The importance of thinking before you click Online media has monetized humanity’s rubbernecking reflex like never before. “Clickbait,” as defined by Urban Dictionary, is an “eye-catching link on a website which encourages people to read on. It is often paid for by the advertiser or generates income on the number of clicks.” Clickbait is now […]

Thoughts on the creative value of taking a break “MY LIFE IN MONTREAL WAS SO GOOD,” said the songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage in a recent interview for Bad Day magazine. “We did so many projects. We made tons of albums and we were making movies and just doing tons of shit all the time.” Savage […]

Why the Canadian government needs to hit refresh on its digital strategies When former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stood in the House of Commons and proclaimed that anyone who didn’t support the government’s new Lawful Access legislation was standing with the child pornographers, the Internet collectively decided he was being ridiculous. When MP Dean […]

In the late ’90s, the Canadian government debuted what was supposed to be a new, golden era of rehabilitation in women’s prisons. Yet, less than two decades later, the dream has failed. What one former inmate’s struggles and successes tell us about a broken system RIGHT BEFORE WE MEET FOR THE FIRST TIME, AVA* SENDS […]

What would happen if housing were enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? One activist’s inside account of the radical new fight to end homelessness In 1996, fresh out of high school, I co-founded the Calgary chapter of the anti-poverty activist group Food Not Bombs, together with a group of youth active in […]

1. What on earth did she want from him? From them? Approval? She was embarrassed by how little she knew, or would own, of her own motivations. She was also too hot in her heavy wool coat, and damp, wet really, hair like feathers stuck to her brow. Add frustrated to the list. After a […]

screams the advent of written history at those of us who think we’ve never said a word before. At all. When no one listens he curls into a basketball. His bee-loud glade’s a sling of mud, he digs for clues, unlucky grubs. He digs, and digs, and reads the soil conditions for paraphrases of the […]

In the dark blue future I will quiet. I have no idea about anything. I suppose I’ll know what I know or I can wait— and be really & sunnishly in the knowledge (being whole limber accomplished jazzy “didn’t/did” “come around” “wish list” “look hard” here I am— You wanted so you walked. You walked, […]