Everyone knows about editors in movies. An editor takes footage from a movie shoot and works with the director to cut multiple takes into a coherent picture. There’s an Academy Award for Best Film Editing, so names get known. Thelma Schoonmaker has won three Oscars, having edited all of Martin Scorsese’s movies since 1980. But […]
I don’t see any reason to read only books that are vibrating with the latest buzz. In fact, I’m happy to let them rumble around out there and pick them up later if I feel the need—something that worked brilliantly recently when I came across an off-kilter, eight-year-old memoir that got me thinking. American writer […]
I sometimes put down Shoba Rao’s new book as I read it, having fun comparing her novel, Indian Country, to a classic work that’s a little bit similar and a whole lot different. Okay, to an Adam Dalgleish mystery by P.D. James. I meant no disrespect to Rao by flipping between the two. In fact, […]
Charlie Gilmour’s partner Yana was the one to bring home the magpie chick, which had fallen to the ground in a scrappy part of southeast London. Yana’s sister had found it and taken it to her studio, which is located in what Gilmour calls a leaky industrial unit on the edge of an English junkyard. […]
I’m putting out an unscheduled post this week to send writers a warning—and to share a bit of a laugh. Lately many writers have been getting invitations from scammers to speak to non-existent book clubs, asking them to pay upfront fees ranging from $55 to $350 U.S., when real book clubs don’t charge. Here’s an […]
Two things happened last week. The encampment of unhoused people beside St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church in Toronto was cleared October 16 by the order of the Ontario fire marshal, this after pressure from a city councillor and both the staff and parents from a private school located nearby. The night before, the Anglican priest of […]
Not long ago, I wrote a note on Substack about my husband’s neurosurgery. He has multiple sclerosis and needed an operation to implant a device to deliver a drug called baclofen directly to his spine. It was a delicate procedure done by an elite neurosurgeon and her team. Afterward, he spent five days in an […]
Our house is over-stuffed with stuff. We haven’t moved in years and things have accumulated largely unmolested in corners and crannies. I sometimes think they’ve been breeding at the back of closets, even though I’ve done several purges over the past few years. But I’ve only ever got as far as the easy stuff: duplicates, […]
A lawyer friend of the family says he knows of three Canadians who’ve been asked at the U.S. border by immigration officers whether they support Donald Trump. I’ve searched my memory, but can’t think of anyone who was queried about any other U.S. president. When I mentioned this to an American friend, she emailed back, “I’ve […]
It’s a classic American success story. Fredericka Mandelbaum arrived in the U.S. as a penniless immigrant and built a cutting-edge, multi-million dollar business from scratch. The twist? “Ma” Mandelbaum ran a criminal empire, which she launched by gathering freelance thieves into a profitable network. To launder the take, Mrs. Mandelbaum (as one must call her) […]
It’s 1940. The United States hasn’t yet entered the Second World War, but artists and writers have been fleeing Europe ahead of Hitler, many to New York, some to a shabby house in Brooklyn leased by a magazine editor who knows everybody. There, at 7 Middagh Street, you might find English poet W.H. Auden keeping […]
The last nightwatchman in Scandinavia climbs 14 flights of stairs every night to his nook above the belfry of a 13th century church in the Swedish town of Ystad. Roland Borg is in his mid-seventies, and for almost 60 years he has kept watch on Ystad, scanning its ancient streets for fires, its stores for […]