Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

The rasp, the spatula and the corkscrew—Eve Corbel's series of obsessive cooks.

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.

Stephen Osborne's broken cellphone leads him to Schopenhauer, the Titanic publishing industry and historical Phantom Rides.

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Stephen Osborne discovers that some of the most startling papers in the city archives are the letters and diaries of the first archivist himself.

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.

That’s one for the rice bag!

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Headlines featuring crack-smoking mayors and election fraudsters.

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Senior Editor Mary Schendlinger remembers her friend and Geist contributor Saeko Usukawa.

Outlet Malls, Janis Joplin, The Godfather and Taco Bell—on the scent of Ameryka.

The long road to decency and justice.

After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.

The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.

Destroying books for the greater good.

When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.

Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.

The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

Some

A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.

Hal Niedzviecki com­mem­o­rates his Jewish grand­fa­ther—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.

Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.

D.M. Fraser on the myth of cultural identity.

The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.

Mastery of the self

Patty Osborne reviews a collection of journal entries, correspondence and other writings produced by Mary Meigs during the last years of her life.

Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the "semi," a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we would

I answered the ad: SWM likes to dance. Called him up (said his name was Jay), suggested we meet at the local cafe Tuesday night, something different, a performance poet performing. Free coffee and cookies, the place rocking with middle-aged angst.

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.

Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar), Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangon. They were hauled out of their diplomatic Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, at the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official.

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

A flower child looks back, to the time between Motown and acid rock.

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

It started with a note I found tucked into an anthology of poems edited by Selden Rodman, a book I opened rarely, though there was a time when I was young I had read it so closely and so many times I had most of the poems memorized. The note lay in the spine of the book against a poem of Arthur Rimbaud's titled, I think, "The Twelve-Year-Old Poet." On it are four names printed out in my sure and youthful twenty-one-year-old hand: Baghdad, Koweit, Sakakah, Jaffa.

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

During my thirty years living on the waterfront of British Columbia, I have always had some sort of container in which to sit on the water. My first boat was a ten-foot dinghy that my late husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, equipped with a small electric motor to surprise me. He had the bizarre idea that I, a sometime canoeist from Ohio, could manoeuvre a boat on my own around our capacious Pacific coast harbour. The electric engine would be ideal for me, he thought. No rope to pull to start it up! No gasoline tank on board!

And then I remembered an important event. It happened at a funeral in St. Paul’s chapel for a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had overdosed in her Gastown hotel room. The small chapel was half full, and very quiet. There were a couple of fresh flower arrangements in front of the cheap, closed coffin. Most of the congregation were other prostitutes dressed in their working clothes, and a few pimps. One woman apologized to Brother Tim for having nothing black to wear, except for lingerie and a leather miniskirt.

Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.

Connie Kuhns' major profile of punk, politics and feminism in 1970s Canada: the Moral Lepers, the Dishrags and other revolutionary bands.

Review of "There Was a Time for Everything" by Judith Friedland

Review of "Stories from My Gay Grandparents" directed by J Stevens

Review of "Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt" by Diane Borsato

Review of "The Capital of Dreams" by Heather O'Neill

Review of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

Review of "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor

Review of "And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life" by Helen Humphreys.

Review of "Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love" by Sarah Leavitt.

Review of "House Work" curated by Caitlin Jones and Shiloh Sukkau.

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

Review of "The Boy and the Heron" directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Review of "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.

Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Prince Edward Island gothic.

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.