Vol. 140
Something rotten in the state of Greece
February 27, 2012By Reid Standish Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. - Hamlet Act I, Sc. III It all began innocently enough. Back in 2002, as Greece first adopted the Euro as its currency, the country’s economic forecast was overwhelmingly optimistic. With its new currency and fresh access to the privileges of EU membership, Greece began a bacchanalia of large-scale borrowing. This manifested in a wild period of high-profile projects that went well over budget, such as the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Although…
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Canada’s apartheid
February 27, 2012Are we 20 years behind South Africa? By Christopher Nichols I'm sitting on a metal bunk in a medium-security prison in South Africa as I write this. The blazing sunlight and gorgeous natural scenery outside seem strangely juxtaposed with the barred…
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“Ordinary Canadians don’t care about the arts”
February 27, 2012How arts organizations in B.C. are impacted by funding cuts, and why they aren’t giving up By Esther Tung Photos By Mark Burnham It’s official — arts and culture funding in B.C. will be frozen for the next three years. The…
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Fat happiness: Is it wrong to be fat?
February 20, 2012By Ljudmila Petrovic As a child, Kalamity Hildebrandt was put on diet pills by her doctor in order to lose weight. By age nine she was bulimic, which progressed to the point where she was throwing up blood in her…
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Blood on our hands: How the international community has failed the Syrian people
February 20, 2012By Gustavo Destro In February, 1982, Hafez al-Assad ordered his army to besiege and shell the city of Hama in order to quell an uprising so strong that it threatened to overrun his regime. The army followed the orders to…
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The Surrey stigma: The city we love to hate
February 6, 2012By Kelly Thoreson “I heard that Surrey was not the nicest place. It wasn’t a place you wanted to go to,” said Ella Sargent, a sixth-year kinesiology major at SFU. “The ‘ghetto’ is a bad word for it, but it…
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“I don’t know how to use a condom” & other tales of how sex education failed me
February 6, 2012I thought I had pooped my pants, but who poops their pants in the fifth grade? I didn’t remember going to the bathroom that day, but I guessed I must have — in my pants. Maybe it was ‘anal leakage’ —…
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Sweat it: Why you should be worried about your lack of exercise
February 1, 2012Are you one of those people who ceased all attempts at physical exertion the moment your university career began? If yes, withhold panic: you are not alone. But panic, because forgoing exercise is (as you may have already guessed) a…
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Being better: Where did our empathy go?
January 23, 2012By Denise Wong In late October, the story of Yue Yue went viral. The surveillance footage from Foshan, China was posted online and depicted two cars that drove over Yue Yue’s tiny body in the marketplace where her parents worked;…
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Penny for your thoughts
January 23, 2012What to consider before giving change to the homeless in Vancouver By Kelly Thoreson “Panhandling isn’t a very lucrative career,” Thomas explained as we sipped warm coffees outside the entrance to Insite, the Downtown Eastside’s supervised injection site. “Well, for…
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