Retrospective: Fatherhood
I attended classes and read books. I learned the mechanics of back labour and the action of intravenous pitocin. Experts taught me all about breech birth, water birth and afterbirth. Nobody, [...]
Marcello Di Cintio
Marcello Di Cintio
Head Bangers
Tristan Rice didn’t remember the hit. He didn’t remember much of the rest of the game either, only that sometime in the third quarter one of his fellow offensive linemen asked him, “What the hell [...]
Language Limbo
In December 2014, Hetty Roessingh of the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education received a call for help from her colleagues at the Faculty of Engineering. A third of the faculty’s [...]
Weightless in Exile
Ballerina Hayna Gutierrez comes from the tropics, but her long journey to Alberta Ballet began in a Canadian snowstorm. In November 2007, Gutierrez—a star with Ballet Nacional de Cuba and one of [...]
A Hymn in Aramaic
Noël Farman performs a rite born in ancient Babylon and sung in the language of Jesus Christ. Farman is a Chaldean Catholic priest. The Chaldean Order, originally known as the Church of the East, [...]
Fatherhood
1. The downy hair that forms on a baby in utero is called lanugo; the soft spot on its head, the fontanelle. A pregnant woman is called a gravida, and the dark line that appears on her belly and [...]
The Zookeeper
As we tour the aviaries on his Denman Island property, Peter Karsten doesn’t hold doors open for me. This isn’t rudeness; it’s a zookeeper’s etiquette, a behaviour Karsten picked up during his 30 [...]
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The Lesson of Lougheed
For 100 years, between 1905 and 2005, Albertans changed their government only three times (1921, 1935, 1971). The last of these elections, the most portentous, happened 50 years ago this August. Alberta has now changed government twice in the past six years. The next election may see yet another new government—meaning ...
The Assault on Higher Education
The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it declared that the province’s grant to the schools should be reduced by 20 per cent by 2023. The rationale for this ...
Rediscovering a River
The Cree called it Kisiskâciwanisîpiy—the swiftly flowing river. For the Blackfoot, it was omaka-ty—the big river. It starts in the Columbia Icefield, at the toe of the Saskatchewan Glacier, and cuts the province in half as it flows through Banff and Jasper national parks, northeast to Edmonton, then east-by-southeast across the ...