Young Québécois filmmakers are rejecting the commercially successful nostalgia movies of recent years in favour of suburban ennui, substance abuse, and suicide. Get ready to get gloomy! The title of Quebec director Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, A Film Without Guns) is not only a playful warning to viewers seeking the adrenaline […] More »

Aside from the fact that single older women have enough stigma to deal with, the “cougar” trend has been a rampant part of pop culture for years now. And while, for some reason, the thought of an older woman dating a younger man draws giggles and raised eyebrows more often than not, up until this […] More »

The online version of Maclean’s recent piece on young women really doesn’t do the print version justice. “Inside the Dangerously Empty Lives of Teenage Girls” was splashed across the cover, along with two dangerously empty looking girls. As usual, the cover suggested something more comprehensive and controversial than the actual article inside the magazine—in this […] More »

This happened a couple of days ago now and we’re only just now getting around to blogging it, but we’re very excited to tell you that This Magazine has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards. Industry awards can be pretty inside-baseball, but this is an excellent opportunity to highlight a few of our many […] More »

Vitreous Something One green eye followed my footsteps thru the parking lot. I caught it in a rusted hand, surprised by my blinking palm. plucked it dryly, placed it in the ashtray so I wouldn’t squish it on the steering wheel. It blinked disapproval at the music squirping from the speakers “You’re pretty, for an […] More »

In today’s Verbatim, we’ve got a transcript of my interview with Alisa Palmer, director of Cloud 9, currently playing in Toronto at the Panasonic Theatre. Cloud 9 is British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play that masks a scathing critique of English colonialist notions of sex, gender, and race beneath a fast-talking and often absurd family […] More »

In today’s edition of Listen to This, I interviewed Alisa Palmer, who directed the production of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s landmark play Cloud 9, currently on stage at the Panasonic Theatre in Toronto. Cloud 9 is a hilarious satire on colonial-era notions about sex and gender, and how those ideas have crumbled over the years. […] More »

Among the remarkable details of Roman Polanski’s arrest last fall was the notably different reaction to it on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. While the North American media published explicit and condemnatory accounts of Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, in Europe the reaction was much more ambivalent. The governments of France and […] More »

My doctor and I sat there, blankly staring at one another, wondering where we both went wrong. I was perched beside his desk, asking for a prescription refill for my birth control. “You don’t need to ask me,” he kept saying. “Just call ahead, ask for what you’d like and come pick it up at […] More »

Alison Lee’s November-December 2008 This Magazine cover story, “The New Face of Porn” was chosen as one of 14 pieces to be published in Tightrope Books’ The Best Canadian Essays 2009. There are some great pieces of writing in there, and we’re thrilled that an essay that started in the pages of This is getting […] More »

A new generation of feminists are reclaiming porn, both as consumers and producers. A (very) intimate journey The first time I remember thinking critically about pornography, I was 15. It was the early 1990s, and my friend and I were going through a stack of discarded magazines, undertaking the well-loved teenage art of collage. Between […] More »