Chad Kohalyk

At the very beginning, during the early days of confusion and uncertainty, we moved through international airports with an anxious vigilance. My spouse and I had carefully loaded our daughters’ small backpacks with extra masks and disinfecting wipes. In the lounge, we sanitized nearby surfaces and listened to workers gossip about the virus and worry about their…

In 2014, Bruce Kirkby set out with his family to live for three months at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the western Himalaya. Kirkby is a man who operates at extremes. He is an adventurer and photographer who crosses hot deserts by camel and cold mountains by horse; he is also a travel writer and the former host of the CBC’s short-lived version of No Opportunity Wasted…

Amid the pandemic, we cannot help but reflect and imagine how to make our future lives better. What timing, then, for James Wilt to publish a book on an underlying problem that has dogged us for over a century. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? he positions transportation as the centrepiece in our collective fight “against the forces of inequality and oppression” that are epitomized by the…

A good travel book transports the reader to someplace exotic, only to spur reflection on the reader’s current circumstances. For some types of introspection, however, escape to the French Riviera or the highlands of Papua New Guinea might not be ideal. To reflect on our society’s hyperconnected, technology-worshipping society, a tour through one of the places largely responsible for our communications infrastructure seems…

The popular internet as a phenomenon has gone through a number of phases in its short history—decentralized and obscure, to commercial, then to highly participatory (and highly centralized). At each stage critical thinkers have written about the socio-political impact of digitizing everything. The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor is the latest book to tackle these…