Blood, Cash, and Lit Prizes

Plus: The spectre of a longer work week

Only one in ten transactions in Canada involves cash, the CBC reports , a shift that some experts find alarming. Lucy Uprichard dug into the problem in “What Is the Cost of a Cashless Society? ”:

It’s easy to assume everybody has a bank card or a line of credit, but according to the social justice group ACORN Canada, 15 percent of Canadians are “underbanked,” meaning they have limited interaction with traditional banks, and a further million are estimated to have no bank accounts at all (this may be a conservative figure due to spotty data collection). ... Without bank accounts, people tend to rely on cash, meaning that the popularity of cash-free policies could quickly box them out of society. [Read more ]

A Mother Jones feature recently looked into the shocking lack of research into menstrual blood. The main culprit: monthly cycles are still taboo. In her memoir, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory explored menstruation in Inuit culture and how it’s transcustomary, existing throughout time:

It continues to remind us that we are still here and attuned to the earth despite all the efforts to kill us as Indigenous people. It has not changed because of colonization and still exists despite the imposition of the Gregorian calendar. If we focused on menstruation as a physical manifestation of both individuality and collectivism, if we understood it as a marker of time, and if we saw it as a way that a large portion of our population transmits signals from the environment to the functioning of our bodies, our society would operate in a much different way. [Read more ]

Greece just became the first country in the EU to introduce a six-day workweek , in an attempt to boost productivity and employment. Perhaps Greece missed the memo that some companies and countries are headed in the opposite direction. Brad Badelt wondered, “Is a Four-Day Workweek the Secret to Saving the Planet? ”:

One of the best ways to promote well-being and to live within our means is by changing our work-life balance. [Peter Victor, a professor emeritus at York University and one of the world’s leading ecological economists], explains a shorter work week could translate to fewer resources extracted and fewer emissions caused by the production, transportation, and consumption of goods. Countries like Germany, where people work, on average, over 300 fewer hours per year than Canadians do, show that it’s possible. “There are different futures out there,” Victor says. “We just need to be open to thinking about them and talking about them.” [Read more ]

The Globe and Mail reports that a juror for the Giller Prize says it’s “in peril” given the connection of its sponsor, Scotiabank, to an Israeli weapons company. Josiah Neufeld recently unpacked some of the tensions surrounding the country’s most prestigious literary award:

The writers I spoke to for this piece, however, told me that a literary organization more afraid of losing corporate sponsors than of losing authors has failed to understand something fundamental about what it means to write. “Writers are people whose job it is to say what it means to be human,” says Omar El Akkad. The average professional writer in Canada makes $12,879 per year. Most will never be reviewed in the Globe and Mail or shortlisted for one of the country’s few literary awards. It’s precisely because writers earn so little from their art that they can’t afford to squander the cultural capital they do have. That capital—the kind created by honest, piercing, revelatory art—is a currency corporations like Scotiabank can never amass on their own. [Read more ]

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