The Greatest City Grid: New York or Chicago?

Straight as an arrow: triptych along Lake Shore Drive, Chicago

Last year, Manhattan celebrated the 200th anniversary of its vaunted grid street system, the rectilinear net that stretches from First Street in what’s now the East Village to 155th, in Washington Heights. And any assumption this was too dry a subject for most New Yorkers could have been dispelled …

Why is the CBC Doing Such a Terrible Job of Covering the Quebec Student Strike?

The massive student demonstration on March 22 in Montreal. Photo by Yanick Crépeau.

A week ago, my brother emailed me from his home in Prince George, BC, to ask what English-language media he should be reading about the ongoing student strike here in Quebec. “I’ve only been seeing what they have on cbc.ca,” he wrote. Clearly, it …

Margaret Wente Hates Herself

Image via the Globe and Mail.

I wasn’t going to say anything. I was just going to keep my mouth shut. I spent the entirety of April writing poetry, and feeling okay about myself, about my current station. I discovered charcuterie as a meal. I’ve cut back on my smoking. Spring sprang. Life was good. In the background …

On Quebec’s Student Strike

iPhone photo by Jesse Rosenfeld.

Last night, I met my friend Jesse and we walked to downtown Montreal, to attend a demonstration against higher tuition fees. Hundreds of thousands of Quebec students have been on strike for the last two months, and Jesse, a journalist, was in town from Toronto to cover the movement. I had first met him seven …

Another Hole in Montreal’s Heart

The lower Main in 1997. Photo by Kate McDonnell

One of the defining features of Montreal’s cityscape is the abundance of vacant lots. Weedy, gravelly blocks of land, they can be seen in every neighbourhood, in some areas on every street, delineated by rows of misshapen concrete blocks, like boulders left behind by the retreat of urban development. (The …

A Peek at Maisonneuve’s Cover-Design Process

How do our covers wind up looking the way they do? Here’s a quick look at a few ideas that didn’t make the cut.

For our tenth anniversary issue, our art director Anna Minzhulina designed a simple, classic cover. Note the logo in the “10,” the strong cover lines and the corner slash:

But she also brainstormed plenty …

The Sexist Backlash Against HBO’s Girls

The internet is kicking and screaming in a colossal machismo tantrum and it’s all Lena Dunham’s fault.

Her new HBO series Girls—the second episode aired just last night—was supposed to encapsulate all of womankind, tell the world what girls are really all about (cupcakes in the bathtub, lights-on afternoon sex, opium tea) and complete feminism’s …

Why HBO’s Girls is an Unfunny Vacuum of Pandering, Privileged Dross

On Sunday night, Lena Dunham’s Girls made its debut on HBO. This really means it made its debut Monday, when everyone in the show’s target audience got around to BitTorrenting the pilot. It also showed up on YouTube. “It’s here,” a friend proclaimed on Facebook, as if Girls were the HIV vaccine or a jetpack.

In the …