Long regarded as the enemy of literacy, comic books and graphic novels are increasingly useful as a way of improving reading skills among otherwise reluctant students, young and old On a cold mid-February afternoon under overcast skies, a school bell rings. The halls of Toronto’s Agnes Macphail Public School flood with children dressed in puffy […] More »
In Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan, parallel education systems still exist: the secular public school boards, and separate Catholic school boards. It is time to abolish that system. The problem of separate school boards is not their Catholicism; it is their separateness. Public funding elevates one religious tradition above all others, and in secular, multicultural contemporary Canada, that […] More »
It’s easy to despair of politics in the 21st century. We seem cursed with high recurrence: on issues like climate change, poverty, and democracy, we experience the same problems, the same arguments, and the same incomplete fixes. Why is it so hard to make change stick? “You cannot have outer revolution without inner revolution,” explains […] More »
The Journal of Behavioral Medicine tells us what humans have always known—singing in groups is good for you. Sing and immune-boosting proteins come flooding through your bloodstream. Psychophysiological changes take hold. Your mood is elevated. Bruce Peninsula knows this intuitively. The band, which can swell to more than a dozen, mixes gospel, folk, and prog […] More »
Calgary is not a place to stay. A cultural wasteland with a boom-bust oil economy where hard workers can make their money before moving to a “real” city with “real” arts and culture—but not a place to stay. This is an all-too-common belief about Calgary. But skeptics should take a closer look at the Heart […] More »
Before his experience with the youth volunteer program Katimavik, Kamloops resident Erik Nelson subscribed to the usual Quebec stereotypes. “Out here in the West,” he says, “we kind of view Quebec in a very simple light: as the angry, dissatisfied province.” Nine months later, you’ll find Nelson busy planning ways to feed his new-found “obsession” […] More »
Dance is an art form often discussed in terms of its complexity and mystery. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B. Yeats famously asked. One wonders, then, what he would make of dance film. For when you add a second layer—the dance of a director’s eye and viewfinder around the dancer—you get […] More »
In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it. That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s […] More »
“Arts For All”: that’s the motto of Winnipeg’s 2010 reign as the cultural capital of Canada. While the idea is a worthy one, the fact is, our nation is home to some of the most expensive, least accessible museums and galleries in the world. Earlier this year, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing reported that expensive […] More »
Though you might reasonably condemn the modern internet for a variety of reasons—ruining attention spans, turning all public discourse into a shouting match, or insulting your sexual prowess with badly punctuated mass emails—one thing the medium could always reasonably claim was its potential for spreading truth. Decentralized and egalitarian, the web seemed to herald the […] More »
Aging sucks, says Michael Roy Ames. At 45, he sees signs of his own mortality every time he looks in a mirror—the greying and thinning hair, the creases in his face. Ames doesn’t despair, though. He expects to see the day when scientific advances will reverse his aging process, replace his body parts as they […] More »