When the mammoth pharmaceutical company Bayer announced in 2009 that it would be making NorLevo, a morning-after pill, available over the counter to women in Toronto, it failed to mention one small detail: it doesn’t work for every woman. The drug, which is identical to Plan B One-step, (the more popular emergency contraception pill), may […] More »
Inequality, thy name is doorknob! Recently, here at the offices of This Magazine, where the magic of journalism comes alive, and even the chairs have a political opinion, we’ve installed a doorknob. We retired our door lever, and got a doorknob. Folks, let me tell you, I do not like it. The first morning after […] More »
I’m not a psychoanalyst, but I can say with some confidence that the recent spate of Conservative party attack ads, trying to position Justin Trudeau as some dandy whose wrists are too delicate to prop up the weight of Canada’s mighty economy (“…in over his head”, in their words), are part of a rich, dumb […] More »
“I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends.” -Virginia Woolf There’s a hoary old cliché about male nerds that they’re perennially afraid of women, clamming up whenever one begins to talk, scoffing through their retainer at the thought of one intellectually matching them on […] More »
You’ve got nothing to hide. You’re an upstanding, shoes-wearing citizen who smells like soap and carries good conversations. You haven’t a single thing to hide. What does it matter if Bell Canada, this past week, announced that it will track their customers’ location, media habits, search activity, website interests, and application usage? You’re a modern […] More »
When I returned from China over the summer, having worked there for a year and a half, people would ask me, “What was it like?” And I, like a child trying to verbalize their first lofty idea, was sort of tongue-tied. There are over a billion individual perspectives in the country, yet only one autocratic […] More »
The Five Eyes! The Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC)! The Olympia spying program! The Advanced Network Tradecraft! These seem like names lifted from espionage paperbacks, the kind with shiny embossed covers bearing some hyper-masculine pen name like Dick Richter. But, sadly, they aren’t the stuff of fiction. Slides were leaked last week that implicate […] More »
“The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.” -Slavoj Zizek As we all move slowly into the second […] More »
By the time Friday rolled around last week there was a veritable anthology of jokes to which “David Gilmour” was the punch line. The paper-bag jowls and complacent half-smile of his face pasted on News Feeds and blogs like an advert for a public flogging. Everywhere that CanLit went, so too went the name David […] More »
I eat meat. I like the taste of it, and each day I witness my belly’s lust for the stuff dupe my mind into concordance. It’s simple. I look at a cluster of cooked chicken strands in a shawarma sandwich and it has none of the paradigmatic signs of life or pain or loss that […] More »
Amid the whirlwind of controversies surrounding rape and consent, I’m reminded of the cliché, “raping the land”. It’s a grisly metaphor that’s come to signify the senseless destruction of an otherwise innocent place. Nowhere is that metaphor better actualized than in the laying of a pipeline through the pristine B.C. interior. And have the […] More »