Angry Robot

Weekend reading.

Read a couple great articles this weekend. In the Globe, How Brampton demonstrates the new vision of Canada argues essentially that Brampton today is your town tomorrow. It’s the first part in a series of articles about the city, which is now the country’s ninth-largest city, thanks to an influx of South Asian immigrants that have made visible minorities the majority. All sorts of things happen as a result, from the South Asian interest in hockey to the surprising density and resource-sharing that come from a different model of family tackling a low-density suburban sprawl.

Something that had been marinating in my Instapaper queue finally came out and got eaten: First Do No Harm, the engrossing, tragic story of a coroner’s inquest into prescription narcotic abuse in Ontario. While telling the story of two victims of the crisis, it mentions “a prescription narcotic–related death occurred almost every day in Ontario in 2008” and that the medical establishment is dangerously wrapped up in things. In fact, I learned a new word: iatrogenic, “induced by the words or actions of the physician”.