Posts

The Plague-Ground – I Scream. You Scream.

You’d think political conventions were created in order to analyse what those conventions mean. Of the eight opinion pieces on the home page of this morning’s New York Times, six are about Trump and the Republican Convention. As for…

The Plague-Ground – Is the cavalry coming?

The fate-of-humankind question isn’t “When will a vaccine arrive?” It’s also: “Who will take the vaccine?” Two things happened last week to help us answer both. Last Tuesday, the heads of five Big Pharma companies offered…

The Plague-Ground – Justin Not-So-True Though

I won’t write about the loucheness of Justin Trudeau, his need to feather his mother’s nest, his whac--a-mole conflicts of interest; nor the conflicts of his Minister of Finance and Chief of Staff; nor forcing his officials to be economical…

The Plague-Ground – The herd has moved.

You can scratch and claw and fight and hope and despair, and for years nothing changes. Then one day, everything changes. We are living one of those days now. Malcolm Gladwell called it The Tipping Point, “the moment of critical mass,…

The Plague-Ground – Plants Have Ears Too

This week in Barcelona, a string quartet played to a full house of plants. The 10-minute concert was put on to reinforce how important art, music and nature are as life opens again across Europe. It was a weird and brilliant idea to give…

The Plague-Ground – It’s an “and-and” thing.

Toronto is one of the last places in North America still largely closed by the pandemic. Good. Because saving our lives or saving our economy isn’t an ‘either-or’ thing, though we seem hard-wired to think that way. And lord knows,…

The Plague-Ground – What We Didn’t Know

Today is 13 weeks exactly since millions of us were told not to come back to our offices and stay home. Three months exactly. One quarter of the year exactly. A quarter of the fiscal. A season of the year. On Friday, March 13th, Jean…

The Plague-Ground – It is solved by walking

My wife Jean and I once trekked 1,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail. It took us three months with our 45 lb. packs strapped to our backs as we slogged our way up and down the peaks of North America’s oldest mountains from Georgia to West…

The Plague-Ground – Librarians are first-responders

No other public library system in the world is bigger and busier than Toronto’s. Not New York. Not London. Us. Nearly 70 per cent of Torontonians use the Toronto Public Library. During the pandemic, with every one of its 100 branches…

The Plague-Ground – Are you rich?

I’ve always wanted to write a fund-raising appeal that starts with that question. You have money. We need money. Give it to us. Please. What this lacks in subtlety it makes up in reality: rich people have more of the very thing you need…