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Art from the magazine about Canada and its place in the world

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Artwork by Raymond Boisjoly (raymondboisjoly.com).

Read “Five Contemporary Artists to Watch” (December 2013) by Brian Morgan at thewalrus.ca.

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The Exquisite Agony of Watching Bradley Cooper Chase an Oscar

What is it about wanting something that audiences find so repulsive?

While campaigning, you have to pretend not to care too much about wanting an award, yet many Oscar winners are overcome by emotion once handed the golden statue. “I think it would be refreshing if someone was very upfront and said, ‘Yeah, I really want this award. I want to win, and I think I deserve it,’” Willumsen says. Cooper’s Oscar bid is a mirror for our own compulsions, and often failures, to achieve; the only thing more embarrassing than trying is failing, and maybe we experience a modicum of relief when it’s someone else.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

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How Connie Walker Got Us Listening

The Pulitzer Prize–winning podcaster is changing journalism as we know it

True crime podcasts typically aim to solve a mystery by finding an ending, by uncovering new evidence or pointing a finger at the likely killer, like a campfire story meant to thrill and frighten. Indigenous stories, too, are often reduced to their tragic endings: a brutal death, a haunting absence. But Walker goes in the other direction, by showing who a person was before they became a statistic, emphasizing the complexity and humanity of her subjects while avoiding the genre’s tendency to sensationalize the most lurid details of their deaths. And she reaches back even farther, to show how their life and death were shaped by the complex legacy of colonialism that ripples across generations.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Photography by Jordana Bermúdez (jordanabtp.com)

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Read the March/April 2024 issue of The Walrus now at thewalrus.ca!

Photography by Jordana Bermúdez (jordanabtp.com)

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The Shunned Literary Genius of Samuel Selvon

When a giant of Caribbean literature moved to Calgary, Canadian critics ignored him. He probably didn’t care

During his sixteen years in Alberta, he published little. His tenth novel, Moses Migrating, appeared in London in 1983; its humorous plot follows the protagonist of The Lonely Londoners on a return voyage to Trinidad, where he sleeps around and earns a prize for a carnival costume that satirizes the British empire. Other new material from this period is rare, and “Ralphie at the Races” may be his only published work set in Canada. As Singh tells me, while “we can speculate about how Selvon’s Canadian isolation affected his relationship-building and writing,” we can’t truly know why his creative well ran dry.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

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The Diminishing Romance of Train Travel

I took a sleeper train across the country. I learned Via Rail is still stuck in the twentieth century

Coach is a land-based version of steerage: in this section of the train, aside from one or two sixty-two-seat cars, there’s a combination modest cafe and dome car; that’s about it. Then, there are the “Sleeper Plus” options: in ascending order, upper and lower berths, cabins for one or two, and bigger configurations like “drawing rooms.” I can remember, on those long-ago family trips, peeking through open doors at these spaces, which seemed the epitome of opulence compared to our berths. There’s a shower on each Sleeper Plus car, and all these options include meals (prime rib, lake trout . . . ). By contrast, economy choices are described, ominously, as “wholesome and comforting,” code for packets of nuts and microwaved cheeseburgers.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Jonathan Dyck (jonathandyck.com)

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Invisible Lives: Meet Canada’s Undocumented Kids

Without legal status, these young people must live in the shadows

“Kids deal with the decisions other people made,” she says. Those kids spend most of their childhoods in Canada, where they do their schooling, form relationships, and build career aspirations, like everybody else. “It’s just this piece of paper thing—that is the difference,” says Pole. This “piece of paper thing” shuts folks out of ­colleges, universities, and trade schools: those who are not citizens or permanent residents generally require a study permit and must pay international fees to attend post-secondary institutions, and provincial aid often isn’t an option. It’s also a ­barrier to more basic rights, like access to health care and ­secure housing.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Photography by Cindy Blažević (cindyblazevic.com)

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Around the World in Eighty Lies

How a writer fabricated a series of stories for Atlas Obscura

Atlas Obscura’s editorial mission is to tell true stories that seem, at first glance, to be stranger than fiction, which is perhaps why Mastbaum’s strange fictions seemed so plausible. His stories weren’t outlandish; they were well researched and populated with factual details, with believable quotes attributed to real people. Writing them was at least as much work as reporting truthfully would have been, suggesting they weren’t born of intellectual or professional laziness but some other, more inscrutable, motivation.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

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How Should a Diary Be? Sheila Heti Scrambles Her Life in Alphabetical Diaries

Heti takes her autofiction to the next level by publishing her journals—with editing help from Excel

In Alphabetical Diaries, there is no illusion of movement, no tragic downfall or a heroic arc that typically draws readers deeper. Heti recalls a feeling of dread at listening to someone’s grandmother relive past romances: “I thought about how distasteful it was to see an old woman obsessing about her romantic relationships,” she writes, “I saw it was possible; that a woman really could do that her whole entire life,” all too aware that it’s a fate that might befall her too. Even as sentences ping-pong across a decade, the predominant feeling is one of stasis.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

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When I Met My Husband, We Didn’t Speak the Same Language

Neither of us knew we were about to embark on a journey across countries and cultures to have our love legally recognized

Being with someone from another culture and country isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a lifetime of uncomfortable experiences, and you have to be comfortable enough with yourself to want to go on this ride. Language barriers and opaque nuances will always exist. You’ll never fully have the institutional knowledge of the other person’s culture because you weren’t always there. No matter how close you get, your lived experiences—sometimes more extreme than others—will always be a gulf that will never fully close. But spending your life learning about a different culture and perspective is the most enriching gift anyone can give or receive.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Erick M. Ramos (erickmramos.com)

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Skiing Is Becoming an Endangered Pastime

Across Canada, snow cover has been declining. Will winter, and winter sports, soon be extinct?

To compensate for the lack of snow, many ski resorts now rely on snow-making machines, which consume a tremendous amount of power and water. On average, Canadian resorts produce over 42 million cubic metres of snow, enough to fill 7,500 Goodyear blimps, and emit 130,095 tons of C02 in the process, the equivalent of adding more than 28,000 cars to the roads each year. Researchers from Canadian, European, and Australian universities expect that by 2050, climate change will increase the national demand for artificial snow by up to 97 percent—a country of Potemkin ski slopes concealing the grim reality of our disappearing winter.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

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Family Doctors’ Burnout Is about More than Their Workload

Many physicians believe there needs to be a reset in how they treat patients—and their own well-being

For all their expertise, medical professionals don’t have the best track record of prioritizing their own health. Some family doctors, says Mavriplis, don’t even have their own primary care physician. Many go in to work when they themselves are feeling run down. For those who run their own practice, it often feels impossible to take time off, because there’s nobody to cover for them, so many simply don’t. In a way, that’s what they’re taught to do.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Michelle Paterok (michellepaterok.com)

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Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue

For Court and Spark, Joni the lonely, Joni the soloist, did something nobody expected her to do. She hired a band

Where Blue is stormy and snarling, Court and Spark is wild, sunny, and free. It’s about how funny and strange people are, how boxes were created to be smashed, how life is full of pleasures when you move beyond what plagued you as a naive kid. It’s as mercurial as the woman who made it, and an expression of her lifelong desire to not be pigeonholed. It’s brilliant and crazy and delightful, an album written by somebody who’s exchanged their youthful angst for the liberation of adulthood. Young assholes only think of themselves; well-adjusted adults try to understand others. With Court and Spark, Joni rejected navel gazing and embraced empathy.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Natascha Hohmann (nataschahohmann.com)

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The Olympics Are Over But Tessa Virtue Is Just Getting Started

It’s been one year since she became the most famous figure skater in the world. How do you move on from being the best?

“I just don’t want to be forty, putting on a costume and entertaining people. I want to do it when I’m in my prime,” Virtue says. “Because if I can’t do it and be at my best, then it doesn’t interest me. If I can’t be the best, then it doesn’t interest me.” So she’s going to hang up her skates for real? “Yeah,” she responds. “Eventually, yeah.”

Read more at at thewalrus.ca.

Photography by Renata Kaveh (renatakaveh.com).

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“Parents’ Rights” Rhetoric Is Rooted in Radical Conspiracy Theories

Why are federal and provincial conservative leaders echoing the talking points of QAnon?

The unfortunate truth is that parents do not always have their child’s best interests at heart, and many children are not safe at home. The majority of Canadians who suffered physical abuse as children endured it at the hands of a parent or step-parent. For all the fear mongering about predatory teachers, children are fifteen times more likely to experience sexual abuse at the hands of family members. And transgender youth report far higher rates of both physical and sexual violence compared to cisgender peers. “All these policies do is empower parents who are transphobic parents,” says Ashley. “[They’re] prejudiced parents who are going to harm their children, and [it’s] granting them a legal authority to do so.”

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

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Social Media Is Warping History

#History is huge on TikTok, where counterintuitive takes flatter users into thinking they know the “real” story

While it’s not all bad, much of what content creators categorize as history on social media platforms is junk—pseudo history at best but often just wrong or total fiction. Even a cursory search for history content on a platform like TikTok reveals a whole host of examples of history being leveraged to make incredible claims seem credible. Deliberate misreadings of history are regularly used to lend weight to wild postulations.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

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Why Women Hate the Pill

What birth control teaches us about the failure—and future—of women’s health care

When it comes to birth control, the lack of innovation boils down to continued demand: regardless of whether a person is happy with their birth control options, most still have to choose one. Sometimes, any option is better than no option, regardless of whether it’s what you actually want. That’s especially true in the US, where the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in 2022, has put even more pressure on pregnancy prevention.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Holly Stapleton (hollystapleton.ca)