In the past few months, two things happened to me, which resulted in a third. First, I decided to try out a dairy-free diet and observe the effect this change had on my quality of life. Second, my sister gave me a fantastic vegan cookbook for my birthday. At some point, while slowly realizing that … Continue reading
Latest Entries
Diving into Military History: Reading List for 2014
“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” – Otto von Bismark, 1888 I have a habit of sorting the books I read into mental categories or “bookshelves.” One is a list of the perfect rainy day books (Shadow of the Wind, One Hundred Years of Solitude, … Continue reading
Getting Away from “Traditional” Gender Traits
I distinctly remember the day when, while taking a university class on the history of psychology, a brief portion of the three hour lecture touched upon the BSRI test developed by Sandra Bem in 1974. The test was described as a measure of a person’s androgyny; the message was that androgyny, a parallel prominence of masculine and … Continue reading
People / Psychology / Work
“The Typical Millennial”: Changing the Conversation About Generation Y
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell Every generation, when young, is ambitious at its best and narcissistic at its worst. When old, every generation is wise at its best, and condescending at its worst. … Continue reading
The Future of Book Publishing
When Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists won the Giller Prize for Fiction in Canada in 2010, temporary havoc followed. At the time, the novel was being published by a boutique firm that is one of the few in the country to print and bind its own books, using “an unusual mix of traditional and contemporary technologies.” I … Continue reading
Types of Lists to Make and Keep
There is an abundance of lists, everywhere you look. Content is gravitating towards becoming presented in lists rather than in essays. I feel that when we say that we are “reducing” something to a list, we’re unjustly shaming the idea of “listing”; lists are, after all, a great way to communicate clearly and be well … Continue reading
Book Review – Ideas: a History
“There are no whole truths; All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as Whole truths that plays the devil.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues (1953) Earlier this week, I marked a literary milestone. After just over a year and a half, I finished reading Ideas: A History by Peter Watson. This tome … Continue reading
