Y ou know this trajectory by now: After a slow build followed by a sharp upward spike in the infection curve to get to 1,000,000 cases on the planet, the curve basically flattened on the way to Wednesday’s milestone of five million cases. It wasn’t quite flat, however. This teeter totter tipped up slightly from one […]
Kyle Shaw
Loving the arrival of this mysterious climate event people are calling "spring".
Kyle was a founding member of the newspaper in 1993 and was the paper’s first publisher. Kyle occasionally teaches creative nonfiction writing (think magazine-style #longreads) and copy editing at the University of King’s College School of Journalism.
Posted inNews + Opinion
4,000,000 cases
The first million took a long time. The second million went by in a blink. The third million was even faster. And with the fourth million, the disease is still gaining speed. We’re all a little familiar by now with statistical curves and the idea that they can be flattened. The global COVID-19 infection curve […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
3 Coast stories win journalism awards
Normally this happens Saturday night in a hotel ballroom with plenty of wine, but that was a habit from the old normal. In the current normal, the winners of the 2019 Atlantic Journalism Awards were announced this morning by email, prompting lots of heartfelt texting and Tweeting, and very few drunk tears. Hmmm. Journalism awards […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
1,000 cases of COVID-19 in Nova Scotia
Can’t see anything? Turn off your adblocker and refresh the page. While you’re at it, consider turning off your adblocker forever—or at least adding thecoast.ca to your exemptions list. COVID-19 has decimated a reliable stream of print ad income for newspapers, and ads on our website are vital for us to be able to keep […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
You can go outside, but don’t fuck it up
Before the dessert, the vegetables. And not broccoli-with-cheese-sauce or sweet-potato-fries vegetables, either. Premier Stephen McNeil and NS top doc Robert Strang brought the boiled turnips to their webcast C19 briefing on Friday. “I know many people are tired of staying home and that we all just want to see some light at the end of […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
How to move into a new apartment safely in the time of COVID
Moving day always sucks, pandemic or not. But at least before COVID-19 you could lean on your friends for help, and if a lot of other people were moving at the same time—as happens around the start of May and September—in all that carrying of boxes and squeezing past each other in the hallway […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
About that gun lobbyist at the Nova Scotia shootings press conference
The RCMP has a reputation for being so careful and cunning, its investigators “always get their man.” But Tuesday, during what was supposed to be a press conference about Nova Scotia’s mass shootings, the man they got was a registered gun lobbyist. Nova Scotia RCMP superintendent Darren Campbell did most of the talking at […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
3,000,000 cases
With the numbers getting so high, moving so quickly, tracked at so many levels, you could find a scary new coronavirus statistic every day. Nova Scotia hits 900 cases of C19. The United States reaches 1,000,000 cases. There are 3,000,000 cases around the world. Actually, those are all from Monday. The last time we looked […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
And then there’s the climate crisis
Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, but it feels a world away. As if the coronavirus wasn’t enough, now Nova Scotia is in a state of mourning. We are struggling to make sense of the senseless, to understand the unthinkable. How are we supposed to pay attention to the climate crisis? The Coast […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
2,000,000 cases
Doctor by doctor, hospital by hospital, the COVID-19 patients are diagnosed. Town by town and city by city they add up. Collected in states, provinces, counties, territories, earldoms and duchies, the numbers just grow and grow and grow. Country to country, continent to continent until, literally, around the world—the coronavirus spreads its disease. The good […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The premier’s new haircut
Over the long weekend Stephen McNeil freshened up his look. The change was subtle, but Robert Strang noticed. “The premier got an Easter haircut,” Strang said at the first provincial news briefing after the holiday. “You’re looking good, premier.” McNeil laughed and thanked the chief medical officer of health. And then they were just a […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Friday update: looking for hope on the holiday weekend
Key points as of the latest provincial news update: Our death toll is rising Waiting for Nova Scotia’s COVID-19 model The essential Easter Bunny Calling out Costco for real this time Our death toll is rising Nova Scotia’s second death from COVID-19 was announced at Thursday’s news briefing, in Halifax. The patient was a woman […]