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 […]
In September 2000, the UN came up with eight Millenium Development Goals. Things like solving malaria and reducing infant mortality. Perhaps out of despair for the scale of these problems–but I fear out of something worse in me–I show no signs of dedicating my life to such noble goals. They’re more important than anything I’m doing, […]
February 19-23, 2018 My g-g-uncle Norman experienced an early wilderness death by charismatic megafauna: eaten by a lion. Nevertheless, he was deemed to have died for King and Empire. The open secret of the lies of professional wrestling have been generalized into the political sphere, economics, and even scientific discourse, says Sally. Are you in […]
This post originally appeared in March 2012. “It is with the deepest sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of your son Norman. He died after an encounter with a lion near the Keito River in Portuguese West Africa 10/5/15. He made a very gallant fight and killed the lion with his […]
When the official photographer’s helicopter hovered above the Arctic Ocean for the bank note photo shoot, the Canadian Coast Guard ship Amundsen carried Jay Cullen’s oceanographic research equipment prominently on its deck. The icebreaker was to feature on the red Canadian fifty-dollar bill, and Cullen saw his chance at immortality. Unfortunately, when the mint released […]
