Amid all the struggle with trying to get my dissertation done, I have frequently thought about the sunk cost fallacy: basically the idea that because you have invested a lot in something, you need to keep going. It’s called a fallacy because we can’t change the past and need to decide whether any undertaking is […]
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Having just helped my second flatmate move out, I am living alone for the first time in many years. Before the sequence of flatmates here in the Annex, I lived at Massey College or with family in Toronto, or for a while in an apartment above a streetcar stop at College and Dovercourt with what […]
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I had been looking for this poem for literally years when I came across a TVO recording where she recites it. Atwood’s an intoxicating speaker, but you’ll have to use your imagination unless you can also track the audio down somewhere: “That grandfather clock that was too large for the shelf, so it stood 90 […]
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I have a friend for who, every night as I struggle to sleep, I make a point of issuing a hope or aspiration to the universe about: that they are safe and well, and that they will find what they need in life. I don’t believe that such wishes can have any effect on the […]
Now that the darkest part of the year has passed, I’m hopeful we’ll see something like what my Uncle Robert described in an email to me last year: It seems sometimes like things plod along, yielding neither joy nor sorrow; and then suddenly an unexpected series of events, meetings, or conversations; a surge of energy […]
I feel like I’m free, that I’m doing useful work, and that I’m living life as I want to.
We live under constant threat of sudden destruction via nuclear war. It wouldn’t take that many warheads falling on major cities to darken the atmosphere — making the consequences of even a regional exchange (or the payload of a single ‘boomer’ sub) global, and potentially a threat to the integrity of human civilization. The control […]
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there are non-overlapping gaps in all our memories which leave us confused in our social relations with one another
Helplessly watching someone you love suffer can teach and change you more than years of academic study, expert help, and suffering of your own.