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…
Essays, New & Selected
Essays, New & Selected
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…