Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, incidents of anti-Asian racism across the country have surged. In Montreal, several statues at Quan Am temple were defaced, the main gates of Chinatown were vandalized, and a Korean man walking to a market was stabbed in the city’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood.[Read More…]
Off the Board
The role of analog media in an online world
Last Friday, I listened to Prince by Prince on vinyl while I handwrote a letter to a friend, wandered the streets taking videos on my handheld camcorder, and watched my favourite John Cusack film High Fidelity on VHS. It is 2021, and yet I find that my days are consumed[Read More…]
The bad omens of Fall 2019
We all remember the day we heard about the samosa ban. The news rocked all of our worlds; we had been robbed of our beloved, cheap campus snack. But the ban was not the first of bad news on campus in the Fall of 2019. Reflecting on this particular semester—the[Read More…]
Bruised, broken, and behind
“Text me when you get home.” My friends and family said it so often that, when my sister said it that night, it seemed like a suggestion I could ignore. It was 10:30 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, early enough to walk the 20 minutes home. I had done it hundreds[Read More…]
Retracing my steps
If you have been online in January, you have probably seen a Spotify Wrapped against your will. Candy-coloured and set to a nondescript background beat, the Wrapped roundup satisfies our collective desire for life stats while spawning countless imitations. One of these, as I discovered recently while knee-deep in my[Read More…]
Learning from the media’s failures
In an apparent effort to attract support and attention for a white nationalist group claiming an affiliation with McGill, flyers began to appear around McGill’s downtown Montreal campus in December 2020. The group quickly garnered substantial negative attention online. Spurred on by a tidal wave of public outrage, the actions[Read More…]
Looking to history for the future
After finishing a B.A. in history last year, I made the terrible life choice of staying at McGill for graduate school. Tuition hikes and dismal job prospects for prospective historians give me plenty reason to regret my decision for years to come, and the continual weaponization of academic history—be it[Read More…]
McGill must give S/U due diligence
The McGill Senate on Dec. 2 rejected a motion to suspend the body’s standing rules, which prevented it from reintroducing a proposal to implement a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory (S/U) grading option for students this semester. In a controversial move, they referred it back to the Steering Committee, even though it had already[Read More…]
My forgotten wonderful world of model trains
Two of my first friends were a pair of retirees with Santa Claus-worthy beards who worked in a small model train shop. From the outside, the store didn’t appear to be much: It was on the second floor of a nondescript suburban building marked by a patched, half-illuminated sign. Yet,[Read More…]
The good things about having cancer
No one wants to learn that they have cancer, but when I was 12 years old, that is exactly what my doctor told me. I was diagnosed with Basal Cell Carcinoma, a nonfatal chronic skin cancer. Although it is one of the most common types of skin cancers, it is[Read More…]
