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    Chapter VIII: The Pursuit of Pleasure (In hard times)   The list of things that bring me pleasure includes an overpriced Japanese daily planner in a colour I like to convince myself exists solely in Japan; laughing until no sound comes out; whenever “The Sign” by Ace of Base comes on in a Home Depot; the nostalgic smell of suede; and quoting nineteenth-century writers to make sense of current affairs. In my vast experience with fun, folks who comment on the state of the world by quoting Dickens in particular are always the life and soul of the...

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Chapter VII:The Art of Intentionalism   Yoga Guru and Montrealer, Kassandra Reinhardt, of Yoga with Kassandra, starts every class with an intention-setting exercise. That intention is meant to guide you through your practice and the rest of your day. In her book, Year of Yoga: Rituals for Every Day and Every Season (2022), she encourages readers to articulate an intention using the following set of questions: “Why am I stepping on my mat today? What motivates me to practice? What does this practice have to teach me?” (18). Most of us have encountered a version of those questions in a...

  Holy Terrain: We are All Running On the Same Ground   Whatever you were picturing when you read the words “holy terrain,” I bet it wasn’t Cedarvale Ravine. The 7.2-kilometer trail snaking through the heart of Toronto is flanked by drab apartment buildings and segmented by long stretches of ominous wetland growing in defiance of the subway that threatens the landscape from below. Folks say a brook once babbled there, but all you can hear now is a gurgling sewer. The ravine is the kind of place where you picture local kids searching for dead bodies in the summer,...

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s royal wedding dominated the news in 2018, overshadowing much more important matters like the fact that monarchies even still exist and the release of the hottest beach read ever: you all know it, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour. When the US threatened to pull out of the Paris Agreement, Latour, a world-renowned philosopher (in the sense that maybe 3 or 4 people have sort of heard of him) did what academics do best: he wrote a book absolutely nobody read. Down to Earth is a spicy page-turner about...

Remember when everyone was upset about Fyre Fest? Doesn’t that seem like a different life? You know it’s been a tough stretch when you’re nostalgic for the simpler days of fake music festivals. The past year wasn’t all bad, though: we briefly shared in a bizarre global obsession with Tiger King; a recent study finally confirmed that owning a stupidly high number of birds does lead to happiness; and we came together as a species to end this pandemic quickly…just kidding! Of course we didn’t. It’s all the more amazing, then, that while the pandemic drags on, we’re still running—running...