Darts & Letters

The story of the Fountain of Youth is as old as history itself. Herodotus, the father of ancient Greek history, wrote of a mythical spring that extended the life of its bathers. Today, biotech entrepreneurs, scientists, and health influencers are still searching for that mythical spring. Longevity and anti-aging research has recently blossomed, with a number of tantalizing discoveries. Still, this...

From 1968 to 1975 one high-rise was the heart of Canada’s counterculture. Rochdale College in Toronto was jammed full with leftist organizers, hippies, draft dodgers, students, artists, and others just looking for a good time. Rochdale wasn’t really a “college”, it was something much bigger: a political, educational, communal, artistic, and psychedelic experiment. During its time, it was endlessly...

The idea of moving to Canada figures prominently in the imagination of many disaffected Americans. Most recently, it was comedian Marc Maron who said he’s on his way to Vancouver, BC. Usually, they don’t come. However, between the mid-60s and early-70s they really did–and in the 10s of thousands. Yet, when these Americans made their way, they did not always find the Canada they expected. How did t...

20 years ago at Concordia University in Montreal pro-Palestinian protestors clashed with police over whether Benjamin Netanyahu should be allowed to speak on campus. Windows were smashed, arrests were made, the talk was cancelled. The fallout from that day defined how the school year proceeded, with heated council debates, media stunts, lawsuits, explosions, and a contentious student election. Thi...

Is medical assistance in dying, or MAID letting the government off the hook from providing what they should be providing? Should we respect people's choices on harm reduction grounds, even if those choices are severely constrained by an unjust social and political context? Should we give doctors this power over the mentally ill and disabled, given the racist and ableist nature of our crumbling hea...

Many of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there's often a 'chokepoint.' Corporate behemoths -- be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others -- put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up costs. But Cor...

How can billionaires justify the endless accumulation of wealth? Effective altruism. An almost religious philosophical belief. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO and founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX is a major proponent, as is Elon Musk. Now, SBF and many in Effective Altruism have also embraced longtermism, a strand of extreme utilitarian thinking that tells us we should worry about the in...

It’s difficult to criticise science from the left. Right-wingers attack science and liberals defend it. Science for the People is a radical movement of scientists and educators who argue that science has always served capitalism, patriarchy, and empire. So, science doesn’t need to be simply defended; it needs to change. We examine the group’s Vietnam-era origins, with the story of one of its found...

Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable, of pavin...

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambition it used to. zIs technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More and more of our lives are governed by...

On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies. First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political scientists who proposed a cybernetic computer system that claimed to predict conflicts before they happened. With this information, US policy makers could usher in a new age of peace and stability (and forever ensure a US-dominated global order). The pr...

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about everywhere across the ideological spectrum. Technocracy is seductive. In fact, it's an idea as old as politics itself. This episode is the first in a three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future. First, Gordo...

You’ve seen hilarious videos of the evangelicals for Trump. You might be inclined to ignore them, mock their excesses, or dismiss their threat. But the evangelical right is a force to be reckoned with, even with Trump on his way out. So, who are these evangelicals? What do they believe? For years, evangelicals have been plotting a political course, a far-right “theology” that includes Christian na...

On May 14, 2022, a shooter opened fire in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Ten people were killed, an additional three injured. The suspect in the Buffalo shooting had a manifesto, as mass shooters often do. However, this one was different. It was littered with references to peer-reviewed scientific research that, he purports, supports his white supremacist beliefs. It’s part of a broader far r...

Can genetics play a role in crafting left social policy? Or should we not touch those ideas ever again–even with a 10 foot pole? Paige Harden’s book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” makes a forceful case for an egalitarian politics informed by DNA. However, geneticist Joseph Graves critiqued the book, arguing that we do not need sophisticated genetic knowledge to make a...

We look at the mind behind Russia’s imperial vision, Aleksandr Dugin. Political theorist Matt McManus walks us through this far-right thinker’s strange and often contradictory ideas, from: his geopolitical clash-of-civilizations narrative, his flirtation with left-wing postmodernism, his Nietzschean great man-visions, his rejection of all things liberal, and his more ancient and mystical imaginati...

The pickup truck is the symbol of rural conservative masculinity. So, it often takes centre stage in the tired culture wars between reactionary neo-populists and liberal moralists. Like today, with Canada’s right crudely embracing the truck–and tweeting furiously about those ‘Laurentian elites,‘ and ‘Toronto columnists‘ who thumb their nose at it. But, if you really want to piss off the libs: don’...

Before Remdesivir and Hydroxycloroquin there was Tamiflu. To prepare for Swine Flu and Bird Flu, governments spent billions stockpiling this drug called Tamiflu. You’d think governments used the best evidence-based advice, but the story of Tamiflu raises questions about how money shaped the process. On this episode of Cited, Darts and Letters predecessor, we open up the black box of pharmaceutical...

At Crosstown Clinic, doctors are turning addiction treatment on its head: they’re prescribing heroin-users the very drug they’re addicted to. This is the story of one clinic’s quest to remove the harms of addiction, without removing the addiction itself. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app y...

Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are doing just that. Can you figure out if you are a criminal by scanning your brain? On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest-host Jay Cockburn and our guests explore the study of the criminal mind, from the history of madness, to spotty personality te...

Dr. Charles Smith performed autopsies at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, ON. The cops kept turning to him with new corpses, and he kept claiming that these deaths were the result of foul play. He was thought of as a God in his field–few people were willing to question his work. That is until a 2008 inquiry, which found evidence of errors in 20 of the 45 autopsies they reviewed. Dr. Smit...

When it comes to complex social problems, us “sensible” types turn to the experts, but what if they don’t actually know what they’re talking about? That happens to be the case with many forensic experts. Blood spatter, ballistics, hand-writing analysis, fingerprints, etc. They aren’t Gods, they aren’t magicians, they ain’t anything like what you see on CSI. In fact, they get things terribly wrong;...

On this episode of Darts and Letters, we took a personal journey into virtual sport. Listen in as guest host (and regular lead producer) Jay Cockburn gets ready to enter the world of e-sports, with a lesson in Super Smash Bros from a top player and professional coach. Find out why he won’t make it (spoiler alert: he doesn’t have that reaction time he used to); but also, find out why he might not w...

The term “metaverse” was coined in a 1993 science fiction novel. Since then, it’s grown from a dystopian literary concept to a reality that corporations want to sell you. Strap on some VR goggles and escape your tired analog life! Except that the systemic issues we already have seem to be creeping into the metaverse, too. As the lines between virtuality and physicality continue to blur, companies...

Setting goals for the new year? Learning a language? Going for a run? Delivering food? Picking packages off a warehouse shelf for delivery? There’s a game for that. Or, at least, a gamified system designed to nudge you in a series of pre-programmed directions in the service of the state, techno-capitalist overlords, or any number of other groups and entities that chart the course of our hyper-conn...