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 »

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 »

A few years ago, at a freelancing workshop, I participated in an exercise about the power of personal branding. I had my doubts but was not quick enough to duck out, like other attendees. It was the dreaded “get to know you” session of the workshop. We moved our chairs to the centre of the […] More »

When I was a child, I used to confuse the title of Us Weekly magazine—a glossy about celebrities—as U.S. magazine, the entirety of America summed up in a glossy about celebrities. Twenty years later, the same can be done with Canada: The Story of Us. First-person plural pronouns are a messy affair, and it turns out […] More »

My decision to watch Flavor Flav over Tony Soprano was, at the time, a no-brainer. On March 12, 2006, I had two television options: a viewing party of the first episode of the final, and sixth, season of HBO’s hit crime drama The Sopranos or a solo session with the first season ender of VH1’s Flavor […] More »

  Photo by J. Walton It has been nearly one year since the Liberal government enacted a program to admit 25,000 Syrian refugees arrived in Canada. In their first year, many of the families faced several challenges to overcome: getting to know a brand new country, finding suitable accommodations, and trying to find a job […] More »

Post Ashes, Station I Between us, that tune you love more than your life, like honey is a thing said without need for panacea Though I’d haven’t a few months ago agreed, the other day okay’d it: I’d have to dream to bring you back, heralding midnight, the perfect crucible, your skull like a harness […] More »

Photo courtesy of Veronica Simmonds/Braidio If Veronica Simmonds were writing a how-to guide for unparalleled elation, it might go a little something like this: follow your curiosities, meet all kinds of people, do the research, piece it all together and go live on-air—without knowing if anybody is listening. A sound-loving radio artist from Toronto, Simmonds has […] More »

A scene from Just BGraphic’s Summer Arts Academy 2016. Photo courtesy of Just BGraphic Past the gymnasium and down a stairwell, a standard classroom scene unfolds in Toronto’s Downsview Secondary School. Students file in, arrange themselves around tables, chat as their instructor, Josh Watkis, asks for order. Watkis, a spoken word artist, has scrawled “my childhood […] More »

A man styles his hair by a million unnamed agonies. Hears the car horn, the swear flare, the biting chest — all insults injure “the self,” which is bullshit. Everything else is Weather, torn flesh, “Reality.” I am a mountain, and by I I mean the shoreline, the sea-bed, the cup that cradles the injured […] More »

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, […] More »