When I got my copy of Rosa Brooks’ How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, I was excited to step into the insight of a legitimate agent of the Pentagon. What I wasn’t prepared for was the frustration that would come from reading it. What I took from Brooks’ book is a higher resolution understanding of what we see in real time; the United States extending their troops across the world.

In Peter Denton’s book The End of Technology he describes technology as being more cognitive than physically instrumental. In order to invent a piece of tangible technology there must first be a choice made to simplify a process or action by utilizing real world items manicured specifically for the betterment of the activity. For a piece of technology to be invented there must be a need followed by the imagining of what would fill that need and a subsequent product to fulfill the need. Technology is the creation of tools but without the mental capacity to asses the situation and decidedly create the tool the technology itself is useless.

This is a reflection of two books: Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence by Mark Juergensmeyer and The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age by Martha Nussbaum. It was written for a class on the History of Modern Militarism at the University of Winnipeg in the summer of 2024.

From the turn of the 20th century, when cars first replaced the horse and the outrage that came with it, to the modern era of transitioning from the internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, Appleyard tells the story of how cars changed the world.

“You see the most evidence of reconciliation because the population in Manitoba… We were the first province, we’re the first treaty, we’re the first place where the Indian Act Policy happened, where residential schools started.” -Niigaan Sinclair

For a second year course on evolutionary psychology we were required to read Darwin’s classic On the Origin of Species. This was an essay I wrote describing my experience with the book. Written in January, 2019