“I am sending you this email at a time that works for me. I don’t expect you to respond to it until normal business hours, or when it suits your own work-life balance. I encourage you to make guiltless work-life choices and support flexible working.” Starting in 2019, that paragraph appeared in the signature of […]
The Plague-Ground – You have a right to disconnect Read More »
When one thing is a disaster in your life, that’s manageable. Two things and it’s a crisis. Three – like lose your job, lose your health and lose your spouse — and you have permission to pull the covers over your head and never come out. I have a feeling the Trudeau government is headed
The Plague-Ground – Walk and Chew Gum. Read More »
Last weekend, I was reading the proofs of my memoir which comes out in June. My editor queried one word in this sentence: “Like most couples, we have our unspoken tics and habits that signal everything’s okay, or not.” She wanted to know if I would change “tics” to “idiosyncrasies.” As she wrote in the margin: “Some people, especially
The Plague-Ground – Remember When Women Were Called Women? Read More »
T.S. Eliot called April the cruellest month. But February is the coldest, though only outdoors, unless of course you’re in Texas, which is on the Mexican border, and where parts of Dallas are so cold that water bottles are freezing next to people’s bedsides. Yet on February 2nd, Wiarton Willie predicted an early spring for Ontarians and I’m
The Plague-Ground – SOME HAND-WARMERS FOR YOUR HEART AND MIND Read More »
Surely the Letter to Shareholders is one of the most torpid prose forms in any language. Written by an organization’s CEO, it precedes the annual financial statements and is written in code. “Losses” become “negative growth.” A “challenging year” means “we’ll soon be broke.” This is why only financial analysts read these Letters, and the rest of
The Plague-Ground – The rise (and shine) of a near-dead medium. Read More »
“When you’re used to having 100% of the market and someone comes along and takes 1% of your share, this can turn your world upside down.” That was how a highly-perched woman viewed the real reason Canadian women can’t seem to break the last glass ceilings of corporate power around board positions, compensation and C-Suite
The Plague-Ground – Monopolies and Men Read More »
This Sunday, you can’t have dinner in a restaurant in Toronto, but you can in New York City. Governor Andrew Cuomo decided last week to allow partial- capacity indoor dining there because Valentine’s Day is one of the biggest restaurant nights of the year. This gives new meaning to the phrase “dying for love.” Or, if you’re a
The Plague-Ground – Save the performing hearts Read More »
That doesn’t stop us from believing them, and acting on their pronouncements as if they were wrapped in a bodyguard of truth. I’m not talking about fake newshounds and grifters. I’m speaking of experts – economists, heads of think tanks, powerful people with many postnominals. And scientists, especially scientists. In fact, credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the
The Plague-Ground – Most Seers See Wrong Read More »
By a large margin, most Canadians voted against Justin Trudeau in the last election. Or at least the Liberal Party he leads. They won only 33% of the popular vote, the lowest percentage for any governing party in Canadian history. I’m not here to slag our Prime Minister’s policies; he faces the same impossible choices
The Plague-Ground – Why Justin Trudeau Drives Me Nuts Read More »
Back in 2018, Barack Obama claimed publicly that “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.” No, he did. Really. Watch it here. That was one of the very first Deep Fake Videos in the world. But in the past two years, the technology that can put any words into anyone’s mouth has advanced astoundingly.
The Plague-Ground – How baked-in bias cooks chaos Read More »
Right now Roland King is in the woods behind our cottage, clearing brush in the bitter cold, sawing it, stacking it and selling it back to us as firewood. Roland just turns up, often working in the dark, always working for cash. Few people know more about forests and trees than he does. Roland’s been
The Plague-Ground – Are you an elite, or a professional, or neither, or both? Read More »
Four years ago, Robyn Doolittle wrote a series for the Globe and Mail called Unfounded. That word is stamped on sexual assault cases closed by police for lack of evidence. After a 20-month investigation, Doolittle found that one in five reported cases were dismissed this way. Not surprisingly, a large number of them involved Indigenous
The Plague-Ground – One Way to Close the Power Gap Read More »
