I pack four books and a magazine for a three-day trip. Then I buy more at the airport. I forget to pack a change of trousers. This will come back to bite me when I vomit on a boat. The first thing I do when I land is get hoodwinked by not one, but two […]
July 16-20, 2018 “Inscrutable, argent agent of the crepuscular” — To what does Rebecca refer? Find out in the poem she wrote this week. Guest Robin Mejia reminds us that child abduction by the state has a history, and in El Salvador the legacy has been an enduring solidarity among victims and the equally enduring […]
Some people seek out Canada Day; others have Canada Day thrust upon them. And so it was thrust upon me this year when, flying back from a wedding in Lethbridge, Alberta on Sunday, I boarded my Toronto-to-Ottawa plane at 9:15pm. Throughout our airborne hour, hundreds of tiny fireworks displays sparkled in the darkness below. […]
June 18-22, 2018 This week, Emma writes an Amazon review of her half-dome tent. That is, a review of how it fares through multiple trips through the Amazon—and everywhere else. Christie reminds herself to apply the base rate principle the next time she sees an ambiguous animal in her motion-triggered game camera. Michelle transports us […]
I remember the thrill of my first byline. The feeling faded pretty quickly but it returned every time I broke into a new publication and saw my name on the page of a magazine I respected. Having a little bit of name recognition has been useful. But for the last seven years—the same length of […]
These things always look impossible until they are inevitable. Cannabis is to be legal across Canada starting this summer. Hard at work on winning hearts and minds for the plan, our Prime Minister tells the story of his late brother Michel, who crashed his car as a 23-year-old with two joints stashed in his glove […]
Convention centers are funny places. They create insular worlds during any given symposium, but on the margins between those events they hold space for some random intermixing of cosmologies—the kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination that open-plan architects could only dream of. Such a confluence occurred the weekend before the TED conference in Vancouver this year. I […]
Within the last three years, two of my closer university friends have died. I moved away from Toronto a decade ago, and with those moves I was less frequently in touch with my college friends, but I always assumed we could go on picking up where we left off whenever I was in town. In […]