The Rural Juror

by Mike O’Brien I’ve spent the last month-and-some at my favourite pastoral retreat, a family cottage in eastern Ontario. Sitting among the trees and moss and overlooking a lake, it has many of the elements that might make for the ideal antidote to urban nuisances. Except that, with the increasing suburbanisation and peri-urbanisation of previously…

Moonstruck

by Mike O’Brien Montreal is quite safe from natural disasters, relatively speaking. We should be regularly tossed by earthquakes, given our tectonic environs, but in my two-score-and-change lifetime the rumblings have been so minor as to be mistaken for a passing truck. When everyone on the island feels a passing truck at the same moment,…

Ri-Co-Law!

by Mike O’Brien At the dawn of this new year, I might have chosen to wax hopeful about promising social and technological developments boding well for the future. Or I might have taken a light-hearted detour from my usual concerns, and written about something artistic, literary or otherwise creatively engaging. But no, there will be…

Yes, New Materials

by Mike O’Brien “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” —Ecclesiastes 1:9 “Bullshit.” —Mike O’Brien 04-04-2022 It is a strange enough thing to collect knives. It is a step stranger still to collect sharpening stones; a further abstraction from…

Subdivisions

by Mike O’Brien I’ve been reading some articles about dehumanization lately, mostly by the popular philosopher (I doubt he would object to that characterization), David Livingstone Smith. I had already spent some time in that domain, given the preponderance of politics in my early post-secondary studies and the looming questions of how humanity’s greatest intramural…