On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia came apart somewhere over Texas, reminding us that putting people into space is hard to do and very, very dangerous. Engineers determined a piece of foam that broke off during launch had damaged the heat shield on one of the wings. NASA knew about it almost immediately and […] More »

When you love something,  you want to know it loves you back. It’s why we look for ourselves in art: We want to see reflections of our struggles acknowledged, and we long to hear stories where we can be heroes. As a Black and Indian child of the 1990s, I was starving to see myself […] More »

In her bright turquoise van adorned with purple lightning bolts, Melissa Sariffodeen resembles a digital era Ms. Frizzle—travelling the country, expanding the minds of bright-eyed students in new and exciting ways. This is the Code Mobile, Canada’s first coding truck led by Sariffodeen, the CEO of Ladies Learning Code. Sariffodeen was inspired to start the […] More »

The next time you look at social media, I want you pay attention to a subtle detail on each post: the timestamp. If you’re on Twitter, for example, when was each post published? When I was writing this paragraph, I glanced down at my Twitter feed, and here’s what I saw: A tweet about a Chinese […] More »

Yes, it’s a blast from the past! Or if not a blast, maybe a small firecracker? Whose past? My past, obviously: I was Bart Gerrard, one of my noms de plume—the name of a then-forgotten and probably now more-forgotten Canadian newspaper caricaturist of the turn of the century. That’s the turn of the century before […] 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 »

The camera pans the much-anticipated pep rally, tasked with cheering-up the students of Riverdale High after their classmate’s recent murder. The cheerleading squad performs a dance to a mash-up of “Sugar, Sugar” (aptly, by The Archies), and even though the choreography is composed mainly of coquettish shrugging, the performance is so emotionally damaging to Cheryl Blossom—twin […] More »

Still from C’est juste la fin du monde, via YouTube. One Sunday last November, my friend Megan and I met at a French-language movie theatre in Rosemont–La Petite Patrie in Montreal. I stood in line for matinee tickets, and then Megan and I bought popcorn. I ordered maïs soufflé, un regulier; the worker at the counter […] More »