Category: The Magazine

Alison Gordon is telling me a story. She is telling me of the time between 1979 and 1983 when she covered the Blue Jays for The Toronto Star, which made her the first female baseball writer in the major leagues. When you are a writer and cover a major league team for a daily, she… Continue reading Back of the Pack, Baby!

To see life, to see the world, to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machine, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon’…to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed. So wrote Henry Luce in his 1934 prospectus… Continue reading The Final Frame

On the afternoon of Saturday, November 2, as the CBC celebrated 60 years of public broadcasting, I was exposed for the first time to the Peter Gzowski phenomenon. Inside Mother Corp.’s marble mausoleum on Toronto’s Front Street, women and men in their fifties climb on perimeter railings for a better look as the cheering begins.… Continue reading The Dark Side of Saint Peter

October 6, 1996, was an unusually warm day in downtown Toronto-warm enough that the organizers of Canzine 96 had to prop open the front and patio doors of the Library Imperial Pub and Tavern. Light poured into the dark, oak-lined pub, making the place look like a Muskoka lodge, open for the first day of… Continue reading Paper, Scissors, Shock

n the box, all hell may break loose. A 15-by-10-foot room in The Toronto Star newsroom, the box is a netherworld filled with photos of dead people, mug shots of killers and old press releases about Paul Bernardo. A counter circles the room stacked with electronics: seven radio scanners, two computers, two telephones, a television,… Continue reading Intern at Your Own Risk