The Spectator‘s coverage this spring was varied, to say the least. From Albert Barbusci’s nuclear waste deal, to the workings of the Verschuren Centre to the province’s third wave of COVID with a variety of stops in between, including a feature I count among my all-time favorites — the oneRead More

Awards season (I) I first met Rob Csernyik in April 2019. We had coffee at Dr. Luke’s and he interviewed me for a J-Source article he was writing about the Cape Breton journalism scene. We went back and forth by email for months afterward because J-Source is serious to theRead More

Tattoo news This week’s story about Mildred Brown’s tattoos raised many questions for me, but one of the first that occurred was: how unusual was it for a working-class woman to have tattoos in 1929? Brown had not one but five, all professionally done. It’s a subject I hope toRead More

Were it not for the long-dead woman at its center, this story, about a researcher being denied access to items by Quebec’s Musée de la civilisation, might not have been an obvious Spectator story. But the items Jamie Jelinski, “an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the history of Canadian visualRead More