Books abound

Hello!

It’s been a neat week. We hosted my former roommate as she moves back to Ottawa (yay, cool people in Ottawa!)—it was nice to have someone else around, the idle conversation that comes up. And, always exciting to welcome someone to a city!

On Tuesday night, T and I enjoyed some Moo Shu ice cream and then went to hear Jane Philpott in conversation with Paul Wells on the launch of her new book, Health for All. I’ve long, long admired Philpott (anyone who resigns on principle, in solidarity with a colleague, gets extra points in my book), and this was a great conversation (to eventually be an episode of The Paul Wells Show, wherever you get your podcasts). It was a great crowd, with genuinely thoughtful questions that advanced the conversation, instead of retreading ground already spoken to. We’re lucky to have the Ottawa International Writers Festival in town—and luckier still, as a country, to have Jane Philpott.

Today, I finished reading Hild for a book club with friends (finished it just after the book club, but so it goes!!). The plot itself wasn’t that fascinating to me, but the portrait of seventh-century Britain was exquisite. Hild is a seer, someone who predicts or foretells. “Seer” conjures the idea that these predictions are grounded in myth and mysticism, interpreting omens and so on. Hild certainly weaves such a mystique about herself, but I think, maybe more accurately, it can describe someone who notices, gathering intelligence and piecing together a likely story from it. Nicola Griffith set out to fill in the blanks of some actual historical figures by deeply researching the culture and practices of the time, with particular attention to the role of women—a great read.

Briefly, some links!

• Using LLMs to process unstructured data into a structured format.
• “Suspending bureaucracy” in times of crisis—intuitively, we’d like this to be always an option, but bureaucracy is structured to self-perpetuate, making its suspension a (sometimes costly) exception to the norm.
• Digging the idea of “square foot gardening”.
• Mandy Brown, building on Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, celebrates the idea of inquiry. (Brings to mind a phrase I first heard in Ted Lasso, one I’ve been mulling since—“be curious, not judgmental”.)

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas