By a casual count, there are at least 19 items in the TPL catalogue with the title “Catherine the Great.” Why revisit this subject so often? She’s fascinating, is why. Catherine and her reign sit at the nexus of East and West, of profoundly religious and Enlightenment thinking, of rule by both the power accorded […]
What is human resilience? The term keeps coming up in different contexts – mental health, climate change, social welfare. In fact Toronto has its own resilience office. It isn't always easy to predict the qualities that guarantee resilience. How do you build it into a human being, a city, a society? The elements that make […]
Daniel comes to North York Central Library's Creation Loft several times a week to work on sewing projects. He might mention that he's working on a costume, but it's a piece here, a piece there. So when he offered to bring one of his costumes in the following week, we were altogether unprepared for the […]
Maybe you've heard the Great Lake Swimmers song "Your Rocky Spine" — a kind of haunting love story about land, water and the glacier-scraped Canadian Shield: Floating over your rocky spine The glaciers made you, and now you're mine… For some of us, making or even reading maps holds a similar kind of intimacy. A […]
There was a dark side to the story of John James Audubon. To draw the beautiful birds that he was obsessed with painting and cataloguing, he killed many of the birds. Sometimes he killed more than one of the same species to be able to capture the detail that he needed for these gorgeous portraits. […]
I was reading Willa Cather’s wonderful novel, O Pioneers!, and musing about a world that I have no direct experience of . . . farming. Without such prompts, city folk like me perhaps don’t think much about farming. I fall into lazy notions of a bucolic world where adorable cows get milked (by somebody?) and […]
Tim Falconer, who is among the statistically tiny percentage of people who are completely tone deaf, loves music. This puts him into an even tinier percentage of that tiny group. One of the things that sets Falconer apart, again, is that he's chosen to address his musical shortcomings by trying to learn how to sing. […]
"I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me — like food or water." – Ray Charles Beyond the pleasure […]
This week, a single sheet of Arthur Conan Doyle's manuscript for the Sherlock Holmes thriller The Hound of the Baskervilles will go up for sale at Christie's auction house with an estimated starting price of US$80,000. The actual sales price will likely exceed that by a significant amount. [Updated June 23: The manuscript page was […]
Let’s grapple for a moment with another of the universe’s eternal puzzles. Is there life elsewhere, besides here on earth? Neil deGrasse Tyson at NASA says that “most astrophysicists accept a high probability of there being life elsewhere in the universe, if not on other planets or on moons within our own solar system. The numbers are, […]