What I wrote previously about my relationship with Toronto during 2010-2015, and the subsequent deepening of that relationship during the following six years while away from the city, and my eventual return last year, places the burden of agency exclusively on me. After I finished writing, a different way of looking at those years and the relationship occurred to me. A way of looking that recognizes an agency that is external to me. What if,…
Living in Toronto during the five years of my graduate studies felt incomplete. I am not referring to the incompleteness of an unfinished story or an interrupted episode, but an incompleteness that would persist with any length of time. Because of that incompleteness, which is not in length, but in width or depth, leaving Toronto did not feel like losing something that belonged to me. It did not feel like a sudden distancing of something…
Having a good conversation about a painful topic is bittersweet. Having a good conversation about loss, for instance, has sweetness mixed with the core bitterness of the topic, and I think the sweetness comes from the truth we discover and the understanding we come to share. Even loss–and our attention to loss–can become a way of connecting with others, a way of discovering and sharing insights. A few days ago, I listened to a recent…
We got together online last Thursday with colleagues at IcebergIQ for a holiday party. Natalia Stroika and Indigo Esmonde joined us, too, as MCs and game designers. Natalia and Indigo guided us out of Zoom to another platform, Gather, where we played games. After the games, we stayed in Gather platform and shared, i.e., synchronized, a meal in the spirit of holidays. Since I had dinner plans later, I had snack — yogurt, mixed with…
Recent books in popular psychology, and particularly those about our capacity for judgment and reasoning, don’t paint a flattering picture of our intellectual capacities. They argue that we deceive ourselves, that we become satisfied with a feeling of knowing rather than knowing, that we instrumentalize our capacity for reason to justify what we want (and what we want isn’t itself decided by reason), that we conform unthinkingly to established norms and group opinions. These arguments,…