Martin’s Room
JUNE 2000. Martin Cohnstaedt lies in a bed at West Park, a continuing care hospital in Toronto, surrounded by photographs and other memorabilia. He holds my right hand in a firm grip, his blue eyes alive as I talk about…
Morris Wolfe
Essays, New & Selected
Morris Wolfe
Essays, New & Selected
The Sexist Science of Gordon Freeman
The following essay tells a story as important as that of Valery Fabrikant. But the Gordon Freeman affair involves no dead bodies, not even any blood, so it wasn’t as easy to find a publisher. It concerns sexism in the…
Dr. Fabrikant’s Solution
The two articles that follow deal with academic politics. The first tells of Valery Fabrikant, a mechanical engineering professor at Concordia University, who, having been denied tenure, murdered four of his colleagues. I covered the story for Saturday Night for…
Showboat: To See or Not to See
TO BOYCOTT or not to boycott, that is the unstated question at the heart of an important debate about the Toronto productions of Showboat and Miss Saigon in the current issue of Fuse, the alternative magazine about the arts. M.…
The View From the Centre
I wrote a column about magazines for the Globe and Mail for several years. This piece and the one that follows appeared in that space. … “ONLY WHAT IS of a kindly nature is printed … everything unpleasant or unduly…
Tim Buck, Too
EACH YEAR I show the students in my Canadian film class Michel Brault’s remarkable 1974 film, Les ordres, a film all too few Canadians have seen. Les ordres dramatizes what it was like to be one of the 450 political…