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The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain
By Eric Andrew-Gee. 2025
The riveting true story of the star-crossed friendship between two neuroscientists—one famous, the other forgotten—who mapped the brain, but lost…
each other.In the early 1920s, when neurosurgery was more likely to be a death sentence than a cure, two men revolutionized the study of the brain: Wilder Penfield and William Cone. Drawn together by their shared fascination with the "undiscovered country" inside our heads, the surgeons formed a partnership and within ten years established the Montreal Neurological Institute in a Gothic stone hospital on the slope of a mountain. The Neuro soon became the world’s leading centre for neurological study, attracting men and women from across the globe to a booming mid-century city.But their success came at the cost of their friendship.While Cone spent long hours at patients’ bedsides and in the blood-spattered operating room, Penfield pursued the loftier goal of discovering the seat of consciousness. The Chief, as he was known, went on to develop the Montreal procedure for treating epilepsy, which helped identify the source of speech, executive function and memory in narrow slivers of grey matter—achievements that illuminated the relationship between mind and body, made possible by Cone’s anonymous work behind the scenes. Over time, their relationship became fraught with personal and professional hurts—and suddenly ended when Cone was found dead in his office at the age of sixty-two.In this compelling dual biography, Globe and Mail journalist Eric Andrew-Gee weaves together the rich history of The Neuro with that of Penfield and Cone to reveal the untold story of one of the birthplaces of neuroscience. In doing so, he breathes new life into a familiar hero and revives the tragic, forgotten story of his partner, writing Dr. William Cone back into the historical record at last.
October 7th: Searching for the Humanitarian Middle
By Marsha Lederman. 2025
In this emotional missive from the diaspora, Globe and Mail columnist Marsha Lederman gathers her columns searching for the humanitarian…
middle of the Israel-Palestine conflict.Since 2023, the best-selling and award-winning author and journalist has been reflecting, with deep empathy, on the horrific October 7th attacks on Israeli citizens, rising anti-Semitism, and the brutal violence against civilians in Gaza in her column for the Globe and Mail.As one of the leading Canadian voices on Jewish identity, Lederman’s impassioned work in the Globe has been a lifeline for readers since October 7th, 2023. The work collected in this book captures the pain of so many: Marsha’s prose has a way of cutting through the noise and capturing the humanity behind the headlines. She makes room for the reader to be conflicted, grieving, angry and unsure, and is with them through that process as she, like all of us, grapples with a new reality.As someone who is firmly against Netanyahu and firmly in favour of Palestinian rights, believes in a two-state solution, and is a daughter of Holocaust survivors terrified by the rise in anti-Semitism, Marsha’s writing has captured the full complexity of the experience of reconciling an abhorrence of the violence against Israelis and Palestinians with the trauma and fear of rising prejudice around the world.These columns are a contemporaneous look at the year that followed Oct 7th, 2023, reminding us of the pain and confusion. This collection is a crucial archive capturing, in real time, a period of deep division with care, empathy, and grief.
Encampment: Resistance, grace, and an unhoused community
By Maggie Helwig. 2025
We think, maybe, that homelessness is some kind of stable state, like being housed except without housing. Without really considering…
it, most people do imagine that people who are homeless live in, if not one place, at least in one condition, that their days are in some way predictable. But homelessness is, more than anything else, a life of constant displacement. The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto's Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. Encampment tells the story of Helwig's life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society's callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace
Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it
By Cory Doctorow. 2025
Enshittification: it's not just you—the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it. This program is…
read by the author. We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying. Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution. When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification , he was not just finding a funner way to say "things are getting worse." He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better). The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users—and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die. Doctorow's argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror. Here, now, in Enshittification the audiobook, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone
Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community
By Maggie Helwig. 2025
"Striking, elegant." – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review"An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her…
churchyardThe housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.