Panic Is for the Birds

The recent flu flap may be Chicken Little for some, a golden goose for others


by ALICIA PRIEST

It will bolster U.S. President George W. Bush’s fading popularity, leave much of East Asia’s tourist economy in tatters, make billions of dollars for drug companies, politicians, media owners, and certain academics, and needlessly condemn countless innocent and healthy animals to death....

Hard Lessons, Gently Learned

A child’s love affair with nature begins


by Diane Selkirk

My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maia gazed through the glass, awed by a gorilla family at play. She asked me to tell her about them. I launched into an honest, no-holds-barred tale of the status of the gorilla: endangered. My tiny daughter asked a few mystified questions then turned back...

Post Traumatic

A look inside a doctor's mailbox


Most of us are familiar with what was once a doctor’s constant companion —that little black bag packed with mysterious tools of the trade. But what about the contents of a typical doctor’s mailbox? That material, I contend, reveals more about...

Back to the Good Old Days

Milk and beef producers defy “progress”


by André LaRivière

I clearly recall, as a young Winnipeg lad in the mid-1960s, going for long Saturday-morning drives with my father to a dairy farm (now a residential subdivision well within city limits) to refill the family glass milk jugs from a self-serve tank. My jobs included switching on the paddle to mix...

Street Eats in Lotus Land

Hot dogs, ice cream, and, uh, hot dogs


by Don Genova

I’ve been trying to figure out why we don’t have a good street-food scene in Vancouver. Our leading lights like to refer to this place as a “world-class city,” but when it comes to the street-food scene, we can’t compare to real world-class cities.

...

Tidelines

Answers, Questions, Weirdness, News


Janice Abbott: Stop Making Sense

Women in leadership roles have been described variously as being emotional and/or unreasonable. Instead of fighting that label, Janice Abbott has embraced it.

Abbott is the Executive Director and CEO of Atira...

Tidelines

Answers | Questions | Weirdness | News


Shared News

The Madness of Media

Local writer Dominic Ali recently released Media Madness, a new book targeting media literacy in kids aged 10 to 14. The 64-page book, which Ali describes as “Marshall McLuhan meets MAD...

A Tricky Distinction: Death and Dying



by Alicia Priest


For a society that acts as if life is endless and its members immortal, it’s remarkable how much we’re hearing about dying these days. Not death, but dying. It’s a tricky distinction.

Most often what we see in popular culture is sudden, violent and brutal...

Brian Harris: Capturing the Splendour of the True



by Jon Azpiri

A journalist once described photographer Brian Harris as the “Norman Rockwell of photography” because of his ability to capture beauty in life’s small moments. But unlike the famed American artist, Harris doesn’t focus on homespun Americana; he searches to unravel the...

A Guide to Keeping Your Head Down



Go to any really bad bookstore, one indifferent to quality and subservient to last week’s fad, and you’ll see many books with the word “Tao” in the titles. Examples in recent years have included The Tao of the Jump Shot: An Eastern Approach to Life and Basketball and The Tao of Bow...

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