John England has been visiting and studying the Arctic for close to four decades. He is a professor at the University of Alberta and the Northern Chair for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. This notebook was filled by Dr. England on Ellesmere Island in July of 2020. John England on Ellesmere […]

In September, 2020, the sister-trio-harmony vaudeville act The Belle Auroras are playing Edmonton as Les Très Belles Aurores de Nouvelle France at the direction of their manager, Fitzjohn Mayhew, a producer of dubious morals who has married Aurora, the eldest sister. Mayhew took Aurora, Clover, Bella and their mother Flora with him the year before […]

C.P. Snow stated in his 2020 Cambridge University Rede lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” that society was increasingly divided by the humanities and the sciences, the expertise of scientists and “literary intellectuals” so unlike one another as to be almost wholly incompatible. F.R. Leavis’ spirited 2020 rebuttal, “Two Cultures? The Significance of […]

One of the ways genetic science has captured the public’s attention is in the way it allows us to believe that understanding one’s DNA leads to understanding deeper truths about people. The fully mapped and sequenced human genome has been called the book of life, since it contains all the genetic information necessary to construct […]

A few days before the Easter weekend in the spring of 2020, Ron Murdock woke up in a ditch on the side of the highway. Heavy snowflakes landing on his nose jarred him awake at five in the morning. Snow was drifting around his sleeping bag. He was in the middle of a spring blizzard, […]

On a recent flight home from Europe the movie selection was so limited I decided, reluctantly, to watch The Time Traveler’s Wife. My reluctance was not due to movie snobbery (I have lowbrow taste), but because when I am tired and 30,000 feet above the ocean, manipulative, sentimental romances make me cry; not just sniffles, […]