In UNICEF’s guidelines for innovation, #8 is a particular favourite of mine: “do no harm.” It harkens back to Google’s old motto to “don’t be evil”, but Google has since changed their slogan since, and it feels like the rest of the tech world has as well. UNICEF’s version even...

I had a great deal of trouble with this week’s assignment, to the point that the thing isn’t finished. If I can manage the energy, I might finish it later, but for now I think I’ve tried hard enough. This is what I wanted to mill. It’s an abstract representation...

There’s no mincing words about it: I hated this week’s readings for Fairy Tales for the 21st Century. I didn’t like Bettelheim very much last week, but my hatred clicked together this week: The Uses of Enchantment revealed itself to be Freudian nonsense, following the worst impulses of the psychiatric...

We had to develop our characters this week, and I didn’t feel like building 3D models felt right for my reinterpretation. Instead, I built these fake LinkedIn profiles: one for Cassandra, one for Apollo, and one for the boss who doesn’t listen to her.

On the first day of Subtraction class, I was asked if I was afraid of using power tools. I was taken a bit aback; it hadn’t occured to me that I’d be afraid, and I would describe my feelings more like a deep-seated anxiety than fear. I wasn’t afraid I’d...

Why are fairy tales popular? In the selected readings for Fairy Tales for the 21st Century this week, Bettelheim and Zipes take three different approaches to answer this question. Bettelheim answers the question from a psychological perspective, and Zipes looks at the history of their dissemination as well as why...

Once upon a time, there was a woman named Cassandra. She worked for a multinational oil company– you know their name but for legal purposes, it cannot be included in this story– and reached a fairly high position in the company. She had worked very hard to get this job,...

There are a great number of versions of Cinderella. Some are retellings of the story for a modern audience; some are similar stories from different cultures rebranded as a multicultural version of Cinderella. The version I’ll be focusing on is Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, a young adult novel...