The New Literacy
Calgary’s new public library garnered worldwide attention when it opened in November 2018. And rightly so: Its stunning, inventive design made Architectural Digest’s “most anticipated” list [...]
Harry Vandervlist
Harry Vandervlist
The Year of Bargaining Diplomatically
Last year the government of Alberta faced a mountain of public-sector contract negotiations. A whole mountain range, actually. Collective agreements covering roughly 180,000 employees expired: [...]
Citizen Taxpayer
The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.” George Orwell offers these colourful examples of debased political language in his classic 1946 essay [...]
Cosmopolitan Alberta
The other day my curator and writer friend Diana Sherlock got back from her new flat in Berlin. In her Calgary living room, we looked at photos of the view from her Berlin window, which overlooks [...]
Will that be Truth or Profit?
Over the coming decades, Alberta’s universities will be lucky to survive in any recognizable form. Over the coming decades, Alberta’s universities will be among the most important contributors to [...]
Seeing in Black and White
For well over a century, if you were talking about photography as an art form, you were talking about black and white photographs produced using film and photographic paper. From Eugene Atget [...]
Really Big Sky Country
Scholars and scientists were the first genuine global citizens. From medieval scholars walking across a fragmented Europe in search of a copy of Aristotle’s writings to Charles Darwin filling the [...]
Playwrights: Alberta’s Forgotten Wordsmiths?
“For much too long,” writes John Murrell in his introduction to Vern Thiessen’s 1996 play Blowfish, “the playwright has been regarded as inhabiting a sort of neutral (and neutered) zone between [...]
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The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
The Big Man in Cargo Shorts
Leonard was the first to find him. The man was face down in the school’s outdoor learning space, next to a planter of basil. He was fat, his calves the size of a turkey dinner, his hair a gnarled mess of seaweed. Leonard wondered if the man was dead and ...