FordScraper

The comments on the Facebook page of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford are, on the whole, positive and congratulatory. And in the wake of ‘Crackgate’ Facebook fans have been posting a plethora of supportive comments:

“Rob. Hang on. you are…

Photo/graphica

In recent years the graphic novel has morphed into an alternative medium for non-fiction storytelling. From Art Spiegelman’s Maus which documented his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis which details the author’s life…

C A S I ( N O / G O )

Essay: Communing With The Digital Dead

A smiling Cayne Miceli holds a fetishistic staff bejeweled with an animal skull, and gazes directly into the photographer’s lens. The image is mounted in a photo album with cream-coloured, corrugated pages. There is no caption, and no indication of…

P A P A N A C K

Papanack zoo is currently boarded up for the winter, but in the summer months it overflows with visitors. From all over the Ottawa region, parents bring their children to see Keith Forgie’s collection of exotic animals. But some of his…

Visualization: Money In, Money Out

The weighty tome that outlined the Canadian government’s 2013-2014 budget was a veritable doorstep, crammed full of confounding fiscalspeak, graphs and tabular data.

No doubt this data makes perfect sense to economists or budget-scarred journalists, but how do you make…

Book Review: A Season In Hell

Held captive by al-Qaeda for 130 days in the unforgiving Malian desert, not knowing whether each day would be his last, Robert Fowler says it was the idea of writing a book about his ordeal that gave him the hope…

From Igloos, To Microwaves

Abbygail Noah was driven south from Nunavut by a desire for an education, and by the high food prices in the north, where 70% of the population is food insecure.

Abbygail blames the high cost of food on changes in…

The Digital Death Of Hugo Chavez

A tsunami of consolatory tweets choked the Internet’s arteries this week following the deaths of Venezualan leader Hugo Chavez and Canadian folk hero Stompin’ Tom Connors.

The death of Chavez came as no surprise – he’d been battling cancer for…

They were firing at me with their eyes

The thick charcoal around the woman’s eyes does little to mask the contempt she seems to feel for the photographer.

She stares directly at the camera, defiant, with a subtle scowl etched into her symmetrically-tattooed face.

The featureless white wall…

Bleed for your (adopted) country

I must have missed the disclaimer on the citizenship pamphlet: becoming a Canadian may result in serious physical scarring.

There I lay on the ice of the curling rink like a crumpled snow angel, a small claret cloud of blood…

Mali: It’s hard to convince people to put blood and treasure on the line

Even as Canada extends its commitment of a C-17 transport plane to war-torn Mali in mid-March, a former Canadian diplomat warns our nation is repeating the same mistake it made during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Robert Fowler, who was held…

Children Of The Snow

More than 20 Somali youths have been murdered in the last three years across Canada. Unable to assimilate into Canadian culture, unable to find work, many have become involved in drugs and criminal activity. But community groups in Ottawa, buoyed…

Picturing inequality

Today I spoke to CBC’s Robyn Bresnahan about how I came to take the photograph that won the Africa category in the World Bank’s international Picture Inequality photo competition. The picture shows female former child soldier Christine waiting to get…

Penis captivus

Damn, it felt good to get out of the city.

Steven Zhou watched the Malawian savannah scream by in a viridian blur as the car hurtled southeast out of the capital. Lilongwe was left behind in a billowing mushroom cloud…