The years, as a modern philosopher once said, start coming, and they don’t stop coming.

When the 2024 US presidental election happened, I asked on social media where the progressive organizing was happening in Canada. I felt like I could see what was going to happen: there would be a federal election, the right wing would come into power, and Canada would follow its southern neighbours off a metaphorical cliff as we’ve been known to do. When that happened, I wanted to be tapped into spaces of resistance that I had tapped out of for a few years when my husband and I found ourselves unexpectedly raising a teenager.

Lots of people responded to my question, but none of it felt quite like the right answer. The NDP is shambolic at multiple levels, even before they lost official party status federally, but what was being done about it? Doug Ford’s snap winter election saw an abysmal turnout that delivered an overwhelming majority for his legislative agenda of cruelty and cronyism and fucking with Toronto specifically, but what was being done about it? Poilievre was kept out of power for now by a wave of hockey-metaphor-based nationalism, but a central banker is driving the country further right by wielding the austerity hammer that seems to be the only tool in the Liberal chest, while the rich keep getting richer and the planet keeps getting hotter and life keeps getting harder, and what was being done about it?

I set about answering this question the only way I knew how: research. I made a list of people and a map of organizations and I set off to talk to as many of them as I could. I emailed people I’d only met once or not at all, said yes to every event I was invited to, asked people I talked to to introduce me to other people I should talk to. I told everyone I met about this problem I was chewing on.

This became the consuming theme of 2025, a year I’ve come to think of as my year of finding community.

Here’s what I did in 2025:

I launched Show Up Toronto and wrote 33 weekly emails covering almost 1,300 events. I interviewed over a dozen longtime activists and organizers in the city about their experience. I started organizing to help revive the dormant Canadian chapter of the Tech Workers Coalition and ran a book club for us to read No Shortcuts together and brought in a labour organizer to speak to the (pardon me) state of unions in Canada. I became a member of a community coworking space that has turned out to be an anchor in the city for me, and I’ve started collaborating with friends I’ve made there. I consulted on data strategy for a community land trust, assembled and moderated a panel on civic tech and organizing, invested in community bonds and a Canadian social network. I attended probably fifty things this year, protests and mobilizations but also salons and trainings and reading groups. I made new friends, reconnected with old ones, deepened relationships, built alliances. We moved to a neighbourhood that’s more central to all this work.

I also had a full time job, one that let me try out being an engineering manager for a while, but one that I nevertheless left at the end of the year because it was increasingly impossible to ignore the disconnect between what fulfilled me as a person and what I did for a living. This is a risk; by any objective measure it was a great job whose stability and material benefits I am unlikely to match elsewhere. But it was not the right job for me.

By the end of the year I was exhausted and wrung-out, but reasonably satisfied with my efforts. It was only when I got a chance to breathe over the winter break that I remembered that I still haven’t found an answer to my initial question, which was: who is doing something about all of…this?

Or rather, I have the start of an answer, but I don’t like what I’ve found. The answer is: a lot of people are, but not together, and not in the same direction. There’s a ton of incredible boots-on-the-ground work happening around community defense, mutual aid, and direct action. There’s also a lot of great thinking about the longterm horizon, the view from ten thousand feet. But it feels like there is this missing middle in organizing, as surely as there is a missing middle of housing stock. The intuition of this missing middle is what animated me and set me down this path in the first place, and in 2026 I want to go back to trying to make sense of it.

My resolutions this year are the same resolutions I have every year, more or less. Sleep earlier, post less, write more, floss. Spend more meaningful time with loved ones, play with my cat, read books on something other than my phone. I will probably be no more successful this year than I am any other year, and that’s okay.

My commitment this year is to find more clarity and focus. I’ve spent a year gathering moss, and now it’s time to see where these roots lead. I’ve written before about work and love and how much the two are connected for me. If I believe in anything at all I believe in showing up and doing the work and finding others who also want to show up and do the work, so we can build the collective capacity to imagine a different social arrangement.

The bad news is, there’s no shortcut for doing the work. The good news is, that’s all we have to do.

‘A massive global genetics study is reshaping how we understand mental illness—and why diagnoses so often pile up. By analyzing genetic data from more than six million people, researchers uncovered deep genetic connections across 14 psychiatric conditions, showing that many disorders share common biological roots. Instead of existing in isolation, these conditions fall into five overlapping families, helping explain why depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders so frequently occur together.…’ (via ScienceDaily)

Findings such as these resonate strongly with the stance of diagnostic skepticism that I have held throughout my career as a clinical and academic psychiatrist. Psychiatry has repeatedly taught us that its categories are provisional tools rather than natural kinds, and that our confidence in them often outpaces the solidity of the underlying science. The recurrent experience of patients accumulating diagnoses over time—sometimes within a single hospitalization, sometimes across decades—has always suggested that something more fundamental than discrete disease entities is at work.

Historically, this tension is not new. Psychiatric classification has oscillated for more than a century between lumping and splitting. At certain moments, the field has favored broad, integrative constructs—neurosis, psychosis, affective illness—emphasizing shared phenomenology and presumed common mechanisms. At other times, it has moved toward increasingly fine-grained distinctions, carving syndromes into narrower subtypes in the hope of diagnostic precision, prognostic clarity, and targeted treatment. Each swing has been accompanied by a sense that the current framework finally “gets it right,” only to be followed by revision as anomalies accumulate.

Large-scale genetic findings like these offer a compelling biological explanation for why neither extreme has ever fully succeeded. If multiple psychiatric syndromes share substantial genetic architecture, then comorbidity is not an artifact of poor interviewing or diagnostic sloppiness, but an expected consequence of overlapping vulnerability systems expressing themselves differently across development, context, and stress. The apparent neatness of our diagnostic manuals may therefore obscure a far messier underlying reality.

Importantly, this does not invalidate diagnosis itself, nor does it imply that all conditions should be collapsed into a single undifferentiated category. Lumping and splitting are not opposing dogmas so much as complementary lenses. Lumping has value when the goal is to understand shared mechanisms, reduce artificial boundaries, recognize common trajectories, and avoid reifying distinctions that lack biological or clinical robustness. Splitting, by contrast, becomes indispensable when precise phenomenology matters—when predicting course, tailoring treatment, communicating risk, or conducting focused research on well-defined clinical problems.

In practice, good psychiatry has always involved knowing when to do each. A clinician may need to lump in order to see the larger pattern of vulnerability, suffering, and adaptation in a patient’s life, while simultaneously splitting enough to recognize specific syndromes that carry distinct risks or treatment implications. The emerging genetic evidence does not demand allegiance to one approach over the other; rather, it reinforces the wisdom of holding our categories lightly, using them pragmatically, and remaining open to revision as our understanding deepens.

Seen this way, the enduring oscillation between lumping and splitting is not a failure of the field, but a reflection of the complexity of the phenomena it seeks to describe.

I thought I’d quote a bit from the chapter on Russian (pp. 281-98) in How Literatures Begin (see this post), by Michael Wachtel:

Histories of Russian literature invariably begin with the medieval period. However, this period can be understood as the beginning of the Russian literary tradition only if literature is defined in the narrowest sense, as any word that is committed to paper—or, more precisely, to parchment. Even within this limited definition, it would be difficult to argue for the medieval period as the beginning of Russian literature because the language used was not Russian, but rather what is now called “Old Church Slavonic” or—depending on one’s linguistics and politics—even “Old Bulgarian.” The creation of an alphabet can be dated to the ninth century. It was the work of Cyril (hence the word “Cyrillic”) and Methodius, two monks who sought to translate holy texts from Byzantine Greek into a language that could be understood by the Slavs in Moravia. Whether Cyril and Methodius were of Greek or Slavic origin is disputed, but to call them Russian would be anachronistic, since the concept of Russia as a distinct location or even ethnicity did not exist at the time. […]

The existence of a written language was essential for disseminating holy writ. Over the next few hundred years, numerous texts were produced in this “church” language, almost all of which were translations of the Gospels and the liturgy, the only texts familiar to most believers in the early centuries of Slavic Christianity. Precise numbers are revealing: only twenty of the fifteen hundred surviving parchment manuscripts from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries are not concerned with religion. Once again, there is a thorny issue of nomenclature in regard to the language used in these texts. As Alexander Schenker notes: “Depending on the local political situation the terms Old Russian, Old Ukrainian, and Old Belarussian have been applied to essentially the same body of texts.” Regardless of what we call this language, it must be emphasized that the range of texts it produced was extremely limited. While Eastern Orthodoxy in Byzantium (much like Christian culture in the West) was steeped in the traditions of antiquity, Kiev’s approach to Orthodoxy was narrow and pragmatic. In the words of D. S. Mirsky: “The study of rhetoric, dialectics and poetry, of the Trivium and Quadrivium, of all the ‘humaniora,’ never penetrated into South Slavia, Georgia or Russia, and only those forms of literary art were adopted which were considered necessary for the working of the national Church.”

The few literate people in the Slavic lands were primarily engaged in copying religious texts. There was no tradition of exegesis, nor was it encouraged. To the extent it was deemed necessary, interpretation of the holy texts was borrowed from preexisting Byzantine sermons. In this regard, it is worth noting that well into the eighteenth century, literacy in Russia was acquired by painstakingly working through sacred texts and committing them to memory. As Victor Zhivov writes: “The basic means of learning language was reading ‘po skladam’ (‘by syllables’). The procedure was strictly regimented and considered sacred. It began and ended with prayer and was seen as a kind of introduction to Christian life. The special importance of correct and comprehensible reading was conditioned by the fact that the failure to follow the rules of reading could, from the point of view of Eastern Slavic bookmen, lead to heretical error.” […]

Perhaps the most Hattically interesting passage is this (pp. 292 ff.):

Since Lomonosov was living in Germany rather than France, he had grown accustomed to syllabo-tonic verse, which is based not on the number of syllables per line, but on metrical feet, the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. By writing his poem in iambs, Lomonosov in one stroke did away with more than seventy years of poetic practice. Equally innovative was Lomonosov’s importation of masculine rhyme, used in consistent combination with feminine rhyme. The fact that one poem could undo such a lengthy tradition suggests that this tradition was not terribly firm to begin with. And indeed, the alacrity with which syllabic verse was forgotten is astonishing. In the space of a few years, syllabic poetry disappeared from the repertoire of Russian poets. After a few brief attempts to modify syllabic verse to bring it closer to syllabo-tonics, even Trediakovsky recognized that Lomonosov’s reform had won the day. Like everyone else, he began to write syllabo-tonic poetry, even returning to his previously published syllabic poems and revising them in accordance with the new system.

Scholars still debate why Lomonosov’s reform of versification was so successful, but whatever the reason, it is difficult to overstate its significance in the history of Russian literature. Syllabo-tonic poetry has dominated Russian poetry ever since Lomonosov introduced it. And while additional prosodic forms have coexisted with it, such as accentual (tonic) verse since the early twentieth century and free verse in the post-Soviet period, syllabo-tonic verse has never been displaced. Equally important for the present discussion is that fact that, since the advent of syllabo-tonics, not a single effort was made to revive syllabic poetry. That chapter of Russian literary history came to an abrupt and complete end. […]

The precise rules for Russian poetry had yet to be established, but both Trediakovsky and Lomonosov had no doubt that this was a task they must resolve. Once again, Lomonosov’s views proved to be the more influential. Borrowing as usual from earlier writers (in this case Quintilian), Lomonosov formulated a theory of poetic language based on three styles. The high style was drawn from Old Church Slavonic words no longer in common usage, but nonetheless understandable: completely obscure words in Old Church Slavonic were rejected altogether. This lexicon, with its solemn liturgical associations, served as the ideal vehicle for elevated genres like the ode and the tragedy. The middle style relied on words common to Old Church Slavonic and Russian. Because these words were in everyday use, but not devoid of elevated associations, they were deemed appropriate for “delicate” genres such as the verse epistle, idylls, and love poetry. One might recall in this context the above-cited comments of Trediakovsky on why he translated Tallement’s novel about love into “Russian” rather than “Slavonic.” A low style, which drew maximally on words in common usage that did not have Church Slavonic elements, was reserved for genres such as epigrams, fables, and (prose) comedies.

It is interesting that there is no place in Lomonosov’s scheme for loan words from western European languages. For all his formal dependence on Western models, Lomonosov viewed the Russian lexicon as sacrosanct. Indeed, he argued that Russian was in this respect the true heir to Greek and thus superior to the Latinate languages of western Europe. The influence of “Gallicisms” would become a factor in the Russian literary language only after Lomonosov’s death; it is especially pronounced in the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

According to Lomonosov’s influential theories, the more elevated the genre, the less familiar it should sound. In addition to the Slavonic lexicon, Lomonosov’s odes displayed complicated syntax, a “thick” and barely pronounceable—and thus distinctive—sound texture, and elaborate tropes (e.g., zeugmas, striking similes and metaphors, unexpected personifications). These factors combined to create a poetic language that sought to move readers—or listeners—emotionally rather than convince them through logic and syllogism.

It continues to impress me that Lomonosov had such a powerful influence on the development of the Russian literary language.

I’ve read a fair amount about the so-called Reading Wars over the years, but nothing as convincing as David Owen’s New Yorker article in the latest issue (archived). It starts:

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.

Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.

Estimates of dyslexia’s incidence in the general population vary, from as high as twenty per cent—a figure cited by, among others, Sally Shaywitz, a co-founder of the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity—to as low as zero, as suggested by Richard Allington, a retired professor of education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who in 2019 told participants at a literacy conference that legislators who supported remediation for students with reading disabilities should be shot. Nadine Gaab, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me that the best current estimates fall between five and ten per cent.

There are reasons for the inconsistency. The condition varies in type, severity, and presentation of symptoms, and early literacy skills have historically been hard to measure. Many children with dyslexia (and their parents) never learn they have it. Because a common strategy for avoiding the embarrassment of reading aloud is to act in a way that results in being sent to the principal’s office, dyslexic students are often treated primarily as discipline problems. At every grade level, they are more likely to be suspended, expelled, or placed in juvenile detention, especially if their families are economically disadvantaged. According to a 2011 study of four thousand high-school students by Donald J. Hernandez, then a sociology professor at Hunter College, more than sixty per cent of those who failed to graduate had been found to have reading deficits as early as third grade. More often than not, schools don’t intervene effectively, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes as a result of misguided pedagogy, sometimes for fear of incurring instructional or legal costs. […]

Shaywitz, in her book “Overcoming Dyslexia,” cites an account, published by a German doctor in 1676, of “an old man of 65 years” who lost the ability to read after suffering a stroke. “He did not know a single letter nor could he distinguish one from another,” the doctor wrote. This was perhaps the first published description of what’s known today as acquired dyslexia, caused by damage to the brain. Two centuries later, a doctor in England wrote a paper about a case of what he called “congenital word blindness.” It involved a fourteen-year-old boy who was unable to read despite years of instruction by teachers and tutors. He could recognize “and,” “the,” “of,” and a few other one-syllable words, and he knew the letters of the alphabet, but when the doctor dictated vocabulary to him he misspelled nearly everything, writing “sening” for “shilling” and “scojock” for “subject.” His disability stood out, the doctor wrote, because his schoolmaster had said that he would be “the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral.”

Spoken language arose at least fifty thousand years ago, and the brain has evolved with it. As a consequence, most children learn to speak early and easily, without formal instruction. (Deaf children pick up signing readily, too.) Reading and writing are different. They were invented only about five thousand years ago, and natural selection has not configured the brain to facilitate them. “You can’t just lock a group of kindergartners in a library and expect them to emerge, a couple of weeks later, as readers,” Gaab told me. “It’s more like learning a musical instrument. You can listen to Mozart all your life, but if I put you in front of a piano and say, ‘Play Mozart,’ you will fail.”

To become literate, people have to repurpose parts of the brain that evolved to perform other tasks, such as object recognition and sound processing. “What we have to do, over the course of learning to read, is coördinate these areas to communicate with each other and build what we call a reading network,” Gaab said. The areas are connected by axon bundles, which she likened to highways. The French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, in his book “Reading in the Brain,” writes, “Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?”

I could quote a lot more, but I’ll just urge you to read the whole thing; you may be as enraged as I was at the educators who refuse to believe that the methods they were taught have been shown not to work, and at the huge number of kids whose lives have been needlessly worsened. (To preempt an obvious and pointless derail: the wretched English spelling system is neither here nor there; to repeat a sentence from above: “Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese.”)