Bruce’s One Big Day

The life of every parent is shot through with an awareness that the kids will one day fly the coop. And you’ll be left rattling around in an empty nest held together with pride, melancholy and regret about how you bungled the little stuff. (All those “petty treasons we commit against the ones we love,”…

Most days pass so unremarkably that one blends into the next in the compost of memory until they’re just gone. But very occasionally comes a day you never forget. Because it’s a day you’ve been dreaming of since you were a little kid. Around 6pm on October 15, Alex Bishop — a 24-year-old U of…

Deep bow to the artists who were ahead of their time, whose talents were overlooked in their day but whom the zeitgeist is now rounding up. Like: come back, right now. We need you. Emily Carr is so overdue for a second run. I’ve come to think of her as the first real Canadian whose…

As a once-and-future free-range human, I’ve been thinking about how to shake off the commercial algorithms that have hacked into my life and are now driving it. The key, I’ve concluded, is novelty. Whether it’s true, as the ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna claimed, that “the pursuit of novelty is the only way to live…

Since we last spoke, I’ve tried angel dust. Or whatever it is that Brian Doyle sprinkled into his short essays about the natural world. I’m late to the party on this writer, who died of brain cancer in 2017 at age 60. My initiation came this past weekend. I’d stumbled on his hummingbird story while,…

The best answer I’ve heard to the question “What is one skill we should all learn in quarantine?” was this from the writer Jia Tolentino: How to make someone feel loved from a distance. But here’s a pretty close second: singing. Yes! Who wasn’t inspired by all the Italians belting it out from their apartment…

“I thought I was a hoarder. Turns out I’m a prepper.” That New Yorker cartoon captures the spirit of the last three months. Everybody holed up, thinking long thoughts, mentally bracing for what might be coming — while at the same time rueing that we didn’t snap into prep mode sooner. (It’s not like we…

Edited Jan 14, 2020 On August 28, 1998, Merhan Nasseri’s plane touched down at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, and the Iranian refugee strode into Terminal One. In the departure lounge he found a seat. And there he remained until July of 2006, when he took ill and had to be hospitalized. For 18 years,…

Halloween is like Ocean’s 11: You’re in you’re out, right now. “Half-in” doesn’t really fly. Like wearing sweatpants in public, making a lame last-minute costume broadcasts a depressing lack of both imagination and initiative. Why bother? On the other hand, we’ve all had the experience of going all-in on a great costume that ended up…

Lisa Simpson: “Oh, it must be Bloomsday. Every June 16, lovers of James Joyce follow the route traveled by Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses.” Bart Simpson: “What you’re saying is, we’ve run out of fun things to do.” … Even if the Irish family vacation planned by that other Homer, the dim one, failed…