PEREGRINE PULP

I keep being sent, and encountering in the wilds of the internet, essays from social commentator and professor of American history Heather Cox Richardson. She has a Substack with millions of subscribers, titled Letters from an American , a daily newsletter, and the requisite podcast , too. All those deliver her scholarly, history-informed take on current events to a nations-worth of inboxes and feeds. My first real encounter with the professor was some years ago when I was c

I just wanted to say something, something vaguely accurate, about the land that is now Canada. I thought I knew something and the textbooks and encyclopedias, electronic and digital, make it look so easy. Turns out the encyclopedias and textbooks have entirely different aims. I don’t know what those are but if I had to guess I would say their guiding mission includes brevity, avoiding any interesting details, and manufacturing a weird set of narratives. Though I passed throug

SPIN Four men, two probably in their 40s and two probably in their 50s or 60s, and a child of about seven or eight are sitting at a table...

One famous finding from social psychology is that intergroup contact is the most highly effective tool for reducing prejudice. The more...

Two people are having a conversation over the phone. One is in a typical Singapore apartment complex. Lush green trees are all around....

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...

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

Those conformists (sometimes known as “academics”) who provide all the cultural, intellectual, and linguistic justifications for murder —...

“Not every German who bought a copy of Mein Kampf  necessarily read it … But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.”

During the Red Scare and adjacent insanity , that terrible decade of right-wing propaganda, paranoia, and political persecution born of...

I always like to recount Suzuki's story about smog. How when shooting an episode of The Nature of Things he and his crew went and sat at...

The hawi derived all their power and influence from inherited privileges. Those privileges largely took the form of ownership of key...

Letter to Blair

There's a Vancouver MD named Tyler Black who I've been following for some time. He's an emergency psychiatrist who studies suicide in...

The job would be monitoring a threatened polar bear population. Most of us new recruits were well-educated and comfortable out of doors...

Twenty-nine months into this pandemic I'm still running into folks who think that being immunized means they're immune to infection and...

It’s always a mistake to read the news. Reading local news tends to be worse still. I know this and yet I do it anyway. Here’s just one...

Perhaps the most important lessons I learned in university were not part of any curriculum or found in an assigned reading. They also...