Tag: relationships
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To Give or Not to Give – The Pros and Cons of Birthday Gifts
My kids have been invited to a lot of birthday parties over the years. One thing I’ve noticed (or to be more accurate, my wife has noticed…I only noticed her noticing it!) is that more and more kids are having parties where gifts are politely declined. “No gifts” has been scrawled on more than one…
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Remembering A Cosmic Christmas
My late father Ken was a great writer who spent much of his career working in educational TV. He started writing for Nelvana back in 1975, when the global animation giant was just a gleam in the eye of its founders. He wrote or contributed to many series for them over the years, and many…
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Improvising Poetry and Our Digital Future
A couple days ago I posted a recording called Where The Bears Go by my duo The John Waynes (so named because it consists of John Sobol (me) and Wayne Kelso). Today I posted a second recording by The John Waynes called The Evil I. For those keeping score, Where The Bears Go is a…
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Jazz: An Unfinished Conversation (Race and Language in the Digital Age)
Jazz was – among other things – a century-long political conversation between Black Americans and White Americans. It was a musical, intellectual and spiritual conversation within a highly politicized social context whose axes were language, race and power. Jazz was also a conversation about technology, and about techno-cultures. To be specific, in jazz the conflict…
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Phone Hackers vs Facebook – the Future of Privacy Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about the Future of Privacy in light of the ongoing Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking by journalists in England. But in another courtoom on the other side of the Atlantic yesterday, Facebook was being held accountable for its massive invasions of privacy. Specifically, the American Federal Trade Commission concluded that Facebook deceived…
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Phone Hacking and the Future of Privacy
I have been keeping tabs on the Leveson Inquiry in the UK, which continues to deliver the most astonishing insights into contemporary media culture and its effect on the lives of British citizens. Today’s testimony was perhaps the most remarkable yet, although its hard to measure degrees of amazement when almost every witness offers mind-boggling…
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When Bad Things Happen to Good Bassists
Anyone who has gotten out to hear good music in Montreal over the last half-dozen years or so has likely spent a fair amount of time in Casa del Popolo and Sala Rossa, the two cozy and creative music venues founded by Godspeed You Black Emperor bassist Mauro Pezzente. Mauro also programs the amazing and…
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Phone Hacking and Digital Culture
If you’ve spent any time watching the live feed provided by The Guardian you will surely agree that the Leveson Inquiry into British Press ethics, practices and culture is the most riveting public inquiry since Watergate. I mean, you’ve got the most famous, the most beautiful, the most tragic, the most scarred and the most…
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Put an End to Terminal Thinking
Until we understand that stories are beginnings and not ends we will be ruled by Terminal Thinking. (When a story is seen as an end and not a beginning, that is Terminal Thinking.) Until media is made to be transmitted through the many to many, and to be changed in transmission from each to each,…
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Free Bradley Manning!
Just a reminder that this courageous boy has been held in solitary confinement for over 8 months without charge by Obama’s government and against the Geneva Convention, without the right to meet with a lawyer in private, and without clothes for much of that time. Why? For showing the world what democracy looks like. Free…
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