Each year, University of Toronto professor Laura Tozer updates a slide deck that she presents to her graduate students on the state of climate policy in Canada. This year, she is deleting everything.
President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated that the United States needed Greenland for “national security” after his appointment of a special envoy to the Danish Arctic island triggered a new spat with Copenhagen.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly said the United States “needs” the resource-rich autonomous territory for security reasons and has refused to rule out using force to secure it.
Trump on Sunday appointed Louisiana governor Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland, prompting anger from Denmark, which summoned the U.S. ambassador.
“We need Greenland for national security. Not for minerals,” Trump said at a news conference in Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday.
“If you take a look at Greenland, you look up and down the coast, you have Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” he said.
“We need it for national security. We have to have it,” the president said, adding that Landry “wanted to lead the charge.”
On his appointment, Landry immediately vowed to make the Danish territory “a part of the U.S.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen earlier Monday said in a joint statement that Greenland belongs to Greenlanders.
“You cannot annex another country,” they said. “We expect respect for our joint territorial integrity.” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he was “deeply angered” by the move and warned Washington to respect Denmark’s sovereignty.
The European Union later offered its “full solidarity” to Denmark.
The Danish foreign minister earlier said on TV2 television the appointment and statements were “totally unacceptable” and, several hours later, said the U.S. ambassador had been called up to the ministry for an explanation.
“We summoned the American ambassador to the foreign ministry today for a meeting, together with the Greenlandic representative, where we very clearly drew a red line and also asked for an explanation,” Lokke Rasmussen said in an interview with public broadcaster DR.
Strategic location
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and European Council president Antonio Costa stressed on social media that territorial integrity and sovereignty were “fundamental principles of international law.”
Leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have repeatedly insisted that the vast island is not for sale and that it will decide its own future.
Most of Greenland’s 57,000 people want to become independent from Denmark but do not wish to become part of the United States, according to an opinion poll in January.
Lokke Rasmussen said Trump’s appointment of a special envoy confirmed continued U.S. interest in Greenland.
“However, we insist that everyone — including the U.S. — must show respect for the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark,” he said in a statement emailed to AFP.
Washington argues Greenland, located between North America and Europe, can give it an economic edge over its rivals in the Arctic region.
The island has untapped rare earth minerals and could be a vital player as the polar ice melts and new shipping routes emerge.
Greenland’s location also puts it on the shortest route for missiles between Russia and the United States.
The United States has its Pituffik military base in Greenland and opened a consulate on the island in June 2020.
In August, Denmark summoned the U.S. charge d’affaires after at least three U.S. officials close to Trump were seen in Greenland’s capital Nuuk trying to find out how people felt about deepening U.S. ties.
Trump’s determination to take over Greenland has stunned Denmark, a fellow member of NATO that has fought alongside the U.S. in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In January, Copenhagen announced a $2.0-billion plan to boost its military presence in the Arctic region.
Since Prime Minister Mark Carney first took office in March, lobbyists have flocked to Ottawa in record-setting numbers, federal data shows. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)
Since Mark Carney became prime minister in March, he has made promises to spend big on major infrastructure projects as well as AI research and adoption. He’s also dealt with constant trade threats from his counterpart south of the border.
Those major developments in Canadian economic and foreign policy have made the past eight months one of the busiest lobbying periods ever recorded in the federal registry, according to lobbying experts.
[Description: A divorce lawyer answering the question “do you believe in soulmates?”
He answers: I believe that whoever created the concept of soulmates should be taken into the town square and beaten to death. Or you should tell me who they are so I can send them a check for a couple of hundred thousand dollars, because they have done more to facilitate the demise of happy marriages than I could ever aspire to doing.
The concept of a soulmate to me is absolutely bizarre. To suggest that out of eight billion other people in the world, that there’s just this one person, and they happen by the way to live within like the same town as you, where they went to the same university as you - what were the odds of that? And that’s the only person you could ever have a happy, fulfilling relationship with. That’s insane, folks. It’s insane. And by the way, it’s toxic. Because here’s the thing: when you get married, society essentially tells you, this person, they’re supposed to be your best friend, best lover, best roommate, best travel companion, best co-parent - that’s a hell of a resume, guy. Like, it’d be shocking to find someone who fits all three of those things.
So what happens when you have this concept of a soulmate? And my partner, you know, they’re the best co-parent, they’re the best roommate, the best travel companion, but you know, they’re not the best lover I ever had. Well, they mustn’t be your soulmate then. That means that there’s somebody out there in the eight billion people, that they would be the perfect one. And that’s what the horizon that just forever recedes and keeps people constantly craving the next thing that might check all of the boxes. It’s dangerous.
Look, we break in relationship, we heal in relationship. You’re marrying a human being. They’re just as flawed as you. They have great moments, they have awful moments, they have heroic moments, they have villainous moments. This idea that somebody out there is going to be this perfect angelic presence in your life, it is a fiction, and it is the siren song that’s gonna send you right into the rocks of my office. /End Description]
I’m obsessed with this chair. The artist takes a flimsy hunk of injection-molded plastic that’s been cost-cut to hell and back, and insists that we look at it with fresh eyes and understand its beauty. And they went about it in the most labor-intensive way I can think of.
Absolutely nothing about this design is convenient to execute in wood. Every piece is curved, most have compound curves. This is artisan craftsmanship: it’s inherently slow, manual, and skilled. Notice, also, that most features of this chair must be thicker and heavier than on the plastic chairs being imitated. Injection-molded chairs can be produced in this shape in a matter of minutes with far less material at very low cost.
If these flowing, organic curves are so beautiful in polished wood, perhaps they are also beautiful in the mass-produced chairs that are far more accessible. Perhaps we should remember to admire designs that succeed enough to become ubiquitous. I don’t know about you, but I’ll never see injection-molded chairs the same way again.
I agree with all of this, but YOU HAVE HIT UPON A FORGOTTEN TRUTH OF PLASTIC CHAIRS!!!!!
The standard one-piece injection molded plastic chair is referred to as a “Monobloc”, literally just describing it as a single piece. The history of this chair is fascinating, and it all starts back in 1946, with the D.C. Simpson Monobloc.
Douglas Colborne Simpson was an architect mostly active in the 40’s and 50’s, designing a lot of classic mid-century style buildings in Vancouver, Canada(1). In 1946, as part of a government project to find new uses for materials developed for WWII, he and engineer James Donahue developed the design you see above, simply called the Monobloc(2). Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot about this chair as it was only ever a prototype, and no modern examples have survived, nor have most of the records surrounding it(3). To my knowledge, we don’t actually know if this was technically injection molded, or crafted some other way. We can’t even be sure if it was technically the inspiration for the designs that followed, but no matter the case it has lent its name to the entire genre.
Plastics technology was simply not what it is today back in the 1940’s. Most people would have had very little plastic in their homes, most likely just a few pieces of Bakelite (the first commercially viable plastic, made from a formaldehyde based resin in a Bakelizer, the best name for any industrial manufacturing equipment ever). Over the following few decades, however, as a wider variety of plastics were both developed and came down in price to the point of commercial viability, the concept of the plastic chair was revisited, and the first folks to revisit it were Helmut Batzner, in 1964, and Joe Colombo, in 1965.
This, is the Bofinger chair, Batzner’s design:
The elements of D.C.Simpson’s Monobloc were pretty alien compared to todays mass-manufactured plastic chairs, but here we start to see some more modern elements come into play. The first thing you probably notice is the front legs, which have that characteristic visible 90 degree bend in them for added rigidity, plus a much more comfortably leaned back and slightly scoop-shaped seat. We also see much more support in the back rest, with broad triangles allowing for a more efficient use of materials without losing back support.
Similar to Simpson, Batzner was not an industrial designer, but an architect, and this chair had a very specific purpose. Batzner and his team designed it as part of a project to build a new theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, which required a large amount of additional seating which could be easily packed away into storage or distributed around the theaters rooms by the staff (4). As such, it was designed to be both lightweight and stackable, so several of them could be moved by one person, and they could be stored compactly. This piece of furniture was a huge hit a the theater, and was so popular that 120,000 units would ultimately be manufactured and sold around the world, with each one taking just 5 minutes to produce (4).
Around the same time, Joe Colombo enters the scene with this:
Colombo was an artist in several mediums who, after taking over his families appliance company in the 50’s, made the shift towards architecture and interior design, and started designing a wide array of trend-setting furniture(5). The chair shown above is known as the Universale (sometimes referred to as the Chair Universal 4867), designed in 1965. This chair differs pretty greatly from the ones that came after it, it many ways it represents a different path that could have been taken, but it’s also very widely referenced as an inspiration for what is broadly considered the origin of the white plastic chair the world over.
Enter: the Fauteuil 300
This is, arguably, the first iteration of the white plastic chair we all know today. Designed by Henry Massonnet in 1972, the Fauteuil 300 and it’s imitators are, collectively, the single most widely used piece of furniture in the entire world(6). Before that, however, it was something else entirely: works of art.
What might be hard to recognize in hindsight is that all of these chairs described so far were not everyday objects. They were on the forefront of modern design, they made use of brand new materials and manufacturing processes, and at the time they were each made, they were slick, stylish, and fairly expensive. Despite the speed at which they could be manufactured, these innovative, high-end chairs rose sharply in cost up through the early 1980’s due to the sheer demand for them. They weren’t cheap spare seating you stuck in the garage, they were placed at dining tables and on fine patios, and they were a wildly popular talking point. That’s not to say their expense justified their artistic value, but rather that their expense and popularity was a product of their status as highly contemporary and boundary-pushing designs.
With the price of plastics declining after the 70’s, the increasing accessibility of injection molding to manufacturers, and the widespread popularity of these designs, copycats proliferated rapidly, and eventually drove the price down. This era, in the 80’s and 90’s, is when these chairs became cheap an ubiquitous, and where they became manufactured the world over.
And here is where we reach this piece, “Plastic chair in wood”, by Maarten Baas, and a piece of the history I’ve left out so far. The Monobloc was designed to be made out of wood. Like the the other chairs designed by Joe Colombo, like the chairs that predated the Simpson, the Monobloc was designed with the intention of using laminated plywood, but as the artists and designers behind them began to experiment with new materials they fell in love with the idea of making them from plastic, and so they did. They redesigned and redesigned until they made something that would be impossible to make in wood at a price most people could afford, but which could be made from plastic in mere minutes. The organic curves and thin profiles would take so much time, so much waste material, so much skill and effort to create if made of wood that they could never be furniture, they could only be art. Baas’ chair is a perfect, beautiful reflection of that.
That, in brief, is the history of the design of the white plastic Monobloc chair, but it’s not all there is to know. In fact, it’s kind of just the start. I’ve linked my sources below, but I would strongly recommend checking out the German documentary Monobloc, by Hauke Wendler. It goes over the history, but it’s far more interested with what the Monobloc means, and what it’s place is in our world today. The impact it’s made, the better and the worse, and what it says about us. It’s fascinating, and well worth your time.
The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has fundamentally transformed global public health paradigms. As we navigate the endemic phase of COVID-19, understanding the complex dynamics of immunity against continuously evolving viral variants remains critical for maintaining population-level protection and informing evidence-based vaccination policies [1].
SARS-CoV-2 immunity can be acquired through three distinct pathways: vaccine-induced immunity, natural infection-induced immunity, and hybrid immunity resulting from both vaccination and infection [2]. Each pathway confers unique protective characteristics with varying effectiveness, breadth, and durability. Vaccine-induced immunity has proven highly effective in reducing COVID-19 severity, hospitalizations, and deaths across diverse populations [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7]]. However, immune waning and viral evolution continuously reshape the protective landscape, necessitating updated vaccination strategies [[8], [9]].
Hybrid immunity, resulting from both vaccination and natural infection, typically provides the most robust and durable protection [[10], [11], [12]]. However, emerging evidence suggests that the temporal sequence of these immune exposures critically determines the ultimate protective benefit, with vaccination-first approaches showing superior outcomes compared to infection-first scenarios [[13], [14], [15]].
In Hong Kong, the COVID-19 Vaccination Programme launched on February 26, 2021. Initially, the program offered two primary vaccine options: BNT162b2, an mRNA-based vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, and CoronaVac (Sinovac Biotech), an inactivated virus vaccine. By the time of this analysis (November 2022), a bivalent mRNA vaccine (Bivalent Omicron BA.4/BA.5 BNT162b2) was also available. While the original formulations demonstrated substantial initial effectiveness, the emergence of immune-evasive variants, particularly the Omicron lineage and its subvariants, has challenged the durability and breadth of protection [[16], [17], [18]].
The COVID-19 pandemic has generated unprecedented real-world data on vaccination effectiveness, immune responses, and optimal strategies for population protection against emerging respiratory pathogens. The experience with SARS-CoV-2 variants, particularly the Omicron lineage, has provided valuable insights for developing evidence-based vaccination strategies that could inform rapid response approaches for future pandemic threats. The Omicron subvariants, particularly BA.4/5, have demonstrated enhanced transmissibility and partial immune escape, leading to increased breakthrough infection rates even among vaccinated populations [19].
The Omicron BA.4/5 experience offers an opportunity to address fundamental questions relevant to future pandemic preparedness: How effective are heterologous vaccination strategies when primary vaccines lose effectiveness against new variants? What is the real-world performance of variant-adapted vaccines compared to original formulations?
Vaccination timing has particular public health significance. Some individuals and communities have advocated for natural immunity strategies involving intentional exposure to infection. Such approaches assume that infection-acquired immunity provides equal or superior protection compared to vaccination, an assumption requiring rigorous scientific evaluation. Understanding the comparative effectiveness of vaccination-first versus infection-first pathways is essential for evidence-based public health messaging and policy development [20].
In this study, we define heterologous vaccination as switching between different vaccine platform types (e.g., from inactivated whole-virus vaccines to mRNA vaccines), as distinct from switching between different manufacturers of the same vaccine platform (e.g., between different mRNA vaccines). This distinction is critical because immune responses differ substantially across vaccine platforms due to differences in antigen presentation, adjuvant systems, and mechanisms of immune activation.
This study aims to extract actionable insights from Hong Kong's BA.4/5 experience that could inform future pandemic vaccination strategies. Our analysis leveraged Hong Kong's unique position as a well-defined population with universal healthcare access, comprehensive testing infrastructure, and detailed vaccination records—creating an ideal setting for generating pandemic preparedness insights. We focus specifically on individuals with waned immunity, those whose last vaccination or infection occurred more than six months prior, to determine optimal booster strategies for this vulnerable population. Through comprehensive analysis of cohorts stratified by primary vaccination series, booster type, prior infection history, and critically, the temporal sequence of vaccination and infection events, we provide crucial evidence to inform public health policies.
Our analysis investigates whether switching vaccine types or using variant-adapted boosters offers superior protection, how the temporal sequence of vaccination and infection influences subsequent immune responses, and whether vaccination before infection provides measurably better protection than infection-first scenarios. The demonstrated benefits of heterologous boosting and vaccination timing are essential for refining future vaccination campaigns to ensure sustained population-level protection while providing strong evidence to support early vaccination strategies over approaches that rely on or tolerate initial infection as a pathway to immunity.
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