confluence, episode 29: fall is here

Ginter’s Park

Fall gets a bad rap, imho. Where I live, spring is often marked by rain, mud and the inability to do much in the outdoors so I’ve never related to the poetry associated with it. Winter and summer I like when the weather is good, but they are seasons weighed down by expectations: will it be sunny today? Will it snow? Plus the pressure to have the time of your life.

Fall has no expectations except to be dreary. A warm day in fall is a bonus, a cool, crisp one is a welcome relief. And this year it’s come with the bonus of finally being able to breathe after an August of smoke, and by the way welcome to all my new subscribers who are here after coming across my post about the depression of living under a cloud of smoke for weeks on end. I don’t always write about the weather.

What else do I write about? Well, since that post I’ve also put together a long one working out my thoughts on whether journalists using social media is good or if it reveals biases that shouldn’t be seen and another on the landscape of the municipal elections in Prince George. And now I’m writing a new newsletter which will also include links to other things I am doing and thinking about.

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House of the Future: Inside B.C.’s first Indigenous-centred public school:

About 12 years, I wrote a university paper on the political decisions behind the formation of B.C.’s first Indigenous-centred public school in Prince George. This week I got to write about it again— now open for eight years, with lessons based in the reality of setting up in a challenged, inner-city neighbourhood. Though I’m happy with the written version, it was originally designed as a short audio documentary so if you are able to I recommend listening to it.

Also from me: I hosted the morning radio show for the last week-and-half and had some interesting conversations. My favourites: the hidden history of Smithers’ ‘Indiantown’ and what it says about racism and reconciliation; Elliott, the ferry-riding deer; Potatoes are awesome.

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Everything Bad About Facebook is Bad for the Same Reason:

There are lots of pieces grappling with the problems of Facebook, but this one by Nikhil Sonnad elevates itself by hitting on the “banal evil” underlying so many of the company’s missteps:

“To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

“There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.”

I’m still on Facebook, but increasingly only as a tool for connecting to communities as part of my job and not as any sort of personal outlet save what remains the best Rolodex system in existence.

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Toronto built a better green bin and — oops — maybe a smarter raccoon:

This piece by Amy Dempsey is an absolute delight from start to finish. Put in on your Kindle or iPad, print it out, set aside time to just revel in it.

“Long before she tested the bins, MacDonald believed that with every effort we make to thwart the raccoons, we may be helping to make them smarter, creating an uber-raccoon.

“Does that mean, I asked, that they could learn how to breach the bins?
Packing up her scale for the day, MacDonald shook her head no. She watched hordes of them try and fail. Their hands, which lack opposable thumbs, cannot turn the handle. “It’s physically impossible for them,” she said.

“‘They won’t learn how to get in.'”

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Robert Munsch’s countless acts of kindness to schools:

Another delight, from Marsha Lederman. I listened to Robert Munsch tapes as a kid, and I love that he’s still connecting with new generations in such personal ways.

A thing that also stood out for me in reading this: the school Lederman profiles is one where over fifty percent of the children are defined as English Language Learning, meaning immigrants or children of immigrants for the most part. In a time when certain people are so concerned about “common values” and “integration” this makes a strong case for public education, literacy and kindness without coming out and saying so.

Connected to that, Sadiya Ansari profiles the Canadian cities “where minorities are the majority” and “everybody fits in.”

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I’ve had this, by Elamin Abdelmahmoud, bookmarked to read for a while. “I wanted you to have my last name. And I wanted it to be a burden.”

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Denise Balkisoon on why a certain subset of journalists/intellectuals are keen to debate people like Steve Bannon on stage:

“Ego: the desire to go head-to-head with infamy, the belief that their personal smarts can’t be outsmarted”

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Those who leave, and those who stay:

I could do without the digressions into who does and doesn’t vote for Trump, but I still found this write-up by Alvin Chang something that’s stuck in my head. He explores various bits of research about small towns in America and the attitudes and circumstances surrounding the people who move on to “better things” (other cities) and those who stick around.

“What they found was that rural communities spent a lot of resources on the achievers — the kids who show promise early on, and are pushed to leave town so they can reach their full potential.

“Ken Johnson, a University of New Hampshire demographer, told me, ‘It’s a theme that runs through a lot of the historical research on rural America. Rural communities lose the cream of the crop — lose the brightest kids — who go away and don’t come back.'”

There’s also a section on viewing those who leave as long-term investments, so long as they come back:

“The researchers learned that these return migrants come back to fill professional jobs that are hard to fill. They come back with life experiences to spur economic growth. And they come back because they care about the people at home.

“‘Those social bonds played a differentiating role,’ Cromartie said.

“The researchers found that almost all the returnees still had family in town, and when they came back, they felt the need to give back to their community with the skills and experiences they accrued elsewhere.”

As the trends towards big cities accumulate, this is going to be an increasingly important conversation.

Here in Canada, this Robbie_Jeffrey piece weaving together the change in rural Prairie towns, farm culture and Canada’s opioid crisis is a beautiful, challenging, necessary read along the same lines. And in Maclean’s, Aaron Hutchins asks “What’s Killing Rural Canada?” writing “The cancellation of milk-running Greyhounds—archaic as they might have been—seemed an emphatic event that cut small-town Canada loose from a country hurtling toward an urban, cosmopolitan future.” All food for thought

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Simon Worral on the usefulness of beavers:

“Beaver ponds filter out pollution, store water for use by farms and ranches, slow down floods, and act as firebreaks. One study… found that restoring beavers to a single river basin produced tens of millions of dollars in economic benefits each year”

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Kanye West and Why the Myth of ‘Genius’ Must Die:

“Killing genius doesn’t rid the world of beautiful ideas; it clears the air for inspiration to take its place. To inspire is, quite simply, to draw breath. It taps into abundantly available resources without draining them. Inspiration doesn’t require unwavering belief, in one’s self or in anyone else. Inspiration, like grace, simply visits us. It is communal and cannot be weaponized.

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Drake may be responsible for 5% of Toronto’s $8.8b tourism economy

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Josh O’Kane’s profile of the Arkells in the Globe and Mail is something I’ve been waiting for. The band has emerged as one of my favourites– possibly the best rock group going right now– and I loved reading about the decision-making and ambition behind their last couple of years of output.

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In Conversation with Billy Joel | Bill Joel, 33-Hit Wonder

Not sure how I wound up down a Billy Joel rabbit hole, but both of these profiles are engaging and entertaining even if you don’t like the music. Maybe even moreso if you don’t, actually– I’m agnostic on the topic. Something about a person who is so critically-unacclaimed having so much success and being so clearly uninterested in simply catering to commercialism at the same time is just fascinating.

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What happens to the discussion about race in those communities where viral videos depicting racism are filmed?

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As Germans Seek News, YouTube Delivers Far-Right Tirades. Canada has an election coming up. We’re going to have to understand this stuff. Related thread.

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As Oxford sinkhole grows, it’s like ‘watching a disaster happen in slow motion’. Prince George has a sinkhole right now that’s blocking four lanes of traffic, but this one in Nova Scotia is eating an entire park.

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Social media isn’t a social safety net. The downside of those GoFundMe campaigns.

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Canada’s racist geography and what to do about it by Bashir Mohamed.

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“It’s scandalous that you can drink coffee with reckless abandon, then find there are no facilities. The rules should be that if you can eat in, you can wee in, too.”

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The Water Crises Aren’t Coming — They’re Here

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On treating podcasts as individual episodes, rather than parts of whole that must be consumed in their entirety.

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What happens in a world without middle children?

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If you’ve made it all the way down here, you should watch both Paddington and Paddington 2, as well as Kim’s Convenience now streaming on Netflix. On the listening front I recommended The Dock of the Bay Sessions, a post-humous collection of recordings made by Otis Redding just before his early death– put together as an album and one I’ve had on repeat.

Here’s some fun to round things out:

Thanks for reading!