“There have been several calls for his ouster from the University of Toronto — where he’s tenured — including a recent open letter to the dean of the faculty of arts and science signed by hundreds, including many of his fellow professors. Friends refuse to comment on him lest they be associated with his image. Critics hesitate, too, for fear that his supporters will unleash their online wrath. A graduate student at another Canadian university was reprimanded for showing a short video clip of Peterson to a group of undergraduates. One of the professors taking her to task likened Peterson to Hitler.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
We All Believe In Truth, Right? (Are You Sure?)
“We argue for our positions, and get annoyed if they are challenged. Why do we do this? The obvious answer is that we believe the views we express (ie, we think they are true), and we want to get others to believe them too, becausethey are true. We want the truth to prevail. That’s how it seems. But do we really believe everything we say? Are you always trying to establish the truth when you argue, or might there be other motives at work?”
Douglas Coupland: Are Books About To Be Superseded By VR?
“Maybe books are overrated. Maybe they are an interim technology on the way to VR and we can now get rid of our books.”
The Cleveland Orchestra Is 100 Years Old. Is It America’s Best?
Skeptics say that touring orchestras are steeled and on their mettle when they visit Carnegie Hall, adding, “They don’t play that way every week at home.” The Cleveland Orchestra, as I learned during a season (1988-89) spent as its program annotator and editor, plays that way every week, no matter what or where.
Writers Love Routines. So I Followed Famous Writers’ Routines. It Wasn’t Pretty
“For one week, I would spend each day following a different writer’s routine. Now, I know that in changing it up every day I would no longer be participating in a routine, per se, but my rationalization was that this would be akin to a workout schedule, where you do different exercises each day—getting a little stronger, faster, and more flexible with each session. Even if none of these became my permanent routine, I’d still have a solid week’s worth of writing to show for it. At least, that’s what I thought.”
The Leonardo Exception
Leonardo da Vinci was not a consummate painter. He was first and foremost a scientist, inventor and experimenter, with an excess of artistic talent to help pay the rent and a trove of notebooks to document his true obsessions. What I admire and envy about him is that thirst and drive to know everything, and his inventive imagination. I’d prefer to curl up with his codices, which is how I’d probably feel most at ease with him.
Welcome To The Era Of The Crowd (And What It’s Doing To Us)
Because tech companies like Facebook and Google make money off the sale of our personal data to advertisers, they depend on the attention of the masses to survive. And because their algorithms shape much of what we see online, it’s to their benefit to coerce us into thinking of ourselves not as individuals but as members of groups. “The big tech companies,” Franklin Foer writes, “Propel us to join the crowd—they provide us with the trending topics and their algorithms suggest that we read the same articles, tweets, and posts as the rest of the world.”
How Technology Is Changing Our Basic Senses
“In a time when our environment is changing more rapidly than ever before—the inclusion of technology, potential for humans to travel to different planets, climate change—our senses are going to undergo a change to keep up with our environment’s transformation. It’s already happening, in fact.”
Some Clear Trends About Movies That Grabbed Oscars’ Zeitgeist
“The Shape of Water,” a low-budget fantasy about a mute janitor who falls in love with an imprisoned sea creature, became 2017’s most decorated film on Tuesday, receiving 13 nominations from Oscar voters, one fewer than the record for the most in Academy Awards history.
Translation Is Not Just About Trading Words
Since there is no such thing as a truly literal translation — no two languages’ grammars match, their vocabularies diverge, even punctuation has a different weight — there can be no such thing as a translation that is not “creative.” And while most of us translators think of ourselves as “faithful,” definitions of faithfulness can differ. Because languages function differently, much of translation is about achieving a similar effect by different means; not only are difference, change, and interpretation completely normal, but they are in fact an integral part of faithfulness.