Tucked away in an alley off the corner of Bloor and Ossington is what looks like a two-storey garage with only a small purple neon sign acting as a beacon to passersby. This is home for a collection of hackers and hobbyists known as Site 3—a communal space that rewards curiosity of the trades. Many are […] More »

Eight students graduated from high school in Kugaaruk, Nunavut, this year. That might sound like a tough year for education, but the graduating class of 2017 was the biggest on record for this Inuit hamlet of about 900 people. The milestone is all the more exceptional when you consider Kugaardjuq School’s secondary students finished the year […] More »

When Laura Palmer’s dead body washed up, wrapped in plastic, on a riverbank in Twin Peaks, Washington, I was 18—a year older than Laura was when she died. I met Laura on Sunday, April 8, 1990, when I, along with 34.6 million other viewers, tuned in to watch “Northwest Passage,” the two-hour pilot episode of […] More »

After Shanghai, I caught a cheap flight to Bangkok. In the sky, I met a group of Australians who joked about North Korea and Kim Jong-il the whole time and who said “g’day mate” for my pleasure. We parted ways at the airport then I travelled to Ko Phangan, where I think I was roofied at […] More »

A woman in a coral windbreaker peeks through cattails on the periphery of a marsh, her rubber boots camouflaged by vegetation and mud as she strains, clipboard in hand, to detect signs of amphibian life. A frog hops into a beam of sunlight through the dense flora and she marks a tick on her clipboard. […] More »

Growing up in an Ismaili Muslim community in Toronto, there was no explicit acceptance of queer folks, says Thawer. “I simply did not know where to look to find other people like myself.” At the age of 23, Thawer finally found his people at Salaam Canada, a social network and support group for those who […] More »

I too am redacted, unsuitable reptilian, shell of speech I have forgotten, unless ravines can drown each sound they cup from my throat. Exposed against this anemone August is a way of unlearning the untaken graft of leeching questions, a mischief starved in whys. Why-because too much is the way of knowing the chrysalis before […] More »

There’s a running joke in the Northwest Territories that you need to travel outside the Arctic to hang out with your neighbours. That was the case for Yellowknife artists Greyson Gritt and Tiffany Ayalik, who first met a few years ago at the Northern Scene festival in Ottawa. Their spontaneous partnership soon became Quantum Tangle—a […] More »

When most kids in his age are in a classroom learning angles, Ben Hewitt’s son is making a bow. He’s testing the string and the flex of the wood. He shoots an arrow and figures out which angle makes the arrow fly the farthest, flinging them around the Vermont acreage the Hewitts call home. He’s been […] More »

Confession: The first thing I do when I start reading a book is crack the spine. It’s satisfying. I’ve never understood people who keep their books in pristine condition. They are meant to be lived in—dog-eared and coffee stained and marked up all to hell. The pages should be wrinkled from that time you dropped it […] More »

Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho By Jen Sookfong Lee  ECW, $12.95 Jen Sookfong Lee’s Gentlemen of the Shade, the latest volume in ECW’s entertaining Pop Classics series, thoughtfully examines writer and director Gus Van Sant’s 1991 critically-acclaimed indie film My Own Private Idaho. Lee was a Doc Martens-wearing 15-year-old when she first […] More »