Disagnosing Mental Illness During Difficult Times
A guest essay in the NY Times makes some excellent points about the way we’re framing mental health issues in kids. Psychologist Darby Saxbe discusses the well-intentioned but problematic way…
covid-19
On Learning Loss
A New York Times piece discusses, again, learning loss from the lockdowns of 2020, but a new study shows the lockdowns actually improved some skills. The Editorial Board of the…
The Moonshot to End the Pandemic
A recent paper explains how easily we could stop the pandemic even with current highly transmissible, immune evasive variants. Barry Hunt explained the paper’s findings: Rt typically hovers just around…
Compassion as the Antidote for Capitalism
A Taylor Swift fan took the brave position of calling out the beloved superstar, and everyone else involved, for the death of Ana Clara and many in need of medical…
Party Like It’s 1699
It feels like there are three realities out there. It’s not just three separate groups of people, because lots of people straddle a couple or even all these realities. One…
The Frustrating Run-Around on Filtration Units in Schools
This is a long but very informative video about what happened when people tried to improve air quality in schools. This is a very loose collection of things said that…
Preston Manning’s pandemic panel report wants more politicians, fewer docs calling public health shots
Have I got this straight? Preston Manning just made a recommendation to give politicians absolute authority over public health that was so excellent the Alberta government accepted it a week…
On Legislating Kindness
If kind, other-centred behaviour isn’t entirely natural to us, then should it be legislated (more than it already is)? Many old timey philosophers agree that happiness is predicated on an…
From Childcare to Prisons
There’s a growing and obvious labour shortage in certain fields that all connect to one culprit. But we don’t want be explicit about it. And N95s help as well! As…
We Need to Backtrack and Explain the Disease
Kaveri Roy is an Assistant Professor of Nursing, and she explained how Covid works to her first year students last year in very simple terms, like this: “I teach patho…
How It Began
When it all started, I immediately started reading news from China and Italy, figuring that what was happening there could easily happen here, and we should be prepared. Esther Hopkins…
Culture of Uncare or Pandemic of Inhumanity
Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe coined the term “culture of uncare” to explain intentional efforts to sever links from one another and from the environment. She calls it “severing links,” but the…
Consumption is Back in Vogue
Tuberculosis is making a comeback! (Mass-consumerism never left.) About 2 million people die worldwide from TB, but not here, right!?! Now there’s a case in the University of Victoria and…
Newsflash: Covid Should Be Avoided
Studies make if very clear that Covid is really bad for us, yet we’re going to do nothing to prevent the spread. In case you didn’t know, if you have…
Permission to Learn from Home
An Australian case determined that it’s discriminatory to force kids to attend school if doing so could be harmful to the student or family members. From CovidSafeEdAus, “Victory! Our appeal…
Kearl Lake Outbreak
I’m sometimes spurred on by the idea that it’s possible for average people to put things together in a way that might have an effect. I read Michelle McNamara’s excellent…
The Central Error of the Pandemic
Dr. Satoshi Akima, who does internal medicine in Australia, has a great post up about the economic reasons for ignoring the pandemic. First, a bit of context to consider from…
Nothing New
Studies coming out now keep repeating what we already know. Covid was at first thought to be a respiratory illness, but we know it makes its home in the bloodstream…
Compassion Challenge
One of my favourite short stories is Tolstoy’s “The Godson.” It’s the story I revisit whenever I find myself thinking that this whole world has turned a wrong corner. I’ve…
Inaccessible Accessibility
Why is remote learning suddenly so difficult to access when we have all the tech we need to pull it off? When I was in grade 12, I started to…