Charles Wilkins

So much depends on what is meant by “our cities” and “ourselves” in the subtitle of Taras Grescoe’s resounding new transit treatise, Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. If by “our cities” Grescoe means the cities of all humanity (including black-belt carbon catastrophes such as Mumbai, Beijing and Shanghai), and if by “ourselves” he means every one of the roughly seven billion riders on the fragile little subway platform we call…

When the movie Pirates of the Caribbean came out a few years ago, and piracy reared its bandana-clad head in an all but ubiquitous range of ad campaigns and on Halloween and at kids’ birthday parties, etc., a little joke made the rounds: Why are pirates so popular? And the answer was, Because they…

When Angus Bell was a sprite growing up in the hills of rural Scotland, he had few friends with whom he could play the game he loved, the game that eventually obsessed him: cricket. He played when and where he could, followed the international game at a distance and dreamed of glory, assuming the fantasized identities of the Rocket Richards and Wayne Gretzkys of the…

Off and on for 20 years during the 1980s and ’90s, Martin Mitchinson concocted plans to visit the fabled Panamanian province of Darien—perhaps even to possess it in the way that ambitious and self-delusional young travellers tend to “collect” rare territories and deposit them in their backpacks. But he never made it. On a succession of aborted…

Most Canadians who have any perspective at all on the Dominican Republic these days have gained it either from budget travel to seaside Dominican resorts (Hotel Punta Goleta, Cabarete: $499—two weeks) or as fans of major league baseball, which in recent decades has employed a whopping 410 Dominican players (during the 1980s, the Toronto Blue Jays’ legendary Dominican…