By a casual count, there are at least 19 items in the TPL catalogue with the title “Catherine the Great.” Why revisit this subject so often? She’s fascinating, is why. Catherine and her reign sit at the nexus of East and West, of profoundly religious and Enlightenment thinking, of rule... Continue reading

What is human resilience? The term keeps coming up in different contexts - mental health, climate change, social welfare. In fact Toronto has its own resilience office. It isn't always easy to predict the qualities that guarantee resilience. How do you build it into a human being, a city, a... Continue reading

Daniel comes to North York Central Library's Creation Loft several times a week to work on sewing projects. He might mention that he's working on a costume, but it's a piece here, a piece there. So when he offered to bring one of his costumes in the following week, we... Continue reading

Maybe you've heard the Great Lake Swimmers song "Your Rocky Spine" — a kind of haunting love story about land, water and the glacier-scraped Canadian Shield: Floating over your rocky spine The glaciers made you, and now you're mine... For some of us, making or even reading maps holds a... Continue reading

There was a dark side to the story of John James Audubon. To draw the beautiful birds that he was obsessed with painting and cataloguing, he killed many of the birds. Sometimes he killed more than one of the same species to be able to capture the detail that he... Continue reading

I was reading Willa Cather’s wonderful novel, O Pioneers!, and musing about a world that I have no direct experience of . . . farming. Without such prompts, city folk like me perhaps don’t think much about farming. I fall into lazy notions of a bucolic world where adorable cows... Continue reading

Tim Falconer, who is among the statistically tiny percentage of people who are completely tone deaf, loves music. This puts him into an even tinier percentage of that tiny group. One of the things that sets Falconer apart, again, is that he's chosen to address his musical shortcomings by trying... Continue reading

"I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me -- like food or water." -... Continue reading

Let’s grapple for a moment with another of the universe’s eternal puzzles. Is there life elsewhere, besides here on earth? Neil deGrasse Tyson at NASA says that “most astrophysicists accept a high probability of there being life elsewhere in the universe, if not on other planets or on moons within... Continue reading

Mr. Stephen Biggs is a self-described fig pig. He seems to have been born to the role, suited as his name is to his vocation (at least if you like rhymes). But what is it that draws a man to a fruit tree with such passion and commitment? He isn't... Continue reading

The Human Genome Project finished mapping the three billion-or-so chemical base pairs that make the how-to-build-a-human instructions code in 2003. It was a monumental step. But of course each human’s code is unique, and the difficulty of “reading” the genomic map means that in some sense this was just the... Continue reading

Canada is a country that thrives on immigration. So there are systems in place to help immigrants move into their new lives in Canada as easily as possible. In fact, new changes in immigration processes (some of them controversial) allow skilled and highly educated immigrants to be “fast-tracked” into Canada... Continue reading

Sometimes, it is just what you pay attention to. Ever wondered, for example, how people saw the constellations – shapes of bears, hunters, scorpions, while we see undifferentiated masses of stars? That is if we’re lucky enough, here in the well-lighted city, to see the stars at all? photo credit:... Continue reading

As baby boomers approach old age, and as we’re living longer, topics like brain health and prevention of age-related cognitive decline are making headlines, but also a matter we come across in our personal lives. The brain is at the centre of everything we do, who we are, what we... Continue reading

The happy appointment of William Robins to the Victoria University (UofT) presidency had me thinking about the value of storytelling in different kinds of settings. For Robins, storytelling and humanities are the subject of his medieval studies research, and how he sees his mandate as a champion of the cultural... Continue reading

...whether intricately prepared or straight from the freezer, whether from the backyard garden or shiny supermarket. The dudes at my dog park talk pork recipes, my sister has inordinate pride in her pie crusts. Tomorrow (Feb. 12), is the last day of Winterlicious, the Toronto festival that allows us all... Continue reading