Category: Journalism
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the layoff
I love my job at the Toronto Star. The elevator spiel — that I get paid to look at photos all day — really is the happy truth. Like, I got to make a video about a Lego man who went to space. But the Star, like all newspapers, is struggling. (They posted a 44…
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Where the wild things are
I’ve been working the Toronto Star for almost two years now, and I’ve finally written my first piece for them… a little essay about the joy of foraging for berries in the city. A pint of serviceberries is however you value an hour’s work. Grasp the branch with one hand, an open plastic bag looped…
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R.I.P. Cynthia Brouse
Going into fourth year, we had been warned by older students that our copy editing and fact-checking instructor Cynthia Brouse was a little strange — her obsession with Paul Gross, an (overly?) honest admission to the previous year’s group that she lay somewhere between fag hag and celibate — but for a nascent feminist such as…
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It’s a mad, mad world
The following is an unabridged version of my column that ran in Metro on Aug. 20, 2009: There been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long But now I think I’m able to carry on It’s been a long, a long time coming But I know a change is gonna come The third…
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Locavorism at its purest and most insane.
Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. It requires a willful abstinence from convenience and plenty, a core promise of the modern world. Our bountiful era is predicated on the division of labor: We don’t sew our own clothes, we don’t build…