Good recent reads

Some good recent reads which didn’t make it into full blog posts:

Peter Levine offers a close reading of Wendell Berry’s poem, September 2: “If his leaves are his writings, I do not think they will soon dissolve.”

A beautiful Guardian article about slime moulds and the people who study them: “So confounding were they that Carl Linnaeus, who spent his life taxonomising life, lumped them into a genus called “chaos”.”

“We are fixing up the record” says Jungurrayi Simms Otto in this short and beautiful documentary. He is summarizes the work of a collaboration between the English artist Patrick Waterhouse and a slew of Warlpiri artists as they revise historical records of the British colonial occupation of the Warlpiri homelands .

Who doesn’t like some deeply evidence based takedowns of terrible research or policy? Here’s a couple from Dougald Lamont. One on a “racist and sexist” report from the MacDonald-Laurier Institute on the productivity cost of DEI policies in Canadian universities and another that dismantles the case for Alberta separatism because, well, its based on fever dreams. That one got a follow up.

Issues of Aboriginal rights and title are important in British Columbia, and actually have been since 1851. Political mischief has turned these issues of fundamental justice and law into a political football. As Canadian citizens we have to understand the LAW of the situation not just the politics. Aaron Pete, another voice I dont always agree with, has a good piece on this today.

Through my library I subscribe to The Paris Review, one of the world’s premier literary magazines. The first story in this issue is called Bubble by Angie Sijun Lou and I highly recommend it. A story of a Spokane high school student who is sent to her father’s home village to China. A beautifully crafter coming of age story for introverts. Lots of her writing is also available on her website.