PEREGRINE PULP

I was hearing about all this stuff around Trump-related court cases and some being consequential far beyond those cases. Knowing nothing...

With a couple of communication degrees, I think of it as my job to comment on media matters. But at this point the relentless barrage of infelicity — from serious reporters and journalists at all our leading news outlets — has become pretty overwhelming. To be honest, I find it tiresome, too. But it's also hard to look away. Aside from how I feel about all this, folks also like to tell me this “obsession” of mine is both pointless and overly pedantic. All I can offer in respo

As a kid I was always a big fan of triceratops. But at that time we knew only of about half the ceratopsian species we know today. There was a boom of discoveries of ceratopsids between 1870 and 1925, then very little for almost a century. But over the last two decades there have been a bunch of new finds. 1996 saw the discovery of Zuniceratops , significant for being the earliest-known ceratopsian with brow horns and, it must be noted, discovered by an eight-year-old in New

I want to love nuclear. I really do. But there’s so little to like and proponents continually refuse to win me over. Here’s just one more...

Some folks really hate Jared Diamond. And those folks love hating Jared Diamond. As any good polymath (with backgrounds in physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geography, history, and anthropology, degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, and professorships at UCLA in both medicine and geography) Diamond has written several books. His first popular work came out in 1991 and was titled, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal . He followed that in

I don’t know how I got here. Somehow I developed this crazy belief that firefighters fought fires. Crazy, right? My bad.  Per capita, Vancouver is one of the country’s busiest fire departments, and getting busier all the time. But almost none of that fire service activity involves firefighters marching into buildings, masks on and hoses over their shoulders, to beat back flames. As a matter of fact, if you eliminated calls for service that weren’t for fires or false alarms (w

You read that right. I’m all for burning books, as I'm pretty sure you are. Just because you can conjure a pithy line you heard in a film or picked up from someone on social media about democracy or free expression doesn’t make the sentiment true. Yes, there was most certainly a time when books were precious items and libraries temples celebrating and preserving the world’s culture and collective wisdom. And, yes, in that context destroying a book or a library, god forbid, co

For years we were hearing about the replication crisis in the world of psychology; how so much accepted work in the field had never been...

Thinking about journalism and public perception, I was reminded today that in 1979 Australian journalist John Pilger entered Cambodia....

I haven’t written anything about the encampments, the ones that have sprung up seemingly over night, like springtime mushrooms, on the...

No one finds it the least bit interesting when folks suddenly flip reality on its head and offer up the very arguments they just finished spending weeks and months and years loudly and aggressively shooting down? That phenomenon occupies me. This sort of behaviour is so frequent at present it could be a weekly show on CBC Radio. Speaking of which, did you catch the recent Front Burner episode on CBC about the keffiyeh? The feature  came about because the Ontario legislature

Last September the CMHC came out with a study suggesting that for Canada to reach housing affordability last seen 20 years ago “an...

If you’re the chief coroner, hold an executive position in public health, or are the independent representative for children and youth or...

On April 12th, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld sent George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice and email titled “Predicting the Future.” The...

In Canada, any person or entity responsible for moving money around has obligations to help combat money laundering and the financing of...

CBC - Federal plan would count rent toward a credit score. Wow. It's almost impossible for me to make sense of the level of detachment...

As the leadership of Hamas has explained publicly, they expected, at the very least, for Iran and her proxies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq,...

Regardless of what happens, what actions are taken or not taken, the same blood libel will be offered up. Israel will be accused of using...