Big ideas in small packages
Welcome to this weekend’s edition of Ramsay Writes, designed to divert our gaze from the dull and the usual, and remind us how odd and lovely life can be.
1. Tax the rich! Where you don’t expect to hear that from is the rich.
But Resource Movement is a group of “children of privilege” bent on reducing social inequality from the inside. When the Liberals presented their budget in Parliament this month, Resource Movement, using the hashtag #taxtherich, took Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to task for just taxing yachts and private jets. They point out that she wrote a book a decade ago called Plutocrats: The Rise of the Ultra Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. She, of all people, knows the real price of inequality.
2. The Nobel-Prize Winner taking on the Mafia. In 2014, Kailish Satyarthi won the Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against child slavery. It’s a miracle he’s alive today. He’s trying to dent the fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the world. It’s so bad that more people are enslaved today than at any other time in the world. This video tells the tragic, hopeful story.
3. Want to live to be 200? Here’s a roadmap, not from snake-oil quacks, but from the amazing infographic people at the New York Times, on what we can expect from medical science now and in the next 50 years.
4. Why can't we sing together online? Because of the 300-millisecond lag from one computer to another. But a 10-year-old technology called JackTrip makes all our lips move together and online choral music possible once again. When dozens of Ragazzi Boys Choir members plugged into JackTrip, they heard each other sing clearly for the first time in six months.
5. Harvey Weinstein sings Figaro. The Met Opera’s wonderful podcast series, Aria Code, takes the most beloved arias and unpacks them. But this latest has a distinctively #metoo bent as you’ll hear here. “It’s like a pigeon being locked in and not being allowed to fly.”
6. Germany’s best-painted trucks...are a lot more colourful and funny than ours. Why can’t we be smart like this on our highways?
7. What to do if you stumble across suspicious police activity. Or worse, you’re part of it. The deaths of George Floyd and too many others leads to the obvious question: what can you do about it?
It turns out, there’s an app for that. With hands-free voice control, Just Us notifies 5 designated contacts at the first sign of trouble. “At the command of your voice, your contacts will get a live view of the interaction directly to their phone.”
8. If you were the most beautiful bird in the world. Flip through these shots and your eyes will pop at just how canny nature is in disguising and showing off our fine feathered friends.
9. Three great reads. You don’t need to be a soccer fan, or an AI geek, or a maker of reading lists to love these articles. The first chronicles the sudden Shakespearean fall of the soccer Super League. Next, a profile on Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of Artificial Intelligence. Finally, the answer to the question: “What compels us to keep book lists in the first place? Is it simply showing off, or does it tell us something deeper about who we are?”
Dr. David Goldbloom will join us for this free RamsayTalk on mental illness, the diseases that harm 1 in 5 Canadians - and every family - every year.
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