I disagree with the fundamental notion inherent to the supposed “right to be forgotten”, which is the presumption that the main and most important purpose of documenting world events is to depict your life history in an autobiographical sense. My conviction is that history belongs not to the subjects who it is about, but to […]
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Flickr user Agatha Barc has some albums of historical postcards of Toronto and the University of Toronto. To me, they provide the contrasting thrills of seeing buildings that look just as they do today and seeing whole areas (like around city hall) that are now unrecognizable.
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So much depends on style, that factor of which we are growing more and more suspicious, that although the tendency of criticism is to explain a writer either in terms of his sexual experience or his economic background, I still believe technique remains the soundest base for a diagnosis, that it should be possible to […]
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Back in November, Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva released a podcast episode for Climate Justice Toronto about the first generation of fossil fuel divestment organizers at U of T. That episode covered from the inception of the campaign in 2012 until the People’s Climate March (PCM) in New York City in September 2014. They have […]
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One genre which I enjoy reading is non-fiction about espionage and counterespionage. Recently released Cuban spy in the USA Ana Montes is an interesting story from several perspectives, including ideological motivation, tradecraft, and the challenges in countering insider attacks against the intelligence services. Related: Protecting sources and methods How useful are spies? Spies and the […]
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The first episode of Amanda Harvey-Sánchez and Julia DaSilva’s podcast about the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign at the University of Toronto is online. This one features three organizers from the early campaign in 2012: me, Stu Basden, and Monica Resendes.
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One inescapable but confounding element of trying to understand politics, international relations, and history up to the present day is that we don’t have access to what governments are doing in secret. We will need to re-write the history of these times decades from now, if circumstances and freedom of information laws permit historians to […]
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The first pile at Hanford generated 250 million watts—250 megawatts or MW—of thermal power and produced each year about a hundred kilograms of plutonium. A rule of thumb is that a megawatt of fission heat in a natural uranium reactor accompanies the production of about a gram of plutonium-239 per day. About six kilograms were […]
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I watched the four-part Netflix series on the Three Mile Island disaster and found it to be well crafted and emotionally poignant, though only OK as an educational resource on the partial meltdown. My technical complaint is that they explain almost nothing about why the accident happened and exactly what took place while it was […]
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“One profession that is particularly close to my heart, a profession that can get away with nearly anything,” Wagenbreth told his colleagues, “and this group are our dear journalists.” Journalists with a good reputation, he said, had excellent access to officials with security clearances and business executives, and could even travel through the Iron Curtain […]
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