Category: Summer 1996

It’s hard to talk about the CBC these days without referring to cutbacks in the same breath. But it’s precisely because of the threat posed by those cutbacks-the context for numerous editorial polemics about the legitimacy of public broadcasting-that we have chosen to pay tribute to what many call “The New Yorker of the air,”… Continue reading The Good

Sometime in August 1993, I found myself rattling in an ancient Cessna over one of the densest parts of the Brazilian Amazon dressed partly in my pyjamas and a soiled pair of khakis that I had discarded in a dark corner of my hotel room the night before. I barely had enough time to dress… Continue reading The Massacre That Never Was and the Terrorists Who Always Were

In a world dominated by CDs, AM sound quality doesn’t cut it anymore. Music is simply better on FM. But even though AM’s share of Canadian listeners fell from 64 percent in 1982 to 48 percent in 1992, AM stations still managed to capture five of the top ten places in eight of the nine… Continue reading The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Town Hall theatre at the University of Toronto is a modern haven of academia. The chairs are plush and comfortable, and the room, though it seats around 200, has an atmosphere that manages to be both intimate and scholarly. The people filling the hall on this Thursday evening in mid-November 1995 come in a… Continue reading Dissent and Sensibility

The commercial break is over. A camera pans the studio of the current affairs program POV: Women and then pulls in tight on host Sylvia Sweeney’s face as she begins her introduction. She tells us that her next guest is Carol Camper, a woman of mixed race and author of Miscegenation Blues. Sweeney turns to… Continue reading The Feminine Mistake