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Boundary Issues

Have Canadians and Americans become the same people?

Horror Undimmed

A feminist scholar investigates the place of the Montreal massacre in our collective memory

Who Controls North America?

Today, even the U.S. government is just one of many players

Ruth Jones

Ruth Jones is one of the magazine’s contributing editors.

Articles by
Ruth Jones

On That Note

The music that defined a province March 2024
There isn’t a lot of singing in Frontier, which debuted on Netflix in 2016. With each episode, the show about the eighteenth-century fur trade attempts to prove that the pages of Canadian history conceal enough intrigue to sustain prestige-ish television. (Three seasons’ worth, anyway.) Starring the towering, glowering, sometime superhero Jason Momoa as Declan Harp — a…

Paging Dr. Dolittle

How non-humans are trying to reach us October 2023
Tell your problems to your dog or cat, and you’re unlikely to get a response. The motorist yelling at a squirrel to get off the road doesn’t really expect the little guy to learn traffic rules. There’s no expectation that the pigeon in the park will thank you for those bread crumbs or that the raccoon in your attic will take offence to being…

Dancing through the Pain

Bereavement, vigilance, and hope June 2023
In 2004, the arts activist and critic David Gere published his seminal work, How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS. “In this era,” he wrote, dancing “commonly serves a mourning function, with fetishes of loss and longing literally embodied in the corporeality of the performers.” Twenty years…

The Scribblers

Reading between the lines March 2020
Written language sleeps when we do: the areas of our brain that process it go dormant. Any text we experience in dreams is asemic — with no actual semantic content. Made of meaningless symbols, it might present an image of readability, perhaps beguile us with a reading-like experience, but it never comes together like a true linguistic…

The Mysteries of the Rainbow

Making and interpreting the colours around us December 2018
I go through most days acting as if I understand colour. I dress myself, stop for red lights and go for green, I pick the brightest berries at the supermarket and point to the yellow tree and say, “It’s fall!” or “It’s dying,” depending on the season. But using and understanding are not the same thing. Humans have three colour receptors in their…