Since news of his death broke a few days ago, the sensational story of ill-fated American Christian missionary John Allen Chau has been getting lots of attention in social media—and mostly for the right reasons. For every religious dingbat who calls him a martyr, there are countless other people who take no pity on the 26-year-old zealot for meeting an end that even his own family admits was entirely of his own making. For…
When American author Edmund White finally published his much-anticipated biography of Jean Genet in 1993, not all of his peers were impressed. Playwright and activist Larry Kramer, for one, wanted to know: at the height of a global AIDS crisis what was White doing, spending seven years in Paris writing about a decadent, bohemian artist/outlaw while gay men by the thousands were dying in the prime of their lives? During a plague, was it…
With the corpses piling up in Rakhine State and the number of Rohingya refugees fleeing into Bangladesh eclipsing the 400,000 mark, international good will toward Aung San Suu Kyi appears to be hemorrhaging by the minute. The whole world, it seems, is piling on Myanmar’s former beacon of democracy, blaming her for a crisis the UN describes as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. And with good reason. Once celebrated for her steadfast courage, dignity, and…
You can tell a lot about Canadians from how we talk about Omar Khadr. Right now, there’s a lot being said about Khadr that isn’t exactly flattering to those who are saying it. It has been been two years since the former child soldier, accused terrorist and youngest Guantanamo Bay detainee was released from a medium security prison in Edmonton, ending 13 years of incarceration that had divided Canadians on partisan lines. With his public debut, there…
[NOTE: As I write, I am supposed to be in Vancouver at the Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC)’s annual general meeting. Having flown to previous ones in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Toronto, I had every expectation of finally attending an AGM in my home province. Instead, thanks to a careless mistake involving my passport, a trip to Berlin that was supposed to end on May 31 was extended until June 5—the day after the AGM’s…