Thoughts on the creative value of taking a break “MY LIFE IN MONTREAL WAS SO GOOD,” said the songwriter Sean Nicholas Savage in a recent interview for Bad Day magazine. “We did so many projects. We made tons of albums and we were making movies and just doing tons of shit all the time.” Savage […] More »
The Victoria Day sun beckoned my five-year-old daughter and I to the park. While playing near the slide she was pushed over by a tongue-waging canine; looks like Bella was beckoned too. The kiddo laughed it off and the six-month-old puppy kept running with her owners, a family of three. The mother told me how […] More »
When was the last time you climbed on a swing? Not the publicly funded, safe helicopter-parental playground kind, but a backyard homemade one, constructed with palm-scratching ropes and a shaky wooden board that threatens to cause a splinter, or worse. I had forgotten the sensory thrill of the swing until Christmas, when I experienced Ann […] More »
While walking along East 29th Street near Madison Avenue last Christmas, I discovered a faded fallout shelter sign mounted on the brick wall above a freight entrance. Few images better illustrate the Cold War era than these three yellow triangles against a black (or sometimes blue) background. At a time when Russia was thought to […] More »
That Gideon Forman is an activist should come as no surprise. The child of New York peace activists, he spent his 1960s childhood handing out leaflets around his Greenwich Village home. What is surprising is that this wiry man in his 40s has become one of Canada’s best environmental strategists and led a group of […] More »
[Editor’s note: today we launch “Verbatim,” which will be a regular feature where we provide a transcript of our new podcast series, Listen to This. We’ll put these up on the blog shortly after each podcast goes online.] In the first installation of our new, relaunched podcast series (Oh! And we’re now on iTunes!) Nick […] More »
This is the first in our relaunched series of podcasts from This Magazine. Over the next few months (we’ll go at least to the beginning of summer and then likely take a break) we hope to introduce you to some of Canada’s most interesting thinkers, talkers, and doers in politics, art, and activism. I’ll be […] More »
When the Sri Lankan army crushed the Tamil Tigers last spring, it was the end of the war. But for four veteran activists, this is just the beginning I can smell chilies and spices in the cool night air. A few Tamil men and women are handing out biryani in Styrofoam containers to protesters gathered […] More »
What does “free” look like? This was the prompt sent out to a group of local Toronto artists around two months ago. The results, which were hung along the fourth-floor hallway of the Case Goods Warehouse in the Distillery District last weekend, elegantly captured a word that is part economic reality, part political manifesto, and […] More »