Canada
I have a PhD in philosophy from The New School for Social Research. Below you'll find a selection of my non-academic writing about art, culture, and ideas.
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? By Frans de Waal W.W. Norton & Co. 320 pp; $35.95 Some people believe it's so obvious that other animals enjoy thoughts and emotions on par with humans that there's nothing left for scientists to explain.
Recent
University of Toronto Faculty of Arts and Science
CRANE Project Director and U of T archaeologist Professor Timothy Harrison leads an international, multi-disciplinary team of researchers in a groundbreaking effort to digitize, visualize, and simulate the birthplace of human civilization. Archaeologists, paleoenvironmental researchers, and other scholars often converge on the same sites to unearth forgotten ways of life from different perspectives and using different techniques.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the master document of modern English. The Middle English Dictionary (MED), completed at the University of Michigan in 2001, records the form English took after the Norman invasion of 1066. Yet Old English originated five centuries earlier, when the Germanic dialects of Anglo-Saxon migrants took on new shape in the British Isles.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), aimed at recognizing the victims and giving voice to survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system, sums up Canada's historical policy towards its Indigenous people as a form of cultural genocide. The goal of that policy, the commission concludes, was to eradicate Indigenous culture.
Mere weeks after winning the Writer's Trust of Canada's prestigious Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, Professor Joseph Heath of the Department of Philosophy and the School of Public Policy & Governance has been shortlisted for the Donner Prize.
Erin Aylward sports a neoprene brace on her knee and a slight limp. The Trudeau Scholar and U of T PhD student in political science and women and gender studies recently tore a ligament playing rugby. Pointing to the brace, she laughs that it only took one game this year for her to injure herself.
In 2011, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) filed a lawsuit claiming that physician-assisted dying should be legal. That case ended up before the Supreme Court of Canada last fall, and on February 6, 2015, the BCCLA won their case. The landmark decision overturned the Supreme Court's 1993 ruling that physician-assisted suicide is illegal.
Unconventional Criticism
The syllabus as a vehicle for satire. Photo credit: Joseph F. Coffey (1967). Film still from "Up the Down Staircase."
Adjunct Sudoku is just like regular sudoku but pointless and unfair. You may only enter the smallest numerals, 1, 2, and 3. Under no circumstances are you allowed to write 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9. When you are finished, the puzzle will be, at best, one third complete.
And now, Diotima said, let me show in an image how enlightened or unenlightened our profession is: Behold! Mostly white, male philosophers working in a cavernous profession that opens onto the light of egalitarian ideals.
As is normal, Socrates, some men in the media will be wretched if they can't simply take what they want and prey on the women around them. For example, such men will touch women without asking and make unwanted, sexual remarks. A few, given the chance will even violently assault the women they wish to fuck.
NOW Magazine cover stories
Intense Vancouver artist’s photo/film show on Cuba demonstrates the stunning resilence of capitalism.
Video powerhouse shifts gears with a new book of operatic photos
Sketchbook diary Satiro-Plastics gets us inside the mind of the original comic book punk
NOW Magazine features
How Boeing-funded IMAX Film’s Adrenaline Rush Softens Us Up for More Military Spending
Design whiz’s new show mistakes fashion for hardcore politics
Globe and Mail features
Swearing in Stephen Harper under Jean-Paul Lemieux's "Charlottetown Revisited"
New documentary reveals grassroots cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians against the wall.
This summer, Kevin Temple wanted a really fresh salad, so he planted it. He didn't reckon on the raccoons.
What happens when you strip a handwritten manuscript of everything but the famous author's corrections?
Other
The last line Mark Lombardi ever drew was one between the ceiling and his neck.