Canadian journalist, and friend, Adnan Khan, has been covering South Asia and Middle East for over a decade. When not traipsing around Turkey, his home turf, the Maclean’s correspondent can usually be found in Pakistan or Afghanistan working on his next feature story. In 2012, Khan took a much needed break from his reporting duties and embarked […]
Last spring I spent a week with a group of mountaineers at a remote glacier camp in Yukon’s St. Elias Range near the base of Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak. Sometimes referred to as “Canada’s Himalayas”, the St. Elias Mountains (the highest in North America) sit within the largest glaciated region outside of Greenland and the […]
On a recent trip to England I had the opportunity to meet with psychologists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell – the originators of the Human Givens school of psychotherapy. At the core of their approach is the idea that human beings, like all organic life, come into this world with a set of needs. If […]
One of the few remaining structures bearing the scars of Lebanon’s fifteen year civil-war (1975-1990) is Beirut’s Barakat Building. This once stately and aristocratic edifice straddles a key intersection near the centre of the capital. The four-story avant-garde building was designed by two architects in the 1920s and 30s and fused Art Deco elements with […]
On a recent trip to Yukon, I visited Kwaday Dan Kenji (“Long Ago People’s Place”), a First Nations cultural interpretive centre on the old Alaska Highway near the village of Champagne. Harold Johnson and his wife Meta Williams of the northwest Champagne-Aishihik First Nation live on the wooded lot, an ancestral site, where they’re sharing the […]
Brent Liddle, a wilderness guide from Haines Junction, Yukon has spent over three decades exploring one of the most remote corners of North America. Between 1975 and 2002 he served as an interpretive guide at Kluane National Park: a 22,000 square kilometer wilderness area in the Yukon straddling the southernmost limit of the Arctic. Kluane […]
Much of our information on climate change tends to come by way of one media source or another. We rarely, if ever, get a chance to meet the scientists and hear directly from them about their work and the challenges they face. On a recent trip to Manitoba I met Richard Bello. He is a climatologist in […]
I recently caught up with my old friend, Richard Nahas, an M.D. practicing alternative and integrative medicine in Ottawa. Since embarking on his career in 1994 Richard has accrued a panoply of fascinating work-related experiences and travels: from challenging tenures treating the downtrodden in Cairo and Johannesburg, to being a frontline physician during the SARS […]
Three questions sum up the fundamental quandary for scientists working in biology and cosmology today. Where did the information that made matter possible come from? How did life arise out of inanimate matter? And what is consciousness? These profound puzzles about the nature of our universe are the major stumbling blocks holding up progress in […]
For decades a small indie bookstore has been operating, virtually in secret, beneath the corporate hustle of Toronto’s downtown core. “Open Air Books and Maps” is a quirky and clandestine establishment located in a basement-level nook at the corner of Adelaide and Toronto streets. Since 1976, this cramped and largely unannounced subterranean haunt has been […]
