Rattling in my brain-pan

I’m still mulling over what “Stay calm and decolonize” might look like for a fifth-generation Canadian Mennonite. Ms. Sainte-Marie, after making the utterance, is notably vague in details. And that’s as it should be — terse aphorisms that puncture widely-held preconceptions are best served by further aphorisms of a similar nature.

"I get by with a little help from my friends"

But here are some longer reads that are currently fermenting thought.

• At Aeon, Canadian veterinary epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews meditates on wisdom and pandemics. “A person might achieve wisdom after decades; a community after centuries; a culture after millennia. Modern human beings as a species? We’re getting there, and pandemics can help.”
• So many books! I tuned out at the halfway mark. But John Gray has me curious with his recommendation of Aztec Philosophy, by James Maffie.
• “‘Socioeconomic progress is directly to blame for a wider basis for sexual repression.’ Where markets tremble, sexuality is policed, and wherever there are police, the ‘deviants’ of a society become more visible... ‘Thus the massive American economic boom of consumer society following the second World War extended middle-class sexual norms to ever more Americans and led to the most extensive policing of homosexuality in any period of history.’” At The New Republic Josephine Livingstone reviews Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy and Capital in the Rise of the World System.
• Huh — looks like Matthew Yglesias has left Vox to hang his shingle at Substack. The first wave of “Stackers” were positively giddy with the new medium. I have misgivings. Also, I have a budget — I can’t afford to bankroll more than three or four of these jokers. And frankly, five Yankee sawbucks doesn’t buy what it used to.