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BHM, Day 2: George Elliott Clarke
I’m not through writing about early black settler culture, but I am shifting my focus to the Maritimes today*, and moving a ways down some of those early family lines. A few years back, I had the...
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No, Little Buddy, There Isn’t a Gotham City
I have two young nephews I love something fierce, and an honesty policy that often leads to some pretty long-winded conversations with the eldest, aged five. Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter...
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The Ends of Education
Last summer, I was working on a series of letters for my nephews to read when they’re older, under the guiding principles that a) prepubescence and early adolescence can be abysmally confusing times of...
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On the Intimacy of Strangers
I only met my paternal grandmother once, on her visit from England in my early teens. She slept in my eight-by-ten bedroom, converted by my father from a kitchen when I was quite small, and I can’t...
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Scientific Storytelling: Why It Matters How We Write the World
There’s a part in Genesis meant to explain why many animals have stripes, spots, and related patterns. As in “Just-So” stories from around the world, the tale makes the best use it can of its immediate...
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Living in a World of Magical Thinkers
It’s Easter weekend, as the surfeit of chocolate and bunny imagery in store fronts attested to yesterday–and also the heavy-handed Christian parade running down King St., Waterloo, midday. “God...
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Conversation Enders: The Problem with Hero-Worship
Working part-time at a local bookstore is a great reprieve from the isolation of my studies. Just as I get to know many customers’ personal lives, so too have many of them learned that I’m a doctoral...
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On the 2015 Hugos, and the Promise of Fantasy and SciFi
In the last week, the Islamic State took control of 90% of a Palestinian refugee district in Damascus, Syria, worsening an already dire situation for some 18,000 human beings trapped within. Meanwhile,...
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“Failure of the Genetic Code”: On the Choice Not To Have Children
I finished Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids just as a harried mother and her children rushed from a taxi to meet an intercity bus that, as it...
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Talk Like a Conservative: Conversation-Starters in an Era of Right-Wing Extremes
In the wake of the Republican National Convention — part of an American presidential season that has Canadians as riveted as we are unnerved — I want to talk a little about information silos, and how...
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