive, dismissive, disinformed retorts – the 4 walls of condescension put up around the ‘other’, in more circumstances than the above.
-
The Gravity of the Game
Groundskeepers prepare the field and wicket at Hagley Oval, Christchurch, for a test match between New Zealand and Sri Lanka in December 2018.
So optimism was rationed like wartime jam. For most of the day Lord’s was alive with anxious chatter, a jittery, skittery babbling, “what do you think, can they, could they, will they, maybe?”
– Andy Bull conveys the crowd’s temperament during the 2019 ICC Men’s World Cup Final
Lionel Messi stares up at his final peak. Kylian Mbappé prowls in the foothills of greatness. From the Andes to the Alps, from River Plate to the banks of the Seine, our planet unites around its ultimate game.
– Peter Drury invites us to witness the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup Final
The morning of December 18, 2018. Summertime in full flow, a taunting breeze wafting in from the hostel room window. A crucial decision to make.
I have just 64 hours to explore Wellington, on this lap, and the certainty of rain the next day has all but been confirmed. My prepared itinerary mocks me on my phone – the planned indoor-outdoor balance now thrown askew. The sun, shining bright since early morning, will continue to raise temperatures throughout this, my only full one in the city.
I could go, as I had originally desired, to the Basin Reserve. It will be Day 4 of a test match between New Zealand and Sri Lanka. My only chance to observe two giants of the international game, likely for many years to come. If I take this route and the rain falls as promised, I check the cricket box but miss out on many other outdoor sights under a perfect sky; tomorrow being the opportune time to explore the capital from the drier side of the window.
Or I could skip the Basin. Mount Victoria would be a nice hike. The waterfront is abuzz with activity. A nice trip on the cable cars perhaps, followed with a stride through the lush parks on the way to Zealandia. But the age-old duel between bat and ball beckons…
-
Weekly Picks – January 7, 2024
This week’s collection:
- The False Link Between Climate Change and Mass Migration
- Why is Gaza so central to the Palestinian Struggle?
- How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons
- Welcome to Canada’s New Gilded Age
- Greenwashing Oil
- Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
-
Solitude, Interrupted
Walk with me for a moment.
This path leads onwards. It does not circle back. It may branch, like the trees adorning its tranquility. Whether its branches converge again is unknown. What we cannot do is turn back. We may want to, but forward is the only motion in this space. After all, we dare not cheat time.
Occasionally, we may happen across a mirrored surface. One that allows us to look around a corner, or offer a reflection on what has passed. Unfortunately, the surface will never be free of impurities. The grime will make it difficult to say with certainty what we are contemplating. Echoes, harmonious and discordant alike, may pierce the air. Visions from beyond this locale may briefly glide into view between the tangled network of green and brown; our perspective marred by the spore-driven haze.
But we shall stick to the earth marked out for us. A simple line through an overgrown reality. The path is soft and still, and we are its only inhabitants. At least for the time being.