The Final Frame
Twilight descends on the luminous art of photojournalism
To see life, to see the world, to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machine, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon’…to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed. So wrote Henry Luce in his 1934 prospectus […]
The Dark Side of Saint Peter
Songbirds are chirping, coffee is brewing, and the voice of Morningside is salving the nation's soul with his offhand geniality. Then the microphone switches off
On the afternoon of Saturday, November 2, as the CBC celebrated 60 years of public broadcasting, I was exposed for the first time to the Peter Gzowski phenomenon. Inside Mother Corp.’s marble mausoleum on Toronto’s Front Street, women and men in their fifties climb on perimeter railings for a better look as the cheering begins. […]
Paper, Scissors, Shock
Done on the cheap with indie attitude, zines carry all the news that's misfit to print
October 6, 1996, was an unusually warm day in downtown Toronto-warm enough that the organizers of Canzine 96 had to prop open the front and patio doors of the Library Imperial Pub and Tavern. Light poured into the dark, oak-lined pub, making the place look like a Muskoka lodge, open for the first day of […]
Intern at Your Own Risk
Look kid, here's the deal. Three months general assignment. Sink or swim. And by the way, where's my muffin?
n the box, all hell may break loose. A 15-by-10-foot room in The Toronto Star newsroom, the box is a netherworld filled with photos of dead people, mug shots of killers and old press releases about Paul Bernardo. A counter circles the room stacked with electronics: seven radio scanners, two computers, two telephones, a television, […]
Shift Happens
It was launched as the self-proclaimed voice of an unsettled generation. Now it's time for Shift to grow up and get a real niche
The light turned red 10 seconds ago. Evan Solomon adjusts his longshoreman’s toque and continues across the intersection through oncoming snow flurries and mercifully few cars. Shift‘s editor-in-chief and VP of Behaviour Publishing Inc. has two sweaters beneath his coat as he wends his way to the new Shift offices, still under renovation, darting neatly […]
The Art of the Matter
Shaping the raw material of fact with the creative tools of fiction, the literary journalists reveal a deeper truth
A funny thing happened to David Macfarlane at about this time last spring. The first anniversary of the Progressive Conservatives’ rise to power in Ontario was approaching and Toronto Life wanted a profile of Premier Mike Harris. Macfarlane accepted the assignment, and aware of his reputation for writing quirky and unorthodox profiles, he set his […]
The Good
Why Ideas is still a good idea
It’s hard to talk about the CBC these days without referring to cutbacks in the same breath. But it’s precisely because of the threat posed by those cutbacks-the context for numerous editorial polemics about the legitimacy of public broadcasting-that we have chosen to pay tribute to what many call “The New Yorker of the air,” […]
The Massacre That Never Was and the Terrorists Who Always Were
Reports and retorts from a Globe and Mail foreign correspondent who came home with a suitcase full of questions
Sometime in August 1993, I found myself rattling in an ancient Cessna over one of the densest parts of the Brazilian Amazon dressed partly in my pyjamas and a soiled pair of khakis that I had discarded in a dark corner of my hotel room the night before. I barely had enough time to dress […]
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
AM Radio is talking up a storm, but does anybody have anything to say?
In a world dominated by CDs, AM sound quality doesn’t cut it anymore. Music is simply better on FM. But even though AM’s share of Canadian listeners fell from 64 percent in 1982 to 48 percent in 1992, AM stations still managed to capture five of the top ten places in eight of the nine […]
Dissent and Sensibility
Linda McQuaig's uncompromising journalism challenges Canada's economic elite by chipping away at policies that are seemingly cast in stone
The Town Hall theatre at the University of Toronto is a modern haven of academia. The chairs are plush and comfortable, and the room, though it seats around 200, has an atmosphere that manages to be both intimate and scholarly. The people filling the hall on this Thursday evening in mid-November 1995 come in a […]
