See also

Hello!

It was a good week. Changes afoot, on which more another time—for now, reading and rest.

As an opening note, I really appreciated Sara Hendren’s framing of “critique and repair”, as two modes or posts from which we might engage the world and seek change (via a post by Hendren on “solutions journalism”):

Critique is alive and well (thank goodness!). What are its modes of action? Critique unmasks hidden or suppressed realities. It reveals ugly truths. It subverts or even negates mainstream or inherited or lazy narratives.

…

Repair language suggests new futures. It invites possibility. Perhaps it translates ideas from the past that might be reinvigorated or more accessibly understood, or perhaps it enchants by asking: what if? What if this new different thing could come to life?

…

But understanding each mode as a post—as a vantage with a view of the horizon that is necessarily partial, with particular assets and with unavoidable drawbacks—is one way to sidestep the often corrosive debates about “civility” that tend to explode in urgent times. Instead of policing the tone of others, wanting either less or more anger, less or more imagination and kindness, we might instead ask: What is my post?

With that—on to the links!

• Various American online tax filing services have been sending filer information to Facebook. Tracking pixels are a nefarious practice of the modern surveillance web—their risks on clear display here.
  • See also: An observation that Google Maps is now served from the main Google domain, not a subdomain—meaning you may now be sharing your location with Google any time you use its sites. (via John Gruber)
• Alex Usher offers some very tangible improvements Canada (or organizations within) could make to the collection and dissemination of data about the higher education system.
  • See also: A tangible example of Canada’s “data deficit” in healthcare, our inability to track family doctors or their workloads. Here, too, little apparent traction.
• Kady O’Malley, watching the Public Order Emergency Commission proceedings, offers some lessons-learned for parliamentary committees—including longer question sessions and timelier document release. (By the way, the explorer I shared last week has been updated to include the five days of expert roundtables that wrapped this week.)
  • See also: Speaking of parliamentary proceedings, there’s an interesting procedural angle to the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act (which has been thoroughly dissected elsewhere): it’s this legislature’s first bill, usually reserved for a “pro forma” bill asserting the legislature’s supremacy over the executive (though Alberta, perhaps fittingly, did not do so even before this bill).

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas