UBC president’s resignation sparks freedom of information backlog
VANCOUVER – The lack of substantive answers around former University of British Columbia (UBC) president Arvind Gupta’s resignation has hit UBC’s two freedom of information…
2015
The end is nigh
The world is burning. Over the summer, for days, the sun was veiled in smoke, a gibbous and hideous orange. At midday you could look directly at it. An old neighbour commented that he had not seen such a thing since the eruption of Mount St. Helens. That was the first time the sun was dimmed, when it was fires in Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.
Morbid music
Halloween and the days approaching it are a time when many look to temporarily embrace the macabre. Music and the feelings it is capable of…
Kitty Fitzgerald: U of M’s writer-in-residence
As with any skill, writing requires consistency and knowledge to be honed. The University of Manitoba Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture is giving…
Frighteningly funny
This Halloween the musical improv comedy group Outside Joke is teaming up with the Dungeons and Dragons Improv Show to kick off their fourth season…
The Sumner Brothers – “The Hell in Your Mind”, 4/5
Picture a wave undulating in a heavy storm on a nippy and overcast day. It is a dark and dangerous sight, but it calms you…
Ben Caplan and the Casual Smokers – “Birds with Broken Wings”, 5/5
With absolutely no surprise, Ben Caplan and the Casual Smokers’ sophomore album perches atop Canadian community and campus radio magazine !earshot’s national folk/roots/blues chart. The…
Why tapes are great
Millennials quiver with excitement at the sight of anything tacky, nostalgic or vintage. It became not a question of if, but when a genius and…
Why tapes aren’t that great
Nostalgia can be an extremely powerful motivator. If a significant object of one’s past is no longer widely available or relevant, then a sense of…
Legalize it – and by ‘it,’ I mean ‘all of it’
Commanding a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, and with the already-established support of the courts, there is no reason the incoming Liberal government cannot make good on its promise to legalize, tax, and regulate the sale of marijuana. The ending of the prohibition on marijuana is the proper time to reconsider our society’s stance on other drugs as well.
Many drugs, like marijuana, are not illegal because they are inherently addictive or harmful – the arguments put forward as justification for the legalization of marijuana apply to them also. There is no reason (other than the weight of tradition and old attitudes) that a significant part of currently outlawed substances cannot be legalized, taxed, and sold.