The BookNet Dictatorship
According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.
View ArticleBurning Mistry
Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?
View ArticleCanada for Spartans
Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.
View ArticleSex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity
In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.
View ArticleDivergence
Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.
View ArticleMetamorphoses
Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.
View ArticleA Table in Paris
Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.
View ArticleDeviance on Display
Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.
View ArticleWheels
Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.
View ArticleNoir
Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.
View ArticleObserver and Observed
Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.
View ArticleAgainst Efficiency
Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.
View ArticleBoob Tube
Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?
View ArticlePower to the Reader
Alberto Manguel reveals that words are dangerous creatures, with the ability to both hinder and help.
View ArticleHow to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read, Part Two
I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.
View ArticleWarrior Nation
The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.
View ArticleTigers' Anatomy
As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.
View ArticleIt's a Free Country, Isn't It?
During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.
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