My encounter with pseudo-archaeology

There was a used bookstore downtown, in a barely renovated nineteenth century warehouse. It was five floors of dense, rickety shelves, piled high with jumbled paperbacks in various states of decay. To say that they were sorted in any kind of order would have been a gross exaggeration, but there was a certain thematic geography…

The old man’s typewriter

We used to have neighbours in our old building, a very nice older couple. This was many years ago. The husband was starting to have trouble remembering things and getting around on his own. One day, he had to move to an assisted care facility. A while later, his wife also moved away, maybe to…

On the origin of doom scrolling

Biella Coleman recently asked whether the phrase “doom scrolling” existed before COVID. Certainly, doom scrolling itself has been a popular past-time since scrolling has existed, and doom page turning was around much before that. Perhaps there was even a form of doom scrolling (or more properly, unscrolling) before pages were introduced as a technology, but…