Projects

March 22, 2020. Vancouver, British Columbia. The SkyTrain should have been packed. At seven in the morning on a weekday, downtown-bound cars are normally shoulder-to-shoulder; commuters are braced against each other, headphones in, eyes down. Instead, I was nearly alone. The silence was not pleasant at all. It was the kind that makes you aware of every breath behind a mask. COVID had arrived. Not just speculation, but fact. Essential workers were still needed, and I was one o

Across every society anthropology has recorded, those humans examined had a curious need to search for something beyond their senses. Donald Brown, an anthropologist, counts this belief in the supernatural sense among what he calls “human universals” or traits with no known exception within humanity. Brown identifies what he frames as “UP,” or “the universal people [who] have religious or supernatural beliefs in that they believe in something beyond the visible and palpable.”