Red Book There is a little red book in which I etch occasions that seemed to matter to us for the sake of a future encounter with engraved instances that will make a boy or girl with something of my genetic structure unknowingly sad. This little red book is a little red bird, lost in […] More »

Quebec is going ahead with its ludicrous ban on religious head-coverings like the niqab and the burka on provincial government property. It’s an astonishing piece of legislation that manages the improbable feat of being baselessly arbitrary and obviously xenophobic. The whole law is crafted to be targeted at a single identifiable—and extremely tiny—minority, but Premier […] More »

November 13, 1971, The Pas, Manitoba. Four young white men drive past Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old Cree girl. They call for her to get in the car and party with them. “I think I heard a yes,” one man taunts. When she refuses, the men pull her into the car and drive off. Flip […] More »

It’s Tuesday, the day we run down a few picks of new and/or notable Canadian music. Just a digest of newish songs today, in contrast to last week’s epic paean to Tomboyfriend from Luke. What do you prefer for this feature? A quick selection of music to listen to, or a longer piece of writing […] More »

For the past six months, opposition parties in Ottawa and in Quebec City have been persistently calling for the appointment of Royal Commissions. At the federal level, the demand has been for an impartial inquiry into the fate of detainees that Canadian troops turned over to local authorities in Afghanistan, and whether or not the […] More »

When Ethiopia asked the world for food aid last October, former subsistence farmer Terefi Tekale was not among the 6.2 million people desperate for help. Though his family’s long-held plot in Ethiopia’s Konso region has done poorly in recent years—the soil is sterile, his corn stunted and his hillside eroded—an ambitious new development plan means […] More »

UPDATE, Sunday, March 28 — Google has re-scanned the site and the problem is solved. Ads will be back, problem-free, in the next day or so. — If you visited the magazine’s site today using the Firefox or Chrome browsers, you likely saw a window like the one above, warning you that This.org stands accused […] More »

Whoever’s pulling the strings at one major tampon-maker has had it with euphemisms. It’s Kotex-ploitation! Finally, an ad about tampons spoofs stupid ad lingo—”down there,” “sanitary napkins,” “that time of the month”—and dares to actually say the word vagina (you know, where it goes) in a television commercial. The run-down: “How do I feel about […] More »

There’s more to online piracy than Beyoncé singles and porn In the summer of 1999, a terrifying rumour began circulating on the then-young internet, gluing millions to their screens: Napster, the illegal music service, was about to be shut down. It seemed like the party with an endless soundtrack was coming to an end. The […] More »

Earth Hour is on Saturday, March 27, when people around the world will turn off all their electrical gadgets for one hour, starting at 8:30 pm, local time. Started in 2007 in Australia, Earth Hour has become a global juggernaut, with hundreds of cities and hundreds of millions of individuals participating. For the last few years, […] More »

Pretty much every “women and children first!” joke has already been made relating to the upcoming G8/G20 conferences in Toronto and Muskoka, and the Prime Minister’s announcement that maternal and children’s health would be the core of the agenda. The Conservatives have been dancing around the issue of reproductive planning and what they actually consider […] More »