The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back […] More »

Alice Munro, one of the giants of Canada’s literary scene, has always been a tremendously sensitive and humane writer; in turning down yet another nomination for the prestigious Giller Prize, she’s proven to be an equally sensitive and humane cultivator of Canadian writing talent. Having already won the Giller twice—for The Love of a Good […] More »

I met you in a hostel in Rennes. The weather was humid and this made the door stick: I threw my weight against it and fell into the room. Your pink sandals and your pack were lying in a corner and you were there, too: asleep. Eyes turned toward the window. I had to walk […] More »

For Toronto’s “Making Room” art show in 2006, Amy Lam and Jon McCurley—the duo who call themselves Life of a Craphead— erected a bed sitting on a couch. The couch was large and blue and the bed sat as a human would, folded at the waist, with two wooden legs on the ground. It looked […] More »

The drought in Northern Kenya this year is severe. Farah Olad, the Deputy Chief of Party of Education for Marginalized Children of Kenya (EMACK), an organization which works with Somali pastoral communities, tells me grey is the “color of death” in this rural region. And the whole landscape is grey: from the ground to the […] More »

Above we’ve embedded the live stream of today’s Citizen Media Rendezvous taking place in Montreal, sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada’s Citizenshift initiative. The segment above features four speakers: Véronique Marino (INIS) Geraldine Cahill (The Real News Network) David Beers (The Tyee) Laurent Mauriac (Rue 89) The second panel of speakers, above, featured […] More »

In July 2008, Switzerland’s Small Arms Survey released its 2008 annual report on which countries have the best and the worst records when it comes to transparency and the small arms trade — the diversion of weapons such as rifles and anti-tank guided weapons that can fuel civil conflicts and insurgencies. Canada’s score? A disappointing […] More »

If we ran a “WTF” blog post every time another ridiculous, inconclusive political poll came out, you’d never read anything else here. But since this particular batch of ridiculous, inconclusive polls came out as all the Canadian political parties were gearing up for the fall session, we’ll make an exception this time. Harris-Decima says the […] More »

Generally if I find myself awake at four in the morning, the best thing on TV is Vince Shlomi pitching the SlapChop or Billy Mays yelling at me from beyond the grave.  But this morning, I caught an unapologetic and often uncomfortably unflinching documentary on what day-to-day life in a wheelchair is like. More »

Jordan Himelfarb—who among many other talents is the Arts & Ideas editor for This Magazine and senior editor of The Mark, above—is giving a talk this Wednesday in Toronto called “The New World of Journalism: Audiences, Editorial and Momentum,” and if you’re interested in the future of our troubled news media, this will be worth […] More »

The other day I stumbled across a petition asking that the British government apologize to Alan Turing for “the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended [his] life and career,” and formally acknowledge the significance of his work. Here’s some background. Alan Turing is most readily associated with the Turing Test, which sought to demonstrate whether […] More »