Tag Archives: Books

Education

Coming Soon: The Library’s 90th Anniversary

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We’re coming up to the 90th anniversary of the Vancouver Island Regional Library. In this morning’s interview Beatrix Baxter, the new Circulation Supervisor at the Cortes Island branch, talks about the library, her love of books and how they are going to celebrate on Saturday, May 30th.

Beatrix Baxter:  “The Vancouver Island Regional Library was established in 1936, and it started off with six library branches, 28 sub-branches, and seven van routes. Now we’re up to 39 library branches and our online branch, which we say is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because you can go online anytime.”

“All 39 branches share what we call a floating collection. We all each hold part of the collection. When a library customer goes online to put a book on hold, the call goes out to all the branches that might have a copy of that book. The first one to respond sends the book off, and it goes through our system and ends up here on Cortes, or wherever the person is requesting it from.

“I don’t know how many books we have, but more than five million items are circulated annually. That’s books, magazines, video games, DVDs, TV shows, audiobooks — it’s everything that we have, which is actually quite a lot.”

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Politics

The Quadra Project – The Dark Tetrad – Part 2

In Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Dr.
Luke Kemp attributes the cause of civilizational failures in 400
societies over the course of 5,000 years of history to the
contaminating effects of leaders who possess the “dark triad” of
narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellian manipulation. A related but
equally intriguing perspective comes from Dr. Leanne ten Brinke, a
professor of psychology and director of the University of B.C.’s Truth
and Trust Lab, who has done extensive studies on the behaviour of
convicted criminals (University of British Columbia Magazine,
Spring/Summer 2025, “The ‘Strongmen’ Who are Breaking Democracies” by Jared Downing).

Continue reading The Quadra Project – The Dark Tetrad – Part 2 →
History

The Quadra Project – The Dark Triad – Part 1

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As the course of history attests, civilizations tend to rise and then fall. This process poses two fundamental questions. What causes people
to coalesce into complex societies? And what causes them to fracture
into disorganized populations? Perhaps the most cogent and credible of current explanations to both their formation and collapse is in Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, a remarkably insightful 2025 book by Dr. Luke Kemp, a scholar from the Centre for Studies of Existential Risk at the Cambridge University.

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Arts, History

The Quadra Project: Invisible Enemies

Alpha Male – Photo by Art DiNo via Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)

Anthropology reveals interesting information about ourselves, particularly because of its ability to conduct an examination of our human behaviour and customs from the distance of different cultures and long periods of time. This provides anthropology with an illuminating perspective that is available to few other sciences. An illuminating example of this is provided by “The Enemy Within”, an article in the July 12, 2025, edition of New Scientist, written by Jonathan R. Goodman. (Also see his book, Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World.)

As a sociologist, Goodman explores the interface between anthropology, primatology, psychology and economics to explain the dynamic of inequality. This has become particularly worrisome in our present culture as the rich get richer, the powerful more influential, and everyone else is feeling justifiably victimized. Goodman begins by taking us back to our very historical beginning.

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Education

Cortes Island Academy embraces the Laurels from Four Years past and begins a new season

The Cortes Island Academy offers an accredited 20 week experimental, project-based education to local students in grades 10 through 12. They just wrapped up their fourth year and, on February 9, are about to start taking applications for 2026-2027. In this morning’s interview Executive Director Manda Aufochs Gillespie talks about the school and their recent annual showcase in Mansons hall. 

She explained, “It was an incredible display, not just by the students of the Academy, but by the community who came out in droves to be the most supportive, engaged, and encouraging audience I have ever experienced. It was truly heartwarming to see the relational aspects of what was happening there.” 

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