They have us singing O Canada! – but it fails to produce the effect of a rousing round of The Star-Spangled Banner in Yankee Stadium. Far from riled up, we feel like children at school again, trying to remember how the French bits go. Then the rocks hit the ice. It is the world’s premier curling […]
February 29 – March 4, 2016 This week, Helen and her friends became famous using nothing but some marshmallows and an idea. Here’s the blow-by-blow of her brush with celebrity. Craig reports from the Bering Strait where, as ever, he walks in two overlaid landscapes, separated by thousands of years. Rose has a fantasy life in […]
Blacksmith Scene (1893), thought to be the first staged narrative in film Last summer, after a decade in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I moved south to Ottawa. It is a city that holds deeper roots for me the longer I dig. Every day, I pass the park where my high school friends used to hang, and […]
February 15-19, 2016 Sea glass: a reworked human product returned to the sand from whence it was wrought. There’s less of it now, but you can tell a lot about its origins if you know what to look for. Designer and writer Matt Steel is working on a simplified version of Thoreau’s Walden, and Michelle […]
On a slushy Ottawa night last week, I tromped into the Officer’s Mess of the Royal Canadian Air Force, here to attend the 513th meeting of the Arctic Circle. When I moved north to Yellowknife ten years ago, my Aunt Diana wrote that her husband Graham would have been pleased I was living in the land he […]
In the early fifteenth century, a new artistic tool spread rapidly throughout Western Europe. Single-point linear perspective – a geometric technique that involves a rectangular grid stretching toward a central vanishing point – was a coup in the quest to represent three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional surfaces. Art had never looked so realistic, and the technique was ubiquitous for […]
Five years ago, I received a fateful invitation to join the Last Word On Nothing. Since then, almost all of the faces have changed, but its maverick spirit lives on. Much like the culture of the Dorset, featured in my first post in 2011…: There’s nothing like a lost tribe to pique child-like curiosity. When an […]
December 13-17, 2015 Michelle’s job as a climate change reporter feels like working a crime beat in a lawless nation. Compared with the natural, abysmal state of international climate negotiations, the Paris agreement is something she celebrates, however briefly. Christie, meanwhile, is not impressed. The Paris agreement doesn’t include shipping or aviation, and it relies […]