Good morning, and welcome to the weekend.
Grab your cup of coffee or tea, and sit down with a selection of this week’s great reads from The Globe.
In this issue our personal finance team delivers a comprehensive guide to surviving, and maybe even thriving, as a postsecondary student. The game of life may have gotten more expensive in the past year, but that doesn’t mean uncertain finances should distract students from their upcoming studies.
“We constantly hear from younger readers that they’d love to expand their personal finance knowledge, but they have no idea where to start,” says investing and personal finance editor James Cowan. “To meet that need, we’ve published a bunch of explainers over the past two years, and we’ll be launching a glossary of financial terms this fall. But this package was designed to help students through one of life’s big transitions.”
In it, readers can find tips on financial conversations between parents and their university-bound children, campus deals to pursue or avoid, eating healthy despite food inflation, and more.
Nancy Macdonald is following the B.C. wildfire situation – in particular the frustrations inherent in both moving people out of harm’s way and mobilizing firefighting resources, and how those two objectives can clash. In the North Shuswap region, some are confronting police and other authorities and trying to gain access to evacuation zones. But as Nancy reports, those who have stayed to fight the fires believe they are a vital part of the total effort, not a disruption.
And in an essay both personal and provocative, author Pico Iyer contemplates our relationships with the places we find meaningful – whether the historic buildings of Lahaina in Hawaii or a waterfront locale close to home – and what to do about their precariousness in the face of more frequent climate catastrophes and other calamities.
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A financial guide for university students and their parents
Illustration by Maggie Prince
As prepared as you might be to start post-secondary classes, you’ll need some guidance on how to balance your other books as a student. From money conversations with family to how to properly take advantage of financial aid to eating (and having fun!) on a budget, crack open our comprehensive personal finance package first.
Some B.C. residents stayed to fight wildfires amid resource shortage, defying evacuation orders
An RCMP vehicle arrives as community members gather to bring supplies onto boats to move across Shuswap Lake while the Bush Creek East fire burns on Aug. 21, 2023.PAIGE TAYLOR WHITE/AFP/Getty Images
Residents of the Shuswap have defied evacuation orders to fight wildfires threatening their properties, frustrating provincial officials. But many of them say it makes no sense to bar them from participating when resources are stretched so thin. Unlike other jurisdictions, B.C. does not embrace volunteer wildfire fighters.
We may believe the places we love will outlive us. But nothing lasts forever
Some vistas get destroyed by human conflict, such as the Buddha statues demolished by the Taliban in Bamiyan, Afghanistan; others are altered by climate change, such as the Getz Ice Shelf in Antarctica, shown cracking in 2016.Reuters, AFP/Getty Images
We often think about the places we have to visit before we die, and seeing them in person is often emotional. Afterwards, there can be a feeling of security knowing a famous landmark or antiquity is always there, frozen in the moment we witnessed it. Now, though, amid social upheaval and climate change, we have to grapple with those places’ deaths, too. Not only that, but the places we know best are also vulnerable. Pico Iyer probes this new reality.
The 62 best new books to read this fall
iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Take your pick this autumn from a harvest of new books from a wide array of genres. Among our 62 selections there’s fiction from the likes of Zadie Smith, Mona Awad and Waubgeshig Rice, memoirs and biographies galore, books on the history of East Germany and Canada’s railway, and the latest on society and technology from Cory Doctorow and Naomi Klein.
How a three-decade search for S.S. Pacific’s shipwreck brought a golden payoff to treasure hunters
From a piloting station aboard M/V SeaBlazer, the Rockfish team controls the mini-subs used to find the Pacific's remains.GRANT HINDSLEY/The Globe and Mail
The story of S.S. Pacific’s demise never really ended, despite it sinking off the coast of Washington 148 years ago. Treasure hunters like Jeff Hummel and Matt McCauley have kept the legend alive with dreams of finding the ship’s valuable gold cargo. Now, after their three-decade search successfully located the preserved ship, Hummel and McCauley plan to raise it to the surface and memorialize it in a museum – and pay themselves for their trouble in the process.
Pickleball in a pickle: Canada’s plan to become a national sport organization thrown into disarray
Players compete during Pickleball Canada’s national championship at Viterra International Trade Centre in Regina on August 23, 2023.Heywood Yu/The Globe and Mail
Earlier this summer the presidents of the pickleball associations in Canada’s five most populous provinces and regions toppled the governing body of pickleball in this country. The president of Pickleball Ontario rallied her members to fight against what she called “autocratic politicking.” As more than 600 players descended on Regina this week for Canada’s largest ever Pickleball National Championship, the sport’s governing body is in disarray.
A mother’s plea to Facebook strangers: Help me find my boy
Marlene Bryenton looks at her Facebook messages in her home in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island Aug. 18, 2023.John Morris/The Globe and Mail
Marlene Bryenton’s son is 39 and homeless in Toronto. He needs treatment for mental illness, she says, but first she needed a way to keep track of him from her home in Charlottetown. With the help of strangers online, Bryenton has been able to hear from witnesses to his daily routine, which sometimes can include dangerous meanderings on foot. It isn’t much, but Bryenton’s fight to get help for her son has to start somewhere.
India dreams of superpower status, but climate change threatens new nightmares
People cremate their relatives who have died from heat-related illnesses in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on June 19, 2023.Rajesh Kumar Singh/The Associated Press
In India, the stakes are as high as anywhere when it comes to climate change. Not only are lives at risk from extreme heat, so is the country’s very economy, and its ambitions to move up in the pecking order of global geopolitics. Where analysts once questioned whether China could get rich before it gets too old, India’s dilemma is whether it can grow the economy and lift enough people out of poverty before it becomes too hot.
Drawn from the headlines
Aug. 19, 2023: How to manage climate-related anxiety and stress, as drawn by D. McFadzean for The Globe and Mail.
Drawn by D. McFadzean for The Globe and MailIllustration by D. McFadzean