Tricks of the mind
Reading involves bit of trickery. Mental trickery. It engages the imagination and fools us into thinking we are there within the book: nestled beside the author, or better yet, beside…
Ian Chadwick
Ontario’s liquor sales conundrum
The C.D. Howe Institute released its report on beer and wine sales in Ontario, today, advocating for a more liberal approach and allowing beer and wine to be sold in…
The Beginning of the End
Sixty years ago, the end began. It would take almost a full year for the Allies to batter the Third Reich into submission, but in the summer of 1944, the…
Gut instincts
A story on Science Daily says research suggests our so-called “free will” may be less free than we ever imagined. We may, instead, be meat puppets ruled by the desires…
Great books: the academic view
In the mid-1990s, journalist David Denby took on a personal challenge to return to Columbia University for a year to take two courses, both focused on reading the “great books”…
Inanity and vanity
Michel de Montaigne wrote in his usual self-deprecating but sardonic way: If other men would consider themselves at the rate I do, they would, as I do, discover themselves to…
The First Dark Age
The causes of the first “Dark Age” have long been the topic of debate among historians and archeologists. Many ideas and theories have been put forward; none have found universal…
Happiness & Fulfillment
There are ten methods for meditating on the world, begins one scroll in the 1,300-year-old collection of Tang-dynasty sutras from Xian, China, that can lead us to happiness and fulfillment.…
Testing a Homeplug-Powerline Network
I’ve had some wireless issues for quite some time now. There are dead spots in the house – a central wall has metal ducts and a gas fireplace, which are…
Re-reading Heraclitus
I started to re-read Haxton’s 2001 translation of Heraclitus last night. I came across references to him when reading introductory material on Montaigne recently and I wanted to flesh out…
The Soviet Machiavelli
I’ve written a new piece for my Municipal Machiavelli blog about the late (1982) Mikhail Suslov, the “Soviet Machiavelli.” You can read it here: www.ianchadwick.com/machiavelli/the-soviet-machiavelli/ Suslov was the power behind…
Montaigne and Machiavelli
Michel de Montaigne mentioned Machiavelli only twice in his Essays, both in Book Two. This tells us he was aware of the latter, but not whether he was intimately familiar…
Chasing storms on Saturn
There’s a beautiful video about the Cassini mission and its images of the storms on Saturn at the New York Times website. It’s amazing to see what images and information…
Montaigne’s words on anger
“There is no passion that so shakes the clarity of our judgment as anger,” Montaigne wrote in Book II of his Essays (Chapter 31). “It is a passion that takes…
Dave Clark Five
We’re sitting on the front deck listening to British Sixties Radio, an internet radio station we like and listen to a lot, and they just played the Dave Clark Five…
Shock Top beers
Just tried two American beers from St. Louis: a Belgian White and Raspberry White, both in cans. The former has coriander, lime and lemon peel, the latter has, of course,…
Montaigne’s library
I read yesterday that Montaigne had a library of 1,000 books, of which he was very proud. It was his retreat – the room he went to where he wanted…
Finding my muse in Montaigne
Muse: a source of inspiration; especially a guiding genius; the imaginary force thought to provide inspiration to poets, writers, artists, etc. A muse, for modern writers, is that indefinable force…
Fools
Even though for all his life, A fool attends upon a wise man, He no more knows wisdom Than a spoon knows the flavours of soup. The Dhammapada, Chapter 5,…
Another fad bites the dust
The gluten-free fad took another major hit to its already weakened credibility this week when researchers who had first diagnosed “non-celiac gluten sensitivity” found out that, oops, they were wrong.…