At the airport, I learned to expect the pauses, the extra questions, the glances at my passport that lingered a second too long. I did everything right—got into McGill, applied for my visa, and carried proof that I would leave once my degree was over. Even in places I call[Read More…]
Off the Board
Great pitch, terrible news
In The Tribune‘s Slack, ‘that’s great!’ doesn’t usually mean there’s good news. Coming up with pitches for our paper requires a particular analytic perspective. Examining politics, social life, and culture through the lens of journalism can instill a habit of reading the news in search of something controversial; something sensationalizable.[Read More…]
The art of figuring it out
In the summer of 1969, a group of musicians walked on stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland with nothing short of a half-formed idea. In a last-minute effort, pianist Les McCann, bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and drummer Donald Dean recruited trumpeter Benny Bailey and saxophonist Eddie Harris to perform[Read More…]
Reaping the consequences of ‘just a joke’
On Feb. 19, the U.S. Women’s Hockey team won Olympic gold against Team Canada four minutes into the overtime period. Three days later, viewers experienced déjà vu when the U.S. Men’s Hockey team won in a similar 2-1 overtime against Team Canada. As an increasingly unproud American, this was a[Read More…]
Face it!
I saw my mom for the first time this summer. Sitting alone in the busy Toronto Pearson Airport, I waited for my flight to Edmonton to join my family on a trip. I was armed with a couple of pencil crayons, a sharpener, and an Above Ground sketchbook bought from[Read More…]
Against reducing, reusing, and recycling
As a full-time English Literature student and part-time movie-watcher, one of my greatest pleasures is building a mental web of intertextuality: The way texts are influenced by, adapted from, or allude to previous texts. Canonical works such as the Bible, Greek and Roman classics, and Shakespearean plays have long served[Read More…]
A lesson from the neighbourhood cat
I have a friend who appears without warning, leaves without explanation, and never promises to return. He is profoundly unpredictable, given that he is a neighbourhood cat—but are the movements of human friends any more certain? Manchego, lovingly nicknamed by my roommate Katie, is a beloved member of the Milton-Parc[Read More…]
An ode to emails and the archival nature of the inbox
I have often felt as though the diction and formalities of texting culture—or lack thereof—should emulate that of email correspondence. Emails preserve a level of linguistic intentionality that contemporary messaging platforms have largely flattened. My affinity for emails began rather early. At the age of nine or ten, my school[Read More…]
A love letter to ‘Tribune’ haters
Content warning: Mention of The Tribune and its absolutely horrible takes I cannot count on one hand the number of times I’ve mentioned that I’m an editor at The Tribune, only to receive an eyeroll. In fact, there is a Reddit discussion post that affectionately calls our paper the “least[Read More…]
Pics or it didn’t happen
If I met Timothée Chalamet in Bushwick and didn’t post a selfie of us on Instagram, did I even meet him? Pics or it didn’t happen. At the heart of this question lies the same trepidation: Whether experience exists without witness. Galileo Galilei says, “Tastes, odors, colours, and so on[Read More…]