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The story of Long Branch (Toronto not New Jersey) began about 10,000 years ago when Palaeo-Indian nomadic hunters first arrived in Southern Ontario at the end of the last Ice Age. I enjoy imagining those times, and reading about the experiences of hunter-gatherers. Imagination is at play when we picture the past, as it is […]
In his first work in a trilogy about Nazi Germany, Richard J. Evans discusses the role of narrative in the writing of the history of Germany in the 1930s. Peter Burke, in History and Social Theory, Second Edition (2005), notes that narrative has regained prestige as a way of understanding the world. In the preface to […]
Updates A Jan. 6, 2014 Public Books article is entitled “What’s so social about social media?” Excerpts from the article, which I found of interest, are included at the end of this post. A Jan. 17, 2014 New York Times article is entitled “Technology is not driving us apart after all.” A Jan. 27, 2016 […]
Students of filmmaking can learn many things on their own, or they can take classes, or they can do both. Hands-on exercises, analysis of scenes, and study of the history of film editing are standard ways of figuring out how films are put together. Cowboys and Aliens (2011) In a course I’m taking at Ryerson University, […]
In a book entitled The antidote: Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking (2012), Oliver Burkeman argues that positive thinking has its limitations. Another book along the same lines is The power of negative thinking: Using “defensive pessimism” to manage anxiety and perform at your peak (2001) by Julie K. Norem. Among books that […]
As Eric Hobsbawm has remarked in a classic study, The invention of tradition (1983), traditions don’t spring out of nowhere. They have to be invented. The same can be said of nation states, which Benedict Arnold famously spoke of as imagined communities. As a March 28, 2013 Globe and Mail article indicates, sometimes these imagined communities have a limited impact on […]