I listened to Piya Chattopadhyay’s fantastic documentary about Henry Morgentaler on The Current yesterday. Many of my Journalism students at King’s – born half a decade after Canada’s abortion laws were struck down – don’t even know his name. I suppose that’s good in one sense; bad in another. ~~

The responses to my column this week kinda sucked. Lots of anger, yes, but that’s par for the course. The bigger problem is that people didn’t get it. I’m used to readers not liking what I’ve written, but I’ve failed if I haven’t managed to get my point across. The column was a response to [...]

  My column for this week’s Herald is about baby-wearing. It’s tricky to write about, without getting into hot water with either the wearers or the non-wearers. And then I mentioned breast feeding, which is a bit of a similar quagmire; difficult to get out of any broad discussion unscathed. In any case, this story [...]

  It strikes me that all long-form journalism can be boiled down to this:   “In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.  ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko   Ok, ok, I have some problems with the first comma, and the one [...]

  My blog’s been redone by the lovely and talented Hillary Harris at hhdesign.ca. Isn’t it great? In theory, this means I’m newly energized and ready to get back at blogging about journalism practice. In reality … hey what was that shiny thing over there … ? No, seriously, I’m totally on top of this! [...]

I did it! Two-hundred pounds of tomatoes. Blanched, peeled and processed. I wrote about my new annual autumn folly in my Herald column – the fruit flies, the sweating walls, the time it takes. “Some women shop with their friends,” the Ecology Action Centre’s Marla MacLeod told me when I interviewed her for the piece. [...]

Yes, it’s another rat story. Because, what with my journalistic obsession, people mention rat stories to me all the time. And I LOVE it. (*warning: not for the weak of stomach) ~~  

It’s summer. And my habits in summer are to slow down, swim, eat ice cream, and only work a few hours a day at the computer. Yes, it’s lovely. But it also means I’ve also slowed down on the posts. Sorry ’bout that. In any case, I have a grand scheme for the summer to [...]

I tend to do this. I get on a topic and I can’t get away from it. So it is with urban rats. I did this feature for The Coast in 2008 about rats in Halifax. It was actually news-y at the time, since I stumbled upon the fact that there had been a rash [...]