by Mike O’Brien I’ve spent the last month-and-some at my favourite pastoral retreat, a family cottage in eastern Ontario. Sitting among the trees and moss and overlooking a lake, it has many of the elements that might make for the ideal antidote to urban nuisances. Except that, with the increasing suburbanisation and peri-urbanisation of previously…

by Mike O’Brien Montreal is quite safe from natural disasters, relatively speaking. We should be regularly tossed by earthquakes, given our tectonic environs, but in my two-score-and-change lifetime the rumblings have been so minor as to be mistaken for a passing truck. When everyone on the island feels a passing truck at the same moment,…

by Mike O’Brien I have followed the work of York University’s Kristin Andrews for a few years. I even had the good fortune of meeting her in person twice in Montreal, once where she was attending a conference on animal cognition at UQAM, and again when she presented some of her research to philosophy students…

by Mike O’Brien Living next to the United States, Canadians can develop a warped sense of normality. It is similar to living with an alcoholic; sure, you may drink a bit much from time to time, but compared to their whirlwind of self-intoxication, is it really so bad? Of course, your liver function isn’t graded…

by Mike O’Brien At the dawn of this new year, I might have chosen to wax hopeful about promising social and technological developments boding well for the future. Or I might have taken a light-hearted detour from my usual concerns, and written about something artistic, literary or otherwise creatively engaging. But no, there will be…

by Mike O’Brien China has been on my mind lately. It has also been on the mind of my federal government and political press. Recent revelations that China interfered with our elections in 2019, and possibly in 2021, have caused a bit of a kerfuffle, tinged by panic, indignation, and the kind of reflexive Trudeau-blaming…

by Mike O’Brien Another summer media detox successfully completed. I managed to spend the better part of five weeks in self-imposed (or self-gifted, depending on how you feel about connectivity) digital fasting, consuming only as much news as CBC Radio One deemed fit to announce at the top of the hour. It was glorious, and…

by Mike O’Brien Well, it’s been two months since my last column, and I assume that most of my readers are still alive, so it’s time for a second consideration of the “war analogy” regarding our treatment of non-human animals. I mentioned in May that Tom Regan, celebrated animal rights philosopher and activist, expressed some…

by Mike O’Brien “Would that I did not have to speak!” —Confucius, Analects 17:19 Some writers are cursed with the belief that they have something uniquely important to share with the world, and that they must toil in order to make this special gift known to the world. I am free of such a terrible…

by Mike O’Brien “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” —Ecclesiastes 1:9 “Bullshit.” —Mike O’Brien 04-04-2022 It is a strange enough thing to collect knives. It is a step stranger still to collect sharpening stones; a further abstraction from…

by Mike O’Brien This was supposed to be a fun and light-hearted post, filled with reflections on nature and shared spaces that had occurred to me while blissfully snowshoeing in an idyllic Canadian winter. Then a convoy of Brownshirts invaded my country’s capital and entrenched themselves in a lawless occupation, demanding the dissolution of our…

by Mike O’Brien Potentiality and actuality, the difference between what is possible and what is… tout court. I think a lot about design and about the iterative steps between the first dim glimpses of a realized form, and its final perfection. The process itself is something sublime, impressive and compelling apart from its products. I’ve witnessed…

by Mike O’Brien I’ve been reading some articles about dehumanization lately, mostly by the popular philosopher (I doubt he would object to that characterization), David Livingstone Smith. I had already spent some time in that domain, given the preponderance of politics in my early post-secondary studies and the looming questions of how humanity’s greatest intramural…

by Mike O’Brien I remember attending my fair share of concerts as a youth in the 90’s, beginning with the Barenaked Ladies and moving through the slew of grunge/alt-rock groups that crested through those years. Sometimes it would be a day-long festival featuring a selection of the hit bands du jour, like a live performance…

by Mike O’Brien Some readers, having a particular taste in humour, will guess the subject of this piece from the title. “Just an old lump of coal” was a favoured expression of self-reference for the recently deceased comedian Norm Macdonald, who died on September 14th. It was typical of the archaic and self-deprecatory style that…

by Mike O’Brien Last month I took a trip that had a profound impact on me. Departing from a small staircase, my short flight had stopovers on the edge of a sofa and a magazine rack, before finally reaching my final destination on the floor. Being the overly intellectual sort that I am, I proceeded…

by Mike O’Brien I’m self-conscious about the style of my writing. Not that I fear my style is flat or derivative otherwise wanting; quite the opposite, in fact. This isn’t too presumptuous, because I have been told many times, by people whose tastes I esteem highly, that my writing is admirably well composed. Given that…

by Mike O’Brien A very bad man once said that essence of politics is constituted by the distinction between friends and enemies, with enemies being the more important of the two. A very silly man later turned that around and articulated a politics of friendship. But let’s not indulge silliness. The sense of enmity imagined…

by Mike O’Brien I recently booked an appointment to be vaccinated. The provincial government here in Québec has opened up vaccine eligibility to people under 45 in 5-year tranches. 40-to-44-year-olds were able to log in to the health ministry’s web portal and book an appointment in a few minutes. A few days later, 35-to-39-year-olds were…

by Mike O’Brien Thirteen months of living under the spectre of plague has me looking for some means of escape. Mental escape, of course. Physically, I’m still stuck at home, abiding by various lockdown measures, awaiting with weary disdain my province’s next randomized adjustments to its infection-control scheme. Trapped below decks on a ship piloted…