BY: JESSICA BEUKER Truman Capote to English professor Boris Groudinko (1960s) Dear Boris – Have settled on this beautiful island for the summer. Wish you could spend your holiday with me. So glad you got the dictionaries. Will write you…
Expression & Culture
Is McDonald’s new design fighting gentrification in London or offending its citizens?
BY: CAROLINE ROLF If the mass-produced toxic food wasn’t bad enough, fast food giant, McDonald’s, may have another reason to apologize. In a poorly thought out marketing attempt aimed towards the inner city life troubled by tagging in Brixton, south…
Employees spill the 10 easiest ways to score upgrades and free stuff from your hotel
BY: ROB HOFFMAN There’s something oddly alluring about hotels. Maybe it’s all the marble or the thick mahogany pillars that decorate a foyer at Caesar’s palace, or our associating hotels and the type of person that can afford to stay…
Turkish artist captures a surreal bird’s-eye view of Istanbul through the use of a drone
BY: LAUREN ALI In his photo series called ‘Flatland,’ Aydin Büyüktas photographs the scenic overview of the city of Istanbul through the use of a drone. The dizzying, distorted angles and beautifully warped buildings create intriguing images that monopolize your…
Why you can’t let the end of your formal education limit your passion for learning
BY: CAROLINE ROLF Our attitudes toward education have been doomed since pre-school. When we finally mastered tying our shoelaces, we got a gold star. If we grasped finger-painting, we got to march across a stage in June, signifying the…
How Instagram’s Aesthetic Culture Changes Who You Are
Sometimes, on a good day, our lives cross paths with a compilation of visuals so satisfying—complex in allowing desire to wrap around the fading ordinary—that we cannot help but feel some sort of way at the sight of calculation: the…
Why Psychopaths Are Great “CEO Material”
BY: ANGIE PICCIRILLO For anyone who has ever worked in a hostile corporate environment, the intense personalities of executives are all too familiar and far too scary. These peoples’ personalities can be described as devious, competitive and lacking empathy. They…
Every issue of London’s controversial psychedelic underground magazine is now available online
BY: JESSICA BEUKER The University of Wollongong is the only source on the Internet to features every page of the counterculture magazine, OZ—an influential, yet highly controversial psychedelic underground publication that ran in London between 1967 and 1973. The magazine…
Photographer captures his journey through Antarctica on a ship constructed over 100 years ago
BY: LAUREN ALI René Koster is a travel photographer who voyaged to Antarctica on a historical ship that was constructed in 1911. Harbouring a great interest in past expeditions once travelled by sailors over a hundred years ago, Koster set…
This author drilled a hole in his head to stay permanently high
BY: ADRIAN SMITH Joe Mellen laughs from his side of our Skype call when I ask him what the sensation feels like today, “I’m not aware of the difference anymore. It was 45 years ago.” He had run into Bart…
Music education is more than an aid to academics, it’s essential to the human experience
BY: CAROLINE ROLF It is no secret that public music education needs a revamp. I have been thinking this since my first music class in public elementary school – each student in my grade three classroom was handed a shiny…
Inside the formerly abandoned “Wizard of Oz” theme park
BY: JESSICA BEUKER *All photo © Seph Lawless The Land of Oz theme park opened in 1970 and stayed open for a decade before closing the doors to the Emerald City. It’s opening saw over 20,000 visitors and guests “experiencing” the…
The Weed Revolution will, in fact, be televised
BY: TYLER FYFE Bernard Noble’s eyelids peel back to the sound of a loud speaker. At 5 a.m. he swallows a ketchup cup of assorted medication. He remembers the day the levee failed and a wall of saltwater, cinderblocks, and…
Photos of Africa’s wildlife roaming free in the last protected areas of our world
BY: DANIKA MOIR Images by Laurent Baheux Laurent Baheux is a French photographer currently capturing images of animals in the last few protected areas on our planet. In 15 years, he travelled through the African Safari and East Africa and…
Albert Camus explains how happiness is found in the continuous search for meaning in life.
BY: ADRIAN SMITH “There’s no referee for life,” a friend told me as he laughed at the bad luck I was having that week, “there’s no one standing there seeing to it that everything you do, good or bad, balances…
Weed-infused gelato is helping Italy to legalize marijuana one scoop at a time
BY: CAROLINE ROLF You can smoke it, eat it, drink it, rub it in and insert it – and now you can get a nice cold scoop of it. Just ask for “Marley” (do you know Bob?) at Perlecò, a…
This Photographer Captured the Mountains of Whistler After Dark
BY: DANIKA MOIR Tomas Mähring is a freelance photographer, cameraman, kayaker and professional rafting guide, whose travels have taken him from Norway to Zimbabwe to New Zealand. In this photo-essay, Mähring took his adventure to Whistler, where his friend, a…
“Lolitas” are Japan’s newest subculture with the world’s creepiest name
BY: STEFANIE PHILLIPS A group of women out for tea at a restaurant catch your eye. It’s not because they were talking loudly or because you’re creeping. It’s because they’re all dressed in modest-length, tulle-stuffed skirts with lace corsets. Their…
Don’t blame weed for anxiety or depression says new study
A new paper has found no link between marijuana use and a variety of disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder. The study, published in the JAMA Psychiatry journal on Feb. 17, found that “cannabis use was not associated with increased…
Frank O’Hara’s poetry shows us good writing comes from observant living
BY: ADRIAN SMITH My friend showed me a video of Frank O’Hara answering a phone call in the middle of writing new poetry at his desk. He uses parts of his conversation in the writing, even the small, seemingly unimportant…