Essay

A self-help addict explains why. Partly it's the urge to become more effective—to write better to-do lists and keep the tidiest email account—and partly it's the fantasy thereof.

In both her poetry and her relationship with Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett understood love as an abstraction beyond everyday matters. But there are some things a girl reading the Brownings alone in her room could not have known about their life together.

The wildly popular TEDTalk symposia have, for better or worse, given public intellectuals, thinkers, and writers a global platform like none they've enjoyed before. But what happens when you're actually invited to give what organizers call "the speech of a lifetime"?

During a stint taking calls for a distress centre hotline, the author asks herself: Did I help a guy get off or did I save his life?

For most Canadians, the existential frustrations underpinning the Idle No More movement are not even remotely conceivable unless you've visited a northern First Nations reserve.

The spectacular maelstrom that is Lance Armstrong Inc. teaches us how power, backed by lots of money and self-righteousness, can be a force of almost unlimited destruction. The disgraced cyclist's story isn't just about the greatest private doping conspiracy in sports history—it's about the nature of corruption, period.

Adrienne Rich was a writer, unfairly or not, who was known as much for her politics as her poetry. Fiercely mindful of her privacy, it's her contradictions, frustrations, and multiple ambiguities that remain in her absence.

Some recent and much discussed articles on first-person journalism and memoir show their blind spots when it comes to the artistic potential of creative non-fiction. There is an art to losing your shit in public—just look at F. Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Wurtzel.

A new essay collection on the consciousness expanding properties of drugs begs the question: can one simultaneously write about a drug while honestly making sense of it?