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 […]
Muhammed “al-Sharif” al-Idrisi (c. 1100-1165) was a major Muslim scholar, geographer and mapmaker of the medieval Islamic period. He was born in the town of Ceuta, in Morocco, and was descended from a line of nobleman who traced their lineage to the Prophet Mohammed. Al-Idrisi took an interest in foreign lands and travel early in […]
Travel writing may often entertain and sometimes astonish, but seldom does it take the reader past a constellation of anecdotal experiences into the true essence of a place beyond all preconception. Jason Elliot’s Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran takes aim at the blunting assumptions and false perceptions of this little understood country, slipping […]
