Beautiful Books, Basic Income, and Black Therapists
Plus a Billy-Ray Belcourt reading list
Illustration by Chelsea Charles
Books are beautiful objects, and a lot of design choices go into making them both readable and eye catching. LitHub took a deep dive into their interiors, a perfect pairing for KC Hoard’s interview with cover designers Ingrid Paulson, Jazmin Welch, and Emma Dolan. Here’s Paulson on her process:
The other thing, once you get beyond the creative brief, is to analyze the manuscript itself. I call it Lit 101. A lot of authors have a palette that they’re working through; some are conscious of it, and others aren’t. If the book is set around the ocean in the 1950s, you can immediately see what the palette would be. If it’s set in Miami as opposed to Connecticut as opposed to Halifax, you get an idea of what the colour palette would be. Once you start to get the colour palette, you try to figure out who’s the main protagonist, who’s the antagonist, what’s the crisis in the story. [Read more]
Nearly a third of Canadians eighteen and up are suffering from heightened levels of stress, depression, and anxiety, according to a new survey. If you’re dealing with the mental health toll of racism, then you face an additional hurdle: finding a professional who actually understands. Alicia Lue explored this in “All Booked Up: The Frustrations of Finding a Black Therapist”:
“Every other Black therapist I know is fully booked due to an overwhelming surge of client requests and not enough Black professionals in the field to assist them,” says David Archer, a Montreal-based psychotherapist. There is evidence of a direct correlation between patient outcomes and the race of the administering practitioner. Research published in the Asia Pacific Education Review found that clients “tend to trust their counselors who share similar background experiences,” and because of this, they are more likely to actively participate in counselling, leading to better results. [Read more]
The Ontario government is facing a massive class-action lawsuit after cancelling a provincial basic income pilot early. Stephen Marche explored the topic, and why Canada could be ripe for adopting universal basic income, in “Top Dollar”:
Universal basic income is an untried solution to a pressing problem, which is that government services no longer respond adequately to the economic order we inhabit. In 2013, the largest study of automation ever undertaken estimated that “47 percent of total US employment is at risk,” mostly because of artificial intelligence. The antique morality that connects government assistance to the pursuit of employment is increasingly out of touch with basic economic reality. Social security is set up to protect mainly older people, who are by far the richest group in Canada and everywhere else for that matter. The current system increasingly appears not just inefficient but silly. [Read more]
Billy-Ray Belcourt has a new book of short stories called Coexistence, and The Tyee interviewed the award-winning poet and author in a piece titled “Why Everyone Should Read Billy-Ray Belcourt.” We absolutely agree. Here’s a roundup of his poetry, a piece he penned for the magazine, as well as a close reading of his work by Jonah Brunet: