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 [...]
Marcello Di Cintio
Marcello Di Cintio
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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Beyond Belief
Dianne Macaulay sits at a picnic table in front of the brand new, $42-million St. Joseph’s Catholic High School at the northeastern edge of Red Deer. Across the road, new tracts of suburban housing and retail centres gradually take over slow-rolling farmland. Built to accommodate 900 students, the school will ...
Shattered Dream
Shortly after noon on July 29, 1985, a careless driver reaching for a dropped cigarette veered onto the shoulder of the Trans-Canada Highway near Calgary, slamming into a group of teenage cyclists headed to Kananaskis for a camping holiday. He killed three and injured six.
A horrified witness, Bill Pratt, president ...
Blowing Away the Magic
Why is it that we choose so often to replace the sublime with the ridiculous?
Take, for example, the miracle of photosynthesis. It arose, scientists believe, almost 3.5 billion years ago. Life was little more than a precarious experiment until organisms first began to harvest the sun’s light to create organic ...