Illustration by Rachel Joan Wallis
The Doomsday Clock, which is set every January by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, hasn’t ticked any closer to midnight, a.k.a. humanity’s annihilation via nuclear Armageddon. Yay. Our Q&A with Rachel Bronson, an American political scientist, explained the factors at the heart of this particular form of time keeping:
In 1945, the only technology that had potential to change life on earth as we knew it was nuclear. … Over the years, other issues have become more relevant. Climate change isn’t something that we were formally focused on prior to 2007. We’re also keeping our eyes on emerging technologies and asking whether we’re managing them in ways that are advancing, instead of threatening, life. [Read more]
The CBC reports that the cost of keeping MPs safe has spiked since the pandemic and the Ottawa convoy and with escalating threats against politicians. In a piece co-published with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Stephen Maher looked into social media extremism and IRL threats and asked, “Why Is Politics Getting Nastier?”
For Fenwick McKelvey, an associate professor in communications studies at Concordia University, social media isn’t the cause but a conduit: platforms are simply channelling the mainstreaming of polarizing rhetoric. “The idea that certain shifts in the news feed might have had an impact on politics is believable, but I would want to emphasize that this is also during a very tumultuous time,” says McKelvey, who is also a member of this magazine’s educational review committee. “This is post–election of Donald Trump. This is the rise of a real insurgent, reactionary right. This is going through decades of democratic decline and slippage. So, as much as we want to say, ‘The algorithms caused it,’ the best I think we can get to is, ‘Algorithms contribute to it.’” [Read more]
Ring, the Amazon company known for porch and doorbell cameras, will stop allowing police departments to ask for footage from users, a win for privacy advocates who sounded the alarm on “casual and warrantless” requests. What’s the future of privacy amid data obsession and easy surveillance? Molly Sauter explored the question:
People have been attached to what Samuel D. Warren and former US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis called in the 1890s “the right to be let alone,” and some may think it’s something worth paying for. Others may decide to pay because they recognize that corporate surveillance can quickly turn into government surveillance if companies are presented with a warrant or records are subpoenaed, and data stored across national borders can subject the citizens of one country to the prying eyes of another. However, not everyone would be able to afford this. [Read more]
The news cycle has been … a lot lately. And then there’s the cold weather. It feels like the perfect time to bring back Dan Rubinstein’s advice from his 2021 article “Having a Miserable Winter? Go for a Walk.”
The positivity we feel during or after a walk, no matter the weather, isn’t happenstance. Rather, it’s the result of how our brains respond to natural environments, including tiny pockets of urban green space, and how we process information accumulated at a pedestrian four to six kilometres per hour. When I was in that ravine, the sunlight filtering through the barren trees, the rocks whirring across the ice and the crows flying overhead held my focus in an effortless way. This “soft fascination,” a term coined by American environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, bestows a sense of serenity, and at the same time, it frees your mind to reflect on your surroundings and explore other thoughts. [Read more]