Should I stay with the hand I’m holding or touch the table for another card? The tension between the two impulses creates the texture of our days, the foundation of our very character from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Nov 16, 2024. We were on vacation, scanning the menus at a seaside cafe in Greece, when […]

Inside Michael Houghton’s painstaking quest for a cure for Hepatitis C From New Trail, Spring 2021 Illustration of Mr. Houghton by Adam Cruft When Chiron Corp., a small biotech company in California, hired a young scientist named Michael Houghton in 1982, it was already clear he was an exceptional scientist. Several top biotech companies had […]

From THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Sept 3, 2021 Last week, two videos landed in my inbox – field dispatches, from two friends who took off on adventures as soon as COVID-19 restrictions eased. One friend was cycling through the Rockies on a one-speed bike, sleeping rough and grinding it out over high alpine passes; the […]

From Explore magazine, August 1999. Quinton Gordon photos When you look at a grand old railway trestle from afar, it’s impossible not to feel something stir just there, below the sternum. The little matchstick beams crosshatch the sides of the bridge, and the whole effect is so delicate and spiderwebby, it seems an astonishing engineering […]

From THE GLOBE AND MAIL, May 10, 2021 One recent weekend, the sun came out, prompting locals to spill out onto the forest trails. I joined them, but I found it a little too crowded for comfort out there, given that we’re still at DEFCON 1 with the COVID-19 threat. As hikers encountered each other […]

THE WALRUS, March 22, 2021 A BASIC RULE OF SCIENCE is the more data points, the better. If you’re working with human subjects, you need enough of them to prove that your results apply not just to these people but to all people. Too small a sample size is a design flaw. But a single test […]

from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Aug 14, 2020 Have you noticed you’ve been perceiving time differently since the world turned upside down in March? Many people report that the first month of lockdown felt like it lasted about a year. But then the clock started speeding up. And now it’s whirring like a propeller. If […]

HAKAI magazine, July 7, 2020 Todd Cravens photo In the middle of Johnstone Strait, close to the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, a calm June day has dialed up a plate-flat sea. But that won’t last long. “Humpback,” says Jackie Hildering from the cockpit of her runabout, Fluke. She turns her head to a […]

The answer lies in the way powerful stories exploit our cognitive blind spots. Some of us are more blind than others — as I discovered on Christmas Eve. Natalie Vineberg illo from THE WALRUS, Feb 11, 2020 I: The crime report THE EMAIL popped up on my screen at 6:45 a.m. on December 24. I’d […]

  from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Feb 20, 2019. Like pretty much everyone of extraordinarily advanced age, Dr. Robert Wiener was continually peppered with one question: “What’s your secret?” He preferred to show a visitor rather than tell them. After cordial small-talk about politics and hockey, he slipped into his workout togs and, moving his […]

  From HAKAI MAGAZINE, Nov. 20, 2018. Photos by Grant Callegari. In the twilight hush of the fanciest restaurant in town, Paul Griffiths pulls out a tiny device that looks like a primitive cellphone and sinks it in his water glass. He’s trying to figure out where the water came from—here, Campbell River, a small coastal […]

The old and the young hear an entirely different world. And that’s becoming a problem. From EIGHTEEN BRIDGES MAGAZINE, Summer 2018     Robert Carter illustration In 2005, the owner of a convenience store in the tiny Welch town of Barry had just about had it with loitering teenagers driving away customers. So he installed a […]

  from NEW TRAIL magazine, July 2018. Illustrations by Hugh Syme In June 2015, Megan Strickfaden and her grad student Nicole Gaudet arrived at a little village on the outskirts of Amsterdam with a Harry Potter-ish name: De Hogeweyk. An octogenarian gentleman was visibly thrilled to see them. This called for wine. He took Strickfaden by the arm and […]

from ZOOMER magazine, June 18, 2018 One of Facebook’s core values, according to its founder Mark Zuckerberg, is to promote “better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.” Not long ago, a group of psychologists from four American universities decided to test this lofty adage. They conducted the first-ever study of age stereotypes in […]

from the NEW YORK TIMES, Sept 26, 2003 ON an overcast afternoon, eight snorkel divers and two guides — all of us encased in snug, full-body wet suits — gathered under a logging bridge on Vancouver Island in British Columbia and waded into the fast-rushing Campbell River. We took a few moments to acclimatize in […]

From VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, November 14, 2017 Pooya Nabei photo “I’m going to be the least compelling speaker you’ll hear tonight,” Dr. Evan Wood tells me as we pull up in front of the Anvil Centre auditorium in New Westminster. People are already trickling in for tonight’s event, Recovery Speaks, featuring inspiring personal tales of sobriety on the other […]

  Our oceans contain enough energy to power the planet — if we could just get our hands on it. from HAKAI MAGAZINE, June 28, 2017 Edinburgh isn’t known as a hotbed of industrial espionage. But one cool and quiet spring night in the Scottish city, a high-stakes burglary was underway. Down at the old […]

  from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, May 6, 2017 Ed Whitlock, a quiet gentleman of wry British wit, an iron will and a body seemingly purpose-built to run marathons, held 36 age-group world records. He was the oldest person ever to run a marathon in under four hours, and the only person aged 70 or […]

  From PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, Jan. 2017  For a lot of us, a typical day is so full of compromises, distractions, and interruptions that it ends up being neither productive (if it’s a work day) nor relaxing (if it’s a play day). We’re half-on/half-off much of the time, checking emails and running errands, chasing little stuff […]

From THE WALRUS, Dec. 2016     Colette Anderson and her five-year-old son were approaching the checkout line at a Save-On-Foods in North Vancouver when she realized they’d left her shopping list at the sushi place in the mall. A hundred metres away, just out of sight. “Would you mind going and grabbing it while I […]

  from WESTERN LIVING, July/August 2016 photos by Jennifer Williams   1. Sooke dreams As the Mazda eases through the highway curves near Cassidy, B.C. — not ten minutes into the trip — a curdly tang fills the air. “Oh gross – Penny just barfed!” Madeline hollers from the back seat. “Lila’s cleaning it up! She’s […]

Flashes of insight can be personally transformative, creatively inspiring, or even spiritually transcendent. Is there a way to manufacture an “aha” moment,” or at least improve the odds of having one? From PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (cover story), March 2015 Simon Lovell was 31 and a professional con man who had spun the gambling tricks he’d learned […]

  from the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age. Grierson’s last article for the magazine was about Olga Kotelko, a 91-year-old track star, which became the basis […]

from the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, OCT. 22, 2014 One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and […]

from READER’S DIGEST, June 2014 It promised to be the best job so far that summer—which wasn’t saying much. I’d been scanning the “casual labour” postings at the local employment office, vowing every visit to take something, anything. Already I had unpacked shipments of underpants, been pulled through an active sewer on a rolling sled […]

  From READER’S DIGEST, January 2015 Dr. Ephraim Engleman is often asked for his advice. The American rheumatologist, who sees patients when he’s not at the prestigious research centre he heads up at the University of California San Francisco, will turn 104 in the spring. A common query: “What’s the best way to stay as […]

From PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE, Jan/Feb 2014 TO A CERTAIN kind of sports fan – the sort with a Ph.D in physiology – Olga Kotelko is just about the most interesting athlete in the world. A track and field amateur from Vancouver, Canada, Kotelko has no peer when it comes to the javelin, the long jump, […]

From THE GLOBE AND MAIL, JAN 11, 2014 Not long ago, I came across a little list I’d scribbled in a notebook.“Here is what 47 feels like on a bad day”: • You prepare a little milk, with a dash of vanilla, in a mug, which you go to heat up in the microwave. There […]

When a couple tackles their weight issues together, things get complicated. From READER’S DIGEST, JAN 2014 The first thing you notice about Andrew Mclane is the tattoo on his left bicep. It’s densely inked, like the designs on partially shrunken balloons. The tattoo is half the size it used to be because the arm is. […]

  From READER’S DIGEST, Dec. 2010 – Quinton Gordon photograph Today was a big day, I’d reminded my daughter. Right after kindergarten we had a date. “Rick’s taking us fishing. He’ll teach us about fish.” Madeline, who is five, looked unmoved. “I already know everything about fish,” she said. “You do?” “Yup.” “What do you […]

From THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, Nov. 28, 2010 On the third floor of the Montreal Chest Institute, at McGill University, Olga Kotelko stood before a treadmill in the center of a stuffy room that was filling up with people who had come just for her. They were there to run physical tests, or to […]

The complicated questions a vasectomy can pose FROM TODAY’S PARENT, October 2009 Not long after our second daughter was born, my wife, Jen, began leaving vasectomy pamphlets around. This is the way parents sometimes introduce important conversations to teenagers, whose notorious sensitivity prevents things from being discussed more openly. And I can’t claim it was […]

From the archives: East Meets West in the Dentist’s Chair From SATURDAY NIGHT magazine, 2002 For whatever reason—and there’s endless scope to speculate – pain is a hot topic these days. “That’s gotta hurt!” we say of the extreme snowboarder who lands face-first while jumping a Volkswagon, or of our friend’s kid who flashes her tongue […]

From THE RESPONSIBILITY PROJECT, by Liberty Mutual The sign just inside the doors of Surrey City Centre Library was small enough, or strange enough, that most of the patrons who’d been waiting outside filed right past it without even noticing. Human Library—Open Today Surrey City Library, in a bedroom community of Vancouver, British Columbia, is […]

from DISCOVER MAGAZINE, Dec. 7, 2011 The first shot across the bow came in 2002, when Oxford paleontologist Martin Brasier challenged the authenticity of what were then widely regarded as the fossil remains of some of Earth’s first life-forms. In the bargain he took on one of paleobiology’s great lions, J. W. “Bill” Schopf of […]

From THE RESPONSIBILITY PROJECT by LIBERTY MUTUAL, June 29, 2011 Not long ago, a French-Canadian skydiver named Pascal Coudé, who hopes to break a world record by freefalling for 6 to 7 minutes from an altitude of 30,000 feet, was telling me about his preparation. He plans to make the jump in a baggy costume […]

from VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, Sept. 1, 2011 The moment they were born, on October 25, 2006, in Vancouver, this much was known about Krista and Tatiana Hogan. The girls were conjoined—what used to be called “Siamese”—twins. Their skulls were fused such that their tiny bodies together made the shape of an open hinge, the girls facing […]

Canada’s most popular hiking trail isn’t really a hike at all. Or even a schlep. It is, well, a Grind. From EXPLORE Magazine, Spring 2011 Matt Lauer didn’t commute every day by foot to his makeshift set atop Grouse Mountain. But at least once the NBC Today Show figurehead, and his co-host Meredith Vieira, trudged […]

from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, May 3, 2011 Paula Wishart, a career counselor from Ann Arbor, Michigan, learned in her 40s a sinister family secret: Lynch syndrome runs through their genes. Lynch syndrome is caused by a collection of genetic mutations that vastly predispose a person to an early and aggressive form of colon cancer. (In women it’s linked, […]

The “Spirit Trail,” Harrison Lake, BC. from BRITISH COLUMBIA magazine, December, 2010 The tubing park at Hemlock Valley Resort doesn’t look like much: just five lanes carved into the side of the hill, separated by hay bales, with a rope tow to schlep the demonstrably lazy to the top. But it provides a perfect teachable […]

From EIGHTEEN BRIDGES, September 2010 Castor sisyphus canadensis. It wasn’t quite what Jean Thie was looking for—he had been scanning satellite images of melting wetlands permafrost for signs of global warming—but the Canadian ecologist quickly recognized what he saw on Google Earth that October day in 2007. The crescent-shaped blob hiding in the southeast corner of […]

  from POPULAR SCIENCE, July, 2010 When asked to imagine the Earth in 2040, many scientists describe a grim scenario, a landscape so bare and dry, it’s almost uninhabitable. But that’s not what Willem van Cotthem sees. “It will be a green world,” says van Cotthem, a Belgian scientist turned social entrepreneur. “Tropical fruit can […]

UBC cultural psychologist Steven Heine discovered profound differences between Western and Eastern minds. A recipe for prejudice, or just the opposite? from VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, April, 2010 It would be overstating things to claim it made Steven Heine famous—because nobody in his emerging field of cultural psychology is famous—but a study led by the young UBC […]

The new face of faithlessness from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, June 2012 On a recent Sunday, Ross Harvey sat in the back pew of the North Shore Unitarian Church in North Vancouver, BC. A visiting gospel choir from Oakland filled the vaulted ceiling with soaring harmonies, and Harvey, whose flash of white T-shirt beneath a black dress […]

From EXPLORE MAGAZINE, March 2010 Let me tell you a few things about my relationship with the points of the compass, and then we’ll jump to the meat of this thing. At shopping malls, my eldest daughter has to frequently tell me where we parked. She is five. Once, while visiting Paris, I went out […]

There’s a new movement out there to get children into nature from EXPLORE MAGAZINE, August 2009 A huge—and I mean huge—black bear walked right past the car as I was loading my infant daughter into the back seat. It was in no particular hurry. It had emerged from the forest and was cutting through our […]

The familiar becomes invisible. And that’s a problem. from VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, July 2009 “Choice architecture” is suddenly a sexy idea, thanks largely to a recent book called Nudge. A nudge, as authors Richard Thaler (an economist) and Cass Sunstein (a legal scholar) explain, is a little intervention in our daily lives from the unseen hand […]

  One man decides, in early midlife, to pursue a crazy dream long deferred. And discovers he has bitten off more than he imagined From Explore Magazine, Apr. 2009   “Here’s the dream,” said Don Montgomery, “Monty” to his friends. “You’re lying in a hammock, looking out past the palms. Your muscles are sore from […]

Failure destroys some people. Others rise from the ashes. from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, May 2009 In September of 2008, Philip Schultz, a humble and plainspoken fellow, crossed the hardwood floor and slid in behind a temporary lectern in the Center for Well-Being at The Ross School in East Hampton. It was commencement day for the eighth-grade […]

Wind, solar, tidal—all are battling for the renewable-energy crown. But what about the six billion highly efficient short-stroke engines in our midst? What about us? From POPULAR SCIENCE, March 2009 Cave Junction, Oregon, was once, long ago, the center of a gold rush boom that, like so many booms, ultimately consumed its host. Prospectors mined […]

Every day, in almost every field, someone experiences what can only really be described as a wake-up call. They have gotten things terribly wrong. Somehow, they have ended up on the wrong side. The “second brain” in their gut—that ten-billion-nerve knot—tells them that life can’t go on this way. It just can’t. And so, on […]

It’s been called the biggest scientific project ever. And Vancouver scientists are poised to help understand the origins of the universe from VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, December 2008 Given Canada’s key role in the experiment, it would have been a little embarrassing if this business at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva had destroyed the universe. In […]

from Vancouver magazine, Nov 2, 2008 If you’re an endangered animal, you’d better hope that human beings find you cute, like a Vancouver Island marmot, or charismatic, like a Grizzly, or majestic, like a whooping crane. Then supermodels and rock stars and Disney animators will make emotional appeals on your behalf, and the general public […]

Mirror neurons may hold the key to understanding how human beings respond to one another’s plight from IN CHARACTER, April 2008 Simon Lovell is a British-born stage magician whose long-running Broadway show Strange and Unusual Hobbies exploits his dexterity with playing cards. But for most of his adult life, Lovell turned a less reputable dime. […]

From VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, July 1, 2008 At the tiny hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant around the corner from his Point Grey house, Abraham Rogatnick needs no introduction. He is a regular, with his table, his chair. On a sunny afternoon not long ago the owner looked up as he came through the door. She smiled sweetly with […]

Public identity and private faith are never more at odds than when a preacher loses his faith from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, January 2008 James McAllister, a 56-year-old Lutheran minister in the midwest, was working on his sunday sermon one Thursday afternoon last summer. It wasn’t going well. The reverend wasn’t suffering from writer’s block—in fact, he […]

7 Habits of Highly Persuasive Toddlers From TODAY’S PARENT, Sept 2007 Young soldiers, listen up. Your parents are busy. They really don’t have much time. Which means you have only seconds, not minutes, to grab their attention and get your message heard. The good news is, that’s all you’re going to need, because you’re parents […]

from TIME MAGAZINE (US edition) April 5, 2007 It’s easy to get the sense these days that you’ve stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren’t. Something has happened to a lot of people […]

  For The Stress Fractures, a team of highly amateur runners assembled for a single day’s heroic shenanigans, trouble came — for the first time — 40 kilometres outside of Jasper, Alberta. It was 1:30 pm and crowding 27 degrees C. One hundred and sixty two competitors, strung out along the shoulder of Highway 93, […]

On January 1, 1999, Jeff Harris held his Olympus Stylus camera out in front of him and snapped his own picture in Times Square. His face poked out of a parka hood. He wore a tourist’s expression of goofball self-consciousness. It was cliché placed carefully on top of a billion others, noticed by no one […]

It’s been said my grandfather helped build modern-day Korea. He left a subtler legacy for me From THE WALRUS, June 2004 There was a man in the land of Han whose name was Bob; and that man was imperfect, and often wrong, though he feared God, and avoided evil. And there were born unto him […]

And other rallying cries from the fringes of the final frontier from POPULAR SCIENCE, May 2004 UC Berkeley space scientist Greg Delory devoured Carl Sagan’s books as a kid; now he hunts for extraterrestrial water—and life—in the solar system. Jeff Greason learned to pick locks at Caltech, from none other than Richard Feynman; now he […]

Think pulling an all-nighter would damn near kill you? Welcome to Middle Age From TORO, March 2004 There was a moment a year or two ago when the world suddenly belonged to forty-year-olds. Forty-year-old actors—Hanks, Cruise, Cage—commanded the Hollywood A-List. Forty-year-old writers—Michael Chabon, Yann Martel—were bagging the big book prizes; Billy Collins wrote his first […]

From THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, July 27, 2003 It is not considered good judgment to wade into the issue of recovered memories without skin as thick as permafrost and caller ID on the phone. Rare is the academic field in which colleagues on opposite sides of a debate — people with international reputations — […]

from THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, May 4, 2003 A trip to the diet doc, circa 2013. You prick your finger, draw a little blood and send it, along with a $100 fee, to a consumer genomics lab in California. There, it’s passed through a mass spectrometer, where its proteins are analyzed. It is cross-referenced […]

Geographic profiling pioneer Kim Rossmo has been likened to Sherlock Holmes; his Watson in the hunt for serial killers is a digital sidekick — an algorithm he calls Rigel. from POPULAR SCIENCE, March 2003 Until he was called in on the Beltway Sniper investigation, Detective Kim Rossmo’s most confounding case was the South Side Rapist. […]

Two angles on the world’s most dangerous high-altitude stunt from POPULAR SCIENCE, January 2003 In the middle of the plate-flat Canadian prairie, not far from where writer Raymond Carver hunted geese, a flurry of activity broke out last September around a small, rural airfield. Here was ground zero for French skydiver Michel Fournier’s audacious attempt […]

From THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, Sept. 1, 2002 Every September, the office of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Cincinnati issues a crisp new edition of ”Paideia,” a comic-size booklet that lists thousands of obscure words that will appear in spelling bees across the country over the coming year — words that any […]

for EXPLORE magazine, June 2002 patrick hendry / unsplash The first thing I noticed about Norm Winter, the mountain guide I’d hired to help a group of us reach the summit of Mt. Baker in the U.S. Cascades, was his strange calm. Norm was a B.C. boy, lanky as a cowboy, with a little billy-goat […]

  Dashiell Hammett created an idiom as American as jazz. If Edgar Allen Poe invented the detective story, then Hammett hard-boiled it (and an indebted Raymond Chandler gave it an ornamental deviling). Hammett “helped get murder out of the Vicar’s rose garden,” said Chandler, “and back to the people who are really good at it.”

Can squash have an enfant terrible? Oh yeah. Meet Jonathon Power From SATURDAY NIGHT, October 1998 In November of 1993, at the world team squash championships in Karachi, Pakistan, Canada drew Scotland in the first playoff round. But when the team bus arrived at the courts, Jonathon Power, the nineteen-year-old prodigy from Toronto, wasn’t on […]

From Monday Magazine, August 1990 At one point I thought, You know, if I had to turn around right now and leave this party at Lake Cecebe, it would have been worth the drive from Toronto just to have crossed paths with this guy Brantz. Five minutes after we arrived, we heard a sound like […]