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Babel, or Goodbye to All That
Sadly, Osamu Dazai has to step aside now that Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by RF Kuang has replaced The Flowers of Buffoonery as my favourite novel. I have long been partial to fantasy stories since I was a little kid, but it’s not just the…
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Radical Antiquity
One of my old professors, Chris Zeichmann, recently published a book called Radical Antiquity about anarchist (in the etymological sense of the term) movements in antiquity. It was an easy read, by which I mean that I ripped through that densely-packed tome in about 4 or 5 days. He gave a plethora of examples of…
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Wonderland
Earlier this year, I read a really great book by journalist Omar El Akkad. Its provocative title: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He was, of course, referring to the humanitarian crisis and genocide in Gaza, but one might also apply his words to a great many other crises throughout history. People…
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Cyberpsycho: A Horror Story
Recently I made a post about AI, and someone responded by saying that my blog “scared” them. To be honest, as part of Gen Z, the onset of a dystopian reality feels pretty par for the course at this point. If I hear “once in a lifetime event” once more in my lifetime, I may…
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Like a bat
In my high school philosophy class, we had to read this paper by Thomas Nagel called “What is it like to be a bat?” In it, he basically makes the point that the question is impossible: we cannot literally put ourselves into another’s shoes… or, you know, wings… try as we might to imagine what…
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When the World Ends
I’ve been neglecting this topic for a while—not because I don’t care, but because I didn’t want to add to the noise. Everyone seems to have some big opinion about AI, most of them either vaguely utopian or vaguely apocalyptic, and honestly, I wasn’t interested in either. But lately, I’ve been feeling this quiet unease…
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Games, Trains, and Automatons
If you want to understand the lame state of contemporary capitalism, you need not look any further than Toronto’s Union Station. At a first glance, the place will look sickeningly clean, but upon closer inspection you’ll see that it’s quite dirty. Buried beneath a facade of elemental dirt and dust is the tasteless alienation familiar…
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Universal Healthcare: An American Sci Fi
The movie Elysium makes a very obvious critique of class systems. The premise of the film—that the wealthy live in luxury in space while the poor suffer on Earth—isn’t subtle about this at all. Quite literally, the two opposed classes live on different worlds, made obvious by the contrast between the clean white palettes of…
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School Sucks…
… but yes, it could be worse! Believe it or not, I learned about residential schools on vacation. I was twelve years old, maxing and relaxing in Phoenix, Arizona with my family; and my mother brought us to a residential school museum in the city. I don’t remember many of the details—only that the conditions…
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