To understand Alexander “Sandy” Ross, the man who engineered the rebirth of Canadian Business magazine and almost single-handedly created the consumer market for business writing in this country, you must understand that at age 51, at the height of his career, his jazz band fired him for speeding. Try as he might, Sandy just couldn’t… Continue reading Raggedy Sandy

Atop a warehouse, high over Santa Monica Boulevard and just under the shadow of the Hollywood sign, a ghetto blaster blares the chorus of Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Girl.” The view is panoramic, and each surrounding building looks like a confection of sugar cubes, glazed with pale pink frosting. Late afternoon sunshine casts a warm,… Continue reading Glam, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am

When The Globe and Mail‘s medical reporter Wallace Immen was covering the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans last November, a PR representative from one of the pharmaceutical companies was anxious to speak to him. Paul Taylor, another medical reporter at the Globe, was working on the assignment desk that morning… Continue reading Condition: Confused

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