By the Dawn’s Early Light

I want to go to America. So do you. I know we live in a beautiful land. But like everyone else on earth, crossing a border makes our destination more exotic and exciting. I also want Americans to come here. They’re so much fun to admire, decry…

Streaming or Screaming?

The pandemic not only sent us all home, it threw us onto our screens. Here we dutifully started watching videos – not just by streaming movies and TV series, but by watching vastly more videos than we ever did before. Now that we can be outside…

Queen Victoria is not amused

It’s her weekend and are we planting our gardens without fear they’ll freeze overnight? Are we opening our cottages, swatting the blackflies, gassing up at Tim Horton’s?  Well, we are more than last year when we were all locked up…

Saturday soul-searching –and soul-selling.

Odds are, you’ve had at least one shot, and if you’re American or British, both. But if you’re like me, you’re still suffering from vaccine-envy. Why can they barbeque, worship and travel and we can’t? And do we have to lose two…

Time to stretch the parts of you that other days don’t.

Scientific research has two roads: curiosity-driven and problem-solving. In the first, you get to ask: “Gee, what would happen if?” In the second, you’re asking: “How can we invent a COVID vaccine?” What’s amazing is how…

Big ideas in small packages

Welcome to this weekend’s edition of Ramsay Writes, designed to divert our gaze from the dull and the usual, and remind us how odd and lovely life can be. 1. Tax the rich! Where you don’t expect to hear that from is the rich. But…

Playtime for Grownups

My enormous inner child needs constant feeding and watering. Yours should too. Not with other kids. Just the two of you because only you know what nourishes the kid in you because...well, you were that kid a very long time ago. You may…

This blog post is for your fox, not your hedgehog.

People are either foxes, who know many things, or hedgehogs, who know one big thing. That 2,700 year-old idea comes from the Greek poet Archilochus. He’s wrong. People are foxes and hedgehogs, especially on the weekend when our foxes emerge…

“EXPERIENCE IS A GOOD SCHOOL. BUT THE FEES ARE HIGH”

Want to listen to today's blog post? Hear it here. Heinrich Heine said that when fees to attend Harvard in the mid-1800s were $250 and not the $48,000 they are today. He didn’t mean that kind of school, of course, though in America…

Weekend Reading Doesn’t Mean Weakened Reading

Want to listen to today's blog post? Hear it here. Today’s blog is to brain food what eggs benedict is to weekends: great-tasting, highly socializing and not great for your arteries. But hey, try these tidbits and see how they fill…