Made-on-PEI Heatherdale Wholesome Goods oats are now available at Riverview Country Market in Charlottetown.

While you’re at it, pick up some Mont Carmel cheese curds.

Two thoughts on the individual vs. the group.

First, via William Denton, the words of Michelle Dougherty from a BBC interview:

Dougherty: It’s to do with confidence, and that you only build up over time. But what I’ve found, after I turned fifty—I don’t really care what anyone thinks: if I think it’s the right path, I do it anyway.

Al-Khalili: All of us over fifty feel like that.

Dougherty: It’s great, isn’t it? It’s great! I just wish I could have been like that in my twenties, but what the hell.

And in the latest Alpine Review, in an interview with Barry Lopez:

We were hunting out at the ice edge, and a storm came up; the wind that had started coming out of the north was coming out of the south. Big transverse cracks in the ice were opening up, so we had to break camp and cross forty miles of ice to get back to land really fast. We came to an open lead and it was a lot of water. We were just on snow machines, we didn’t have anything that would float along with us. The approach these guys took was, everybody stood at the ice edge, and everybody said what they knew about this situation, and then everybody did whatever they wanted. There was no consensus, there was no spokesperson that said, “Here’s what we’re going to do.” Everybody was left to behave autonomously. Which is very much a part of the way traditional societies behave. They’re able to combine community and autonomy in a way we just don’t seem to be able to manage; we end up with these grotesque expressions of personal autonomy and these phony communities. So when I told that story in the group, this woman said, that’s so interesting because we’re trained with this idea of fight or flight. She said there’s a third alternative, and that’s gather . And I thought, right. You get together, and talk it through, but don’t make any joint decisions. Everybody does what they’re going to do.

With the inauguration of President Trump, we’ve reached the apotheosis of don’t-give-a-fuck-what-you-thinkism, and I would never recommend more prayer in that church.

But I’m also well-aware of the paralysis that comes from an unrelenting belief in the primacy of communitarianism, especially when practiced without a supporting framework. Collaboration can be great. But if you don’t know how to do it, it can be dreadful and soul-destroying.

In my own (having turned 50) life, I find myself, more often than not, swimming against conventional currents. Sometimes this is because I’m an idiot, sometimes because I’m a weirdo, and sometimes because I can see a better path leading off from the status quo that others cannot.

This is one reason why I’ve never been able to fit into traditional party-politics: the notion of snapping my thoughts and ideas into a rigid ideological grid—in this we believe—seems like it would drain away the most important parts of what makes me me.

I think the notion of gathering might be a way that avoids the worst of both steel-eyed individualism and doe-eyed consensualism: there’s a way to make decisions that requires neither a dictator nor an advisory council.

We gather at the ice edge, share our ideas, and then head out with whatever ad hoc affinity groups might emerge. Or by ourselves.

Email newsletters are the cat’s pajamas these days. Recomendo, from Kevin Kelly and his Cool Tools crew, is among my favourites. “A weekly newsletter that gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff,” they describe it. And that’s what it is. Here’s a recommendation that I followed this week:

For many years I’ve used Gmail’s web interface. I’ve tried lots of standalone apps, but they always fell short and I’d return to Gmail. Then I tried Spark (Mac OS X and iOS) and I’m hooked. It’s smart, snappy, and has lightning fast search. I have not used Gmail since installing Spark.

I installed Spark immediately, and am trying it out to see whether I agree (I’m comparing it to Apple’s Mail.app, not to Gmail; I’ve never been a serious Gmail user).

While you’re subscribing to email newsletters, give Mita Williams’s University of Winds a try too; it’s also accurately described: “Three links to things in the world every Saturday.” And that’s why you get.

(I am so glad that I have neither first nor last name that ends in “s”–I’m not sure I could handle the apostrophic ambiguity of it all).

From the compelling Spoon & Tamago blog, the story of the Japanese train station built around a tree.

Dave Atkinson writes about the ramifications of an oversupply of Gorgonzola cheese to the Fredericton market. He begins:

I’m squeezing through the crowds at Fredericton’s Boyce Farmers Market. It’s a few weeks before Christmas, 2002. I finally make my way to the front of the line at the cheese shop.

From this morning’s New York Times:

Steven T. Mnuchin, who failed to disclose nearly $100 million in assets, said the disclosure forms were “complicated” and his omissions were “unintentional.”

Every year, as a U.S. citizen living abroad, I have to file disclosure forms detailing all of my foreign bank accounts. I do this in scrupulous detail, down to the $8 in my PayPal account and the $15 in my Provincial Credit Union shares account.

I file these disclosures with the Treasury Department. The same department that Mnuchin is being vetted to head.

Seeking solace in the memory of President Santos.

Every night just before bed I make up a crossword puzzle for Oliver. Sometimes, like tonight, they are topical.

Before Ethan came into our house, I was the last person on Earth who would consider posting a hilarious dog video online.

But that was then, this is now.

And so, witness this hilarious video of Ethan who, faced with a CD of traditional Venetian barcarole on the stereo, decided to join in.

This is not something that Ethan does regularly; the only time we’ve witnessed him howling at anything before is at an ambulance.

From an interview with Robert Rowland in The Alpine Review № 3 on “The Post-Idea World”:

Alpine Review: I wonder, though, what kind of education system we are going to need to prepare the next generation of people operating in an Age of Intuition, or in a world beyond ideas. Because it seems we are caught in so many frameworks. It’s interesting to envision a world beyond ideas.

Rowland: I think, in terms of education, it is actually much simpler than that. In this country, we have gone backwards in terms of education. If you think about where education was a generation ago, we have now gone back to more kids taking more exams, at a younger age, with more and more testing. It is becoming more like a Japanese system. The opportunity for kids to develop emotionally, physically and so on, that has been cut back. Time for games, for sport, for emotional exploration, talking in a more open, unfettered way about the world—all of that time in the curriculum has been cut back. In a certain sense, I think, it is just about more of that: more time for kids to play, more time for them to do sport, more time for them to talk about their feelings, more opportunity for them to have emotional tools, I suppose, to help them understand their world. Just a bit less math and science, certainly fewer tests. It is crazy, just crazy.