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 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 ...
Alberta’s Black Swan
The best evidence of our conservative government’s cluelessness before the economy tanked in 2020 is the provincial budget. It was passed in a rush on March 18, 2020, two months after the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, had arrived in Canada. Oil demand in China was already down 20 per cent. Oil storage ...
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, to our “ranchette” near the Crowsnest Pass. We would hear the thrum of the plane’s Rotax motor ...