Today's Articles (2/9/2025)
THE WORLD WANTS MATCHA. JAPANâS FARMS CANâT KEEP UP.
Itâs easy to picture the verdant powder, whisked to froth in glazed chawan before being tipped, streaming, into a glass of cold milk [...]
Much of the confusion stems from the fact that the vast majority of Japanese people donât drink matchaâat least, not in the way everyone else is now, in lattes spiked with strawberry jam and blanketed with creamy foam.
Matcha as a flavouringâin ice creams, in coffee-adjacent drinksâonly began in Japan in the 1990s when Western corporations like Haagen Dazs introduced products using lower grade matcha. âIf you talk to an older Japanese person, they only drink matcha when they go to temple and thereâs a special ceremony, like a wedding,â said Liu, adding that it was mostly white yoga moms, rather than her Asian customers, who sought out matcha at Miro when she first started the business.
The phenomenon isnât all bad. Farmers are finally being rewarded for artisanal products that were becoming locally obsolete, and beyond bottled teas peddled by major conglomerates like Coca Cola, Ito En, and Kirin, the industry as a whole was on its last legs.
MAID [medical assistance in dying] now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canadaâmore than Alzheimerâs and diabetes combinedâsurpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.
To work in medicine is to step each day into the worst days of other peopleâs lives.
Although cost savings have never been mentioned as an explicit rationale for expansion, the parliamentary budget office anticipated annual savings in health-care costs of nearly $150 million as a result of the expanded MAID regime.
The elimination of that protection with the creation of Track 2 [legalized MAID for adults whose deaths were not reasonably foreseeable] reinforced their conviction that MAID would result in Canadaâs most marginalized citizens being subtly coerced into premature death.
National disability-rights groups warned that Canadians with physical and intellectual disabilitiesâpeople whose lives were already undervalued in society, and of whom 17 percent live in povertyâwould be at particular risk. As assisted death became âsanitized,â one group argued, âmore and more will be encouraged to choose this option, further entrenching the âbetter off deadâ message in public consciousness.â
Before dying by MAID in 2022, at the age of 44, Kovac wrote her own obituary. She explained that life with ALS had ânot been easyâ; it was, as far as illnesses went, a âshittyâ one. But the illness itself was not the reason she wanted to die. Kovac told the local press prior to being euthanized that she had fought unsuccessfully to get adequate home-care services; she needed more than the 55 hours a week covered by the province, couldnât afford the cost of a private agency to take care of the balance, and didnât want to be relegated to a long-term-care facility. âUltimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system,â Kovac wrote. âI could have had more time if I had more help.â
The problem is that learning handwriting might be necessary to learn everything else.
But nearly all agree that knowing how to write has cognitive benefits. It helps students learn to read, and chances are if they have to think about something long enough to write it down, theyâll remember it more thoroughly than if itâs typed.
[...] itâs a mistake to think that writing isnât necessary. Mathematicians need to jot down problems; scientists need to take notes in the lab. These things can be done digitally, but they still require base-level communication skills. âScience, technologyâwe donât proceed in those things without reading and writing,â he says.
As AI creeps into schoolwork, handwriting wonât die so much as, once again, provide proof of life.