Robert McGill

In my youth, I called myself a writer, but my first passion was distance running. I aspired to shocking feats of physical endurance, nurtured fantasies of heroism. (Probably I read too many comic books.) But at twenty-three, my dreams were burst by a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Suddenly I needed insulin injections each time I…

If some people spend their lives terrified of being bored, why are the distractions they seek out often tedious? This question is raised so provocatively by John Ralston Saul in Dark Diversions: A Traveller’s Tale that to call the book a study in boredom is not to condemn it but to identify its most interesting subject…