Readers of even the most outlandish fiction are likely to be incredulous and deeply unsettled by the hair-raising stories unspooled by digital sleuth Ronald Deibert in Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy. “Every day we interact with victims of espionage or some kind of harassment, usually coming from bad government […]
Timothy Caulfield might want to consider having “champion debunker” tattooed in a prominent place so people would ask him about his mission to combat “how science and health are misrepresented in the public sphere through spin, exploitation and less-than-ideal representations of science,” as he describes it. In four previous books, the 61-year-old University of Alberta […]
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest contribution to the canon of pop intellectualism was not the book he set out to write. He was several chapters into a 25th anniversary update of The Tipping Point – the 2000 bestseller that turned a chatty wonk from Canada into a household name – before he realized the new material was […]
Here’s a shocking statistic from What She Said: Conversations About Equality by Elizabeth Renzetti: The UN estimates it will take 300 years for women to achieve gender parity. The former Globe and Mail journalist builds on three decades of reporting from the frontlines of feminism to trace “the paradox of our condition right now – […]
In the 21st century, with Kamala Harris poised to potentially occupy the White House, Taylor Swift’s record-shattering $1-billion revenue from her Eras tour and the #MeToo movement rooted in the cultural firmament, you might think women in the Western world were enjoying gender parity. But you’d be wrong, as former Globe and Mail columnist and […]
The world’s forests may lack a voice of their own, but they have a powerful ally in Diana Beresford-Kroeger, 80. The globally renowned botanist, medical biochemist and self-described “climate-change visionary” – who describes forests as “molecular green machines, just like the brain” – has dedicated her life and career to tree advocacy. At every opportunity, […]
The journalist in a family is typically the clan’s historian, cobbling together faded documents and ancestral lore to burnish the family tree, and to pen obituaries and eulogies. With her searing new book The Knowing, veteran Toronto investigative reporter Tanya Talaga has taken that to its apex, solving the 80-year mystery of her missing great-great-grandmother […]
Family secrets can be corrosive or illuminating. Occasionally, they are redemptive. That was the case for Canadian video journalist Roxana Spicer, 70, who painstakingly untangled the closely guarded wartime secrets of her late mother Agnes Spicer for her provocatively titled new non-fiction book, The Traitor’s Daughter. Among the bombshells Roxana unearthed: Her Russian-born mother served […]
Of course you know of Homer, Claudius and Alexander the Great, but how about Phantasia (the Egyptian poet who actually penned Iliad and Odyssey, later “borrowed” and republished by Homer), Domitia Lepida (Claudius’ wealthy and powerful mother-in-law who transformed her daughter’s husband from sickly and clueless to efficient Emperor of Rome) or Olympias (Alexander the […]
Timothy Winegard did not grow up horse-mad. Occasionally his parents would take him to a hobby farm near their home outside of Sarnia, Ont., and young Tim would marvel at the beautiful, muscular animals and wonder, as he fed them apples, “How do they get so strong on a vegetarian diet?” But that was about […]