The Hives and the Hive-Nots

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Growing up in Alberta during the 1980s, there were two things I could count on: there would be snow on the ground by Halloween and my school lunchbox would contain a peanut butter sandwich. Today, due to climate change, Albertans can’t even count on a white Christmas. As for peanut butter sandwiches, they are unlikely […]

Dark Side of the Brain

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Around the time that Lionel Messi was slotting home his first goal in the 2022 World Cup final, my mother was taking her last breath. The news reached me at half-time. The previous day, my brother and I had been at her bedside. Death was overdue, but there was an inexplicable delay in delivering the end-of-life meds and it was distressing to witness the woman who had brought us into the world making her way out of it in a state of

A Prick in Time

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

I was left wondering after a moment of peak Simon Schama – where we are led from his ‘idle’ purchase in Paris of a slim old book on Marcel Proust’s father, Adrien, to his own bookshelves by the Hudson River – whether great historians must have something close to a Proustian affinity for a particular period of history, one they understand not simply as a result of study but which they inhabit emotionally, with a quality not far separated from a kind of memory. The reason why the

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