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From the archives

Operative Words

Behind the campaign curtain

Snuffed Torch

Can the Olympic myth survive?

Lax Americana

What happens if Donald Trump returns to the White House?

Wayne Grady

Wayne Grady is the author of Pandexicon.

Articles by
Wayne Grady

In So Many Words

Definitions of a new reality March 2023
When I first heard about COVID-19, my wife and I were at a writers’ conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It was February 11, 2020, and we were talking to a friend of Chinese descent who had just flown in from New York City. She told us she’d been nervous about crossing the border because during the SARS epidemic of…

The Globalized Great Lakes

An environmentalist charts the ruin—and possible revival—of the continent’s heart November 2013
If you want to know what the climate was like in Great Lakes country just before this latest period of global warming, you might have to climb the Rockies. In 1990, the bones of a giant pika, a diminutive member of the rabbit family, were discovered in a cave in the Niagara Escarpment, and were later carbon-dated to 9,780 years before the…

Desolate Lives

A close-up look at the horrors humans visit upon animals. Wayne Grady October 2011
In a recent issue of The Globe and Mail, poet and novelist Lynn Crosbie explained why she will not be going to see the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. When she sees chimpanzees, she writes, she feels “the nausea and fear I have long associated with … apes.” She does not like “the way they stare at you,” and finds in their unwavering gaze evidence that “nature hates us.” “Is no one but me terrified of apes?” she…

Age Brings Knowledge

But domesticated animals, such as humans, don’t seem to recognize this. May 2009