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September-October 2023

A soft space to land

How a peer mentorship collective is helping early-career BIPOC artists

Alexa DiFrancesco

Three years ago, Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet and Sanaa Humayun were both working as junior employees for art centres whose staff were predominately white. Callihoo Ligtvoet is Cree, Métis, Dutch and mixed European and Humayun is Pakistani; the two friends, who co-hosted a book club together, started to talk about the isolation they felt in their respective […] More »
September-October 2023

The Beautiful After

In the ’00s, taking gobs of diet pills didn't feel like a choice. In some ways, little has changed

Rachel Ganz

It was the first day of class. I was an eighteen-year-old Broadway geek entering Syracuse University’s (SU) acting program. I spent the morning seated on the floor of “movement” class with 29 other adolescents in front of our teacher, David, a loud and upbeat SU graduate, Broadway star and self-described “hotdog”—an actor who trained with […] More »
September-October 2023

Tuning in

What's the media's role in the psychedelic renaissance?

Sofie Mikhaylova

One brisk November 1938 afternoon in Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hofmann successfully synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide for the first time. The compound was set aside and forgotten for five years until Hofmann resynthesized it, accidentally absorbed some, and took the world’s first acid trip. The discovery of acid, or LSD, changed the course of social […] More »
September-October 2023

Contingent freedom

Travel can be nearly impossible for Canadians who take methadone

Mikaela Toone

Charlotte Munro and her mom smiled for a selfie high above the frothy water of Niagara Falls. Amidst a difficult year where Munro endured both opioid withdrawal and a near-deadly infection, the weekend trip should have been a respite. But the getaway quickly turned sour because she was forced to forgo packing one essential item—her medication. […] More »
September-October 2023

Catching up to the crisis

In Montreal, harm reduction groups push for decriminalization

Madison McLauchlan

A pride flag flaps defiantly in the wind above a welcoming front porch. A basket of free naloxone kits hangs on the front door. On the wall upstairs, a poster reads “Activities to avoid dying sad/to make you happy” and lists acupuncture, bowling, and picnics. This is the home of Dopamine Montréal. Just like its […] More »
July/August 2023

Zora

Leila Marshy

Maybe you remember Zora. I used to see her on St. Laurent selling jewellery and T-shirts and scraps of paper scribbled with art. In and out of bars and cafés, always alone, a storming shadow. Our eyes met once and I smiled. She stared, walked on. So, when I saw her on Sunday, sitting in […] More »
July/August 2023

Daily Double

Katia Lo Innes

  There are few things left that I can still derive joy from, the night bus being one of them. Whenever I can’t sleep and feel terrible about the state of all things—which is often—I remember that I can just walk out of my apartment in the middle of the night and wait at the […] More »
July/August 2023

Growing out of it

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 »
July/August 2023

Drawing a line

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 »
July/August 2023

Books behind bars

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 »
May-June 2023

Blood Feud

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 »