If others don't notice my stutter, can I really call myself a stutterer at all?
Isabel Armiento
I was walking home from the grocery store when a well-dressed man politely stopped me to ask for directions. “Could you tell me which way to Bloor and…” He struggled to get the next word out, a pained expression on his face, but I knew better than to try to finish his sentence for him. […] More »
AI art can be fun to generate, but that doesn’t mean it’s ethical
Sarah Samuel
A picture may not be worth a thousand words anymore. Generative AI art tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which rely on artists’ existing work to generate images through textual prompts, became available to the public last year. Since then, conversations about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will render creative jobs obsolete have gripped many […] More »
Incarcerated people in Canada are often without access to information. Prison librarians are working to change that
Leslie Sinclair
“I still remember everything about it,” Zakaria Amara says, sketching the library inside Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison located in Bath, Ontario. He maps the librarian’s glass office inside the door from a controlled-movement hallway. An inspirational sign about reading hangs on the wall (he can’t recall what it says exactly). Next, the law […] More »
Canada has made changes to be less discriminatory toward queer blood donors, but is it enough?
Maddy Mahoney
Photo by Dieter Meyrl Last spring, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and six other suited-up politicians held a press conference announcing a long-awaited change to Canada’s blood donation system. Given that the change they were making—eliminating the blood donor screening question that deferred men who’d had sex with other men in the last three months—was really […] More »
Are you always on top of the Canadian news cycle? Are you well-versed on a wide variety of news topics? Are you always looking for progressive topics and angles? Are you enthusiastic about independent publishing? If so, we want you! This Magazine is looking for a News Editor! Our News Editor is responsible for overseeing […] More »
Illustration by Brintha Koneshachandra Dear Mom, The other day, I was making us breakfast and I reached into the fridge to grab the container of yogurt to eat with our puri. Now, you would think, having done essentially this every weekend of my entire life, I would not screech, “Ugh! Mom, where is the yogurt?! […] More »
Photo by Dimitri Nasrallah Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline (Véhicule Press) transports readers to mid-eighties Montreal when weight-loss centres were a burgeoning industry, and “body image” and “health consciousness” were terms just entering the vocabulary of self-care. Muna Heddad, a French teacher by trade, takes a job as a hotline phone operator at meal delivery company Nutri-Fort […] More »
Photos courtesy Jennifer David & Waubgeshig Rice When Jennifer David decided to start Storykeepers, a podcast that spotlights Indigenous literature, she knew Waubgeshig Rice was her only choice for a co-host. He was an experienced journalist with CBC, a published author—most recently of the bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press, 2018)—and they were […] More »
Illustration by Julia Galotta I’m a young woman, who can, to my knowledge, get pregnant and has long-held dreams of being a mother. When I was a child, I spent my days dutifully caring for my dolls—who were named Baby and Popstar. When I turned 13, I started babysitting the two toddlers who lived next […] More »
Seed the North takes an innovative approach to reforestation
Jadine Ngan
Photo courtesy Natasha Kuperman In Hazelton, B.C., one organization is undertaking an ambitious project: to regenerate the public forests of Canada’s north. Seed the North, founded in 2020 by infrastructure developer and architect Natasha Kuperman, isn’t the first to tackle reforestation. However, it has set out to do so with a fresh approach that combines […] More »
A look at pandemic-driven rent policies across Canada
Khadija Alam
Graphic by Valerie Thai Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis, and one perpetuating factor is the skyrocketing cost of rent. Rent control is a type of provincial rent regulation law that limits rent increases. While every province and territory restricts the frequency of rent increases, only four provinces have some sort of […] More »