Punctuation, Panic, and Fluoride

Plus: Three cheers for old shelves

Fluoride fear mongering is going mainstream, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his growing political prominence in the US. Daniel R. Meister and Daniel P. broke down how public figures have helped spread dangerous ideas, in “How Three Big Conspiracy Theories Took Root in Canada”:

Although conspiratorial thinking thrives off the taboo-driven lure of forbidden ideas, stigmatized knowledge, and heterodox thought, its proponents also yearn for mainstream and institutional acceptance. This is why Holocaust deniers often try and challenge legitimate academics to debates. … Fringe beliefs are fringe until they’re not, and the mainstreaming process can be aided by academics and other prominent thinkers. Education is an important tool in building up bulwarks against conspiratorial thinking, but it’s not a silver bullet. [Read more]

There are likely several hundred headlines in your newsfeeds at this very moment that are inducing feelings of dread and mild to moderate heart palpitations. Astra Taylor argues that, in an era as insecure as ours, we’re still not “unsettled enough”:

When the National Intelligence Council described a future of expanding uncertainty and insecurity, the report authors knew these terms would be unsettling to most readers. But uncertainty and insecurity are not always bad. If we want to prevent the worst consequences of the economic and ecological collapse their report warns of—and avoid living in some of the more foreboding future scenarios it portends—there are many entrenched systems and ingrained habits of thinking that need to be made less certain and secure. … As the late Secwepemc leader and political strategist Arthur Manuel argues in his co-authored 2015 book Unsettling Canada, one thing that needs to be shaken up is the colonial claim to land itself. The recognition of Indigenous sovereignty would have profound implications for social justice and sustainability, for the economic insecurity of Indigenous peoples, and for ecological stability more broadly. [Read more]

Is Apple killing punctuation? With the iPhone, the company is sacrificing commas and periods “at the altar of simplified keyboard design.” Sarah Sweet dug into the great punctuation panic of 2016, with “Will Texting Kill the Period?”:

When the younger generation, the one not usually responsible for writing language-related thinkpieces, adopts a new communication technique, certain extreme reactions are common. English will soon be unrecognizable! These reasonably new humans don’t even use periods! What this argument fails to recognize is that texting is its own separate medium and that millennials are capable of understanding that different media operate according to different conventions. Twenty-year-olds who would interpret a full stop as a passive-aggressive rebuke when confronted by one on their phones would almost certainly use them in essays. Or emails. Or all the other forms of written communication that existed before text messaging. Indeed, when university researchers asked a group of undergraduates to look at texts and handwritten notes—some of which contained periods and some of which did not—the students found the period-punctuated texts “less sincere,” but made no such distinction in the case of the notes. [Read more]

Libraries are undervalued, Vox reports, and with growing cracks in the social safety net, it’s become more obvious that “libraries need librarians.” Amid increasing digitization, Andrew Stauffer argued in “Twilight of the Libraries,” they need actual, physical books too:

Libraries are also our guardians of the past—that is, of the textual humanities. Museum-labs of the printed cultural record, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their historic collections that cannot be reconstituted elsewhere. National library collections carry not only the history of a country but also the record of the collective archiving of that history. Library print collections are the ever-evolving result of decisions and chance events. It is certainly true that they reflect the inequalities of the culture of their making, but they have a historical integrity as an archive of what we gathered and what we knew. Both directly and inadvertently, for better and worse, old shelves tell stories we need to hear. [Read more]

In the latest episode of The Conversation Piece, presented by Shoppers Foundation for Women’s Health, 加拿大卡尔加里大学 professor Dr. Jenny Godley shares insights into how menopause, sexism, and ageism intersect in the workplace.

Check out our new podcast, What Happened Next, hosted by Nathan Whitlock . This week’s conversation is with Ali Bryan , author of six novels.

Read a poem by Rhea Tregebov: “Definition”

Read a short story by Ian Williams: “Bro”

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