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…

by Mike O’Brien I have joked, mostly to myself, that if I ever wrote a memoir, it would be entitled “Never Gone Nowhere, Never Done Nothing: The Mike O’Brien story”. Such a lifestyle stands in near-total contraposition to that of Belén Fernández, at least in its status quo ante March 2020. Prior to that, she…

by Mike O’Brien I heard a discussion about animal ethics recently, and the concept of “full moral standing” came up. The presumption was that we humans, certainly most of us and maybe even all of us, enjoyed this full moral standing, and the ethical quandary to be sorted was whether any other beings did as…

by Mike O’Brien They say that everyone’s a critic. Some more than others. I have a particularly critical streak, that occasionally strays into full-on curmudgeonry. I have a few excuses. First, the generally awful and worsening state of the world tends to put me into a bit of cranky mood. Second, I am lazy, and…

by Mike O’Brien I don’t always make great decisions, but swearing off political commentary two months ago was a really, really good one. Ahem. As I stated two columns ago, I’ve been wanting to write more about ecological ethics, and more specifically about ethical obligations across species. Last month I laid out my criticisms of…

by Mike O’Brien There’s a concept in education, particularly science education, called “lies-to-children”. It roughly means this: some matters are so complicated that they cannot be clearly understood when accurately presented. So, if you want a naive audience (“children”) to eventually understand how these complex matters actually work, you need to prepare their minds with…

by Mike O’Brien I’m disappointed in my columns so far. Not to say that they’ve been completely without value; I’ve managed to turn out some decent pieces and some kind readers have taken the time to tell me as much. But, taken together, my output exhibits a fault that I had sought to avoid from…

by Mike O’Brien This column is not about the American election. You’re welcome. Instead, I want to write about evidence, justification, and risk. This is partly a response to very recent events, and partly a regurgitation of some ideas I ruminated on years ago. First, the recent bits. I was listening to the Montreal branch…

by Mike O’Brien (Disclaimer: I have spent the last month in a cabin in the woods, and during that time the media has caught wind of TwinsTheNewTrend and spilled ink about their appeal and significance. What I have written below may therefore be redundant. But it’s still got a hep beat you can bug out…

by Mike O’Brien One of the greatest joys of my graduate studies was reading primary sources in full, rather than a mishmash of summaries and excerpts. I could have done this prior to graduate school, but I didn’t, because I was lazy. (I am still lazy.) Having to read and re-read the works of authors,…

by Mike O’Brien It’s a bountiful feast for discriminating worriers like myself. Every day brings a tantalizing re-ordering of fears and dangers; the mutation of reliable sources of doom, the emergence of new wild-card contenders. Like an improbably long-lived heroin addict, the solution is not to stop. That’s no longer an option, if it ever…