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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Reducing the Harm
It's a little after 10 o’clock in the morning and Taylor feels like she’s climbing the walls.
When her name is called and the door to Lethbridge’s supervised drug consumption site buzzes open, Taylor moves quickly on her crutches. She settles into a chair at the second booth from the end ...
Jason Kenney’s Vision for K-12
It was by all accounts, a fiery speech. Standing on a blue-curtained stage in front of a couple thousand supporters at the UCP’s inaugural policy convention in Red Deer in May 2018, leader Jason Kenney went on the attack against anti-oilsands activists and the foreign money he says funds them ...
Thug Life
The month after Chris Crane’s 18th birthday was a blur. The Alberta Warriors gang member spent most of it drunk or stoned, blowing $16,000 on alcohol and marijuana in just three weeks. His first month of official adulthood ended with an armed robbery, a drive-by shooting at a house frequented ...