Tuesday night in Dartmouth, lacrosse is booming. Literally. In the hollow, echoey guts of Bowles Arena, a barn-like hockey rink hidden deep in the outskirts of Dartmouth, lacrosse sounds like a series of small explosions. Twelve players, along with coach Norman Hum, have gathered to practice on the arena’s ice surface—with the ice temporarily removed. […]
AJA
Posted inArts + Music
Elementary
George Steeves calls his house the photo bunker. It’s well hidden, deep on a looping crescent in an old Clayton Park neighbourhood—it was the end of town when Steeves moved there in 1973—where bungalows protectively stretch out like arms linking in solidarity. The photo bunker is built on angles and soft watery colours. It’s tidy, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Living positive
There’s this pamphlet. It’s called HIV and Mental Health. And there are two happy white people on the inside back cover riding a red tandem bicycle. They’re coasting along a sunny downtown street. And they are smiling; they are glowing, like they’re in an ad for milk or toothpaste. The woman, on the back of […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Living with HIV
Aaron Burke is fluent in the language of HIV. He’s done the research. He knows the terminology. He’s a 43-year-old senior manager at a prominent Halifax company and by god he’s managing this disease, too. He’s also managing not to really tell anyone he has it. “Once the fire is going, I think it can […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Hitting home
Debra Mann’s house is tidy. Not only tidy, either, but clean. She says she thought, “Oh my god,” just before I arrived at her Halifax condo, “there’s dust on the coffee table. I forgot to dust the coffee table.” But if there is dust there, it’s invisible to the naked eye, just like the human […]
Posted inLifestyle
I was an internet addict
///1.///////////////////// The supercomputer is as big as a room, eats punch cards, spits out tickertape and is bent on world domination. It knows all there is to know. Thankfully, paradox makes it explode. Ka-blooey. Or this: The astronaut’s broken body, stitched with circuitry, patched with polymer and steel. Man-machine. Better. Stronger. Faster. And when his […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The trials of Dr. Horne
Her first “light-bulb moment” occurred sometime on a Friday morning in the spring of 1999, probably in the stairwell between her tiny, windowless office on the second floor of the new Halifax Infirmary and the hospital’s Heart Function Clinic two flights up. Dr. Gabrielle Horne was on call at the clinic that morning—the nurses would […]