I had occasion to read the October 4th, 1968 issue of TIME magazine (Canada edition!) cover to cover last night.* There is something magical about reading periodicals from another era, where what we experience as history is rendered as quotidian life, and you get a glimpse of how your own moment, as it is rendered …
Continue reading “UNIVAC is saving a lot of people a lot of time”
In an earlier post, I discussed the evacuation of meaning from the term “interdisciplinarity” and some forms that I consider to be more authentic attempts to get beyond limits of traditional–and nontraditional–disciplines. One question often left unasked is why universities are now so interested in fostering certain kinds of interdisciplinarity. When I was first learning …
Annalee at io9 posted a story about a Saskatchewan university student arrested for having a chemistry lab at home. What’s most disturbing to me is that a few years earlier, Saskatchewan police evacuated a Salvation Army community centre after finding chemicals for a darkroom. One interesting and unfortunate side effect of the consumer-electronicsification and digitization …
Two Christmas posts on a blog by a lapsed Jew. Something must be wrong. Let’s pretend this one is about Boxing Day. Now that I live in Canada and American secular holidays like Thanksgiving and the 4th of July aren’t in effect for the people around me, Christmas is probably the quietest day of the …
Continue reading “A Brief Commercial Phenomenology of Christmas”
As I’ve been squirreled away at home writing a bunch of holidays have been going on: St. Jean Baptiste, which has become a nationalist holiday for Quebec, and July 1st and 4, the nationalist holidays for Canada and the U.S. Quebec City also had its 400th anniversary. A couple years back I noted the slight …
It must be the season or something. Today, our TA union staged a demonstration outside the front gates in support of their ongoing contract negotiations. McGill teaching assistants are quite underpaid compared to their counterparts at other Canadian universities and “R1” universities in the U.S. It’s a Quebec thing, since they’re better paid than TAs …
I know I’m supposed to be scandalized by the latest revelations, assuming they’re true (right now, they are unsubstantiated allegations). And yet, I can’t help feel that there’s a kind of arbitrary logic at work here. Some kinds of drugs are okay, others are not. Last I checked, nobody is going after University of Florida …
