In At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, Roger Ekirch discusses a practice in the early modern era whereby Western Europeans divided their nights in two, with a “first sleep” until midnight, and a later “second sleep” running through until morning.

Growing up in Montreal, with a mother who couldn’t speak French and a father who couldn’t speak English, I had an uncanny understanding of the power of words.

In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman (now Saint) outlined his vision of a liberal education that spoke of the virtues and purpose of a university. Originally an Oxford man, his famed conflict at Oriel College — where he argued with the Provost that a tutor needed more engagement with undergraduates — resulted in Newman being cast out of his beloved institution and turning instead to a life of research.

Recently I was listening to a report that explained why margarine was bad for you, which concluded that we would all be much better switching to butter.

An early December editorial cartoon struck a sympathetic chord with me. It depicted a weary Father Time, sitting at a bar and pleading to be relieved of duty early. Enough is enough, his hoary visage seemed to say.

At breakfast recently my daughter noted that my cardigan made me look like an academic. As a professor I wasn’t sure how to take the comment. But I admitted that the first thing I did when I began teaching in a university was to rush out and buy a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows.

COVID-19 has triggered many things, some of them predictable, many not. Who, for example, would have guessed that the first major response to the virus would be panic buying of toilet paper? A rush on cellphone cases and Lego were two other unexpected results of the pandemic. Apparently, our behaviour has become so unusual that it is negatively impacting artificial intelligence algorithms, with one AI consultant claiming that “automation is in a tailspin.”

In a wonderful essay written in 1919, “Das Unheimliche,” Sigmund Freud proposed a theory of the uncanny to explain the sense of unease and even terror that can arise when something presents itself to us as strangely familiar, but not quite.

Dictionaries offer two definitions for the word beatify. The first is “to make supremely happy.” The second is “a declaration of blessedness” and, for Catholics, this is the step before canonization.

Every year, as my children got older, the return-to-school routine got less exciting.