Is this war worth fighting? I don’t know too many people who—after spending real time outside the wire in Afghanistan—come back with more certainty in their answer to that question. Still, it’s what you get asked. Earlier this summer, I made a couple of trips to Kandahar, and at the end of the last one, […]
Matthieu Aikins
Posted inNews + Opinion
Unembedded in Afghanistan
[Editor’s note: On May 29, 2010 this story won the Canadian Association of Journalists award as the country’s best Print Feature, the second CAJ prize Matthieu Aikins has won in two years. This piece is also one of five Coast articles selected as finalists for the 2010 Atlantic Journalism Awards. All five stories are collected […]
Posted inArts + Music
Elizabeth Hay
Despite her 41 years as a writer, despite her seven books, despite her Giller, even, Elizabeth Hay—kicking off this years Halifax International Writers Festival—still occasionally feels a deep panic that, when she sits down at her desk, picks up her pencil and closes her eyes, the words might not come out. I go back to […]
Posted inArts + Music
Stage Shortage
The Attic, the Idiot, the Khyber, the Speakeasy, the One World Cafe, the Ceilidh Connection, Peel Pub, TKO, Stage Nine, Cafe Mokka, and Planet Pool. These are 11 music venues that have permanently closed their doors in Halifax over the past five years. Together, they represent the loss of about half of the city’s venues […]
Posted inArts + Music
Lindsay Barr
Lindsay Barr While her smouldering green eyes and riot grrrl aesthetic may have helped land her recent video on MuchMusic, its her talent for writing infectious hey, hey party anthems that has earned Lindsay Barr her current buzz. I think rhythmic happenings is my finest delicacy, as she puts it. In 2006, she released her […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Adam’s fall
Editor’s note This story was honoured with two journalism awards in 2009: The Canadian Association of Journalists gave a CAJ award for best investigative piece by a community newspaper, and it won a gold Atlantic Journalism Award for enterprise reporting. More importantly, the Halifax-Dartmouth Bridge Commission has decided to install suicide barriers along the entire […]
Posted inArts + Music
Andru Branch’s New Album,The Only Constant
Kingston, Jamaica, can be a rough place, and the music industry there is no exception. It is, after all, where Peter Tosh once attempted to appropriate Keith Richard’s house in his absence, with the reggae legend phoning the rock legend to tell him, as the story goes: “Don’t come here, mon, I got my machine […]
Posted inArts + Music
Ground control
With success comes stress, and the ordinarily blissed-out crew at Anew Airship is getting their first taste of both. Jeremy Francis, the band’s singer-songwriter, has just flown in from Los Angeles, where he spent three weeks recording demos with Peter Prilesnik, a producer who’s worked with acts like Sarah Harmer, Big Sugar and Great Big […]