Two prominent cultural critics squared off at the Segal Centre for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, arguing about—and, more often than not, agreeing on—how best to promote the arts in Montreal. The debate, hosted by McGill and The Walrus, a monthly publication that fancies itself “Canada’s Best Magazine,” was planned[Read More…]
Articles by Theo Meyer
The Times, It Is A-Changin’
When The New York Times announced a couple of weeks ago that it would begin charging readers to access more than 20 stories per month on its website, it didn’t take long for those who knew I was an obsessive reader to start making jokes. Within hours of the announcement,[Read More…]
Munroe-Blum talks tuition hikes, McKinsey controversy
Holly Stewart Principal Heather Munroe-Blum sat down with reporters from the McGill Daily, Le Délit, and the Tribune earlier this month to answer questions about the upcoming tuition hikes, the ratio of graduate students to undergraduates, and McGill’s Strategic Reframing Initiative. In response to questions about provincial tuition increases, which[Read More…]
Student investigated for hateful tweets
The McGill administration is currently investigating Haaris Khan, a McGill student who, using Twitter, threatened to shoot a roomful of other students last week at a campus film screening. Khan made the threats at a screening of “Indoctrinate U,” a documentary, on March 8 hosted by Conservative McGill and Libertarian[Read More…]
He’s just a small town boy, living in a lonely world
keepthisthought.blogspot.com In Cedar Rapids, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), a small town insurance salesman with a heart of gold, is the picture of Midwestern naiveté—a man, as his boss says, who was going places and then never did. He’s never flown on a plane before, doesn’t drink, and wears a sweater[Read More…]
Jobbook Details
Nearly a fortnight after the Students’ Society Council issued a public censure of President Zach Newburgh for his involvement with Jobbook.com, a social networking website designed to connect students at elite universities with employers, new details have emerged about the efforts by several councillors to remove Newburgh from office. Certain[Read More…]
Council votes to censure Newburgh
Matt Essert The Students’ Society Council voted to publicly censure President Zach Newburgh in the predawn hours of Friday morning for his role in pursuing a contract with Jobbook.com, a new social networking website designed to match students at elite universities with potential employers. The deliberations and the vote to censure, which[Read More…]
Collective reopens after permit debacle
After being shut down by the Students’ Society on January 25, Midnight Kitchen, the Shatner Building’s popular vegan food cooperative, reopened for lunch on Friday with a renewed permit. The cooperative’s sudden closure was the result of a “communication fiasco” between Midnight Kitchen and SSMU, said Emily Zheng, an administrative[Read More…]
For ICU patients, private rooms help cut infection rates
Panoramio.com Being admitted to a private room in a hospital’s intensive care unit can dramatically decrease the likelihood of a patient contracting an infection, a recent McGill study suggests. About one in three patients admitted to hospital ICUs contract some sort of infection, which increases the length of the average[Read More…]
A Shorter Frosh
Adam Scotti Due to calendar changes made by the university administration, Frosh is likely to change dramatically next year, with a variety of social and orientation events packed into a shorter time frame. The details of the proposed changes are still being discussed, but a key factor driving them is[Read More…]
University considers cutting semesters from 13 weeks to 12
The McGill administration is currently considering a number of changes to the university’s academic calendar, including a proposal to shorten the lengths of the fall and winter semesters by reducing the number of hours students are in contact with their professors. Standard McGill classes currently give students three hours of[Read More…]
Principal Munroe-Blum presents university’s financial plan
McGill Principal Heather Munroe-Blum addressed the National Assembly’s Commission on Culture and Education in Quebec City on Tuesday, urging the provincial government to allow universities to raise tuition for Quebec undergraduates to the Canadian average. The speech was Munroe-Blum’s latest attempt to convince Quebec to address what university administrators have[Read More…]
Covering Chicago from Chicago: A Start-Up Takes On the City’s Daily Papers
On a recent Wednesday morning in Chicago, three of the city’s veteran newspaper editors sat around a desk in a small office eight floors above Lake Street, talking about story ideas. The men—Jim Kirk, David Greising, and Bill Parker, all in shirtsleeves—were discussing how to cover the trial of Rod[Read More…]
Principal Heather Munroe-Blum talks tuition and research
Alice Walker Last week, Principal Heather Munroe-Blum sat down with reporters from the Tribune, the Daily, and Le Délit to discuss tuition fees, the university’s relationship with Quebec City, and competition between McGill and American schools. The interview has been edited and condensed. Thanks to the Daily and Le Délit[Read More…]
Chianti and charity at Robin des Bois
Tucked on a quiet stretch of St. Laurent below Villeneuve Street, Robin des Bois possesses all the characteristics you’d expect from a well-heeled Plateau bistro: candles on the tables, a sophisticated wine list, and canard confit on the menu. The one thing it’s lacking? Profits. Despite this, Robin des Bois[Read More…]
Architecture Cafe was projected to lose $73,000 in ’10-’11
McGill’s Board of Governors made public several documents last week regarding this summer’s closure of the Architecture Café, including some of the financial figures that protesting students have been asking for. The documents revealed, among other things, that the café had lost more than $15,000 last year and was projected[Read More…]
A blue-headed villain
About 15 minutes into Megamind, the movie’s eponymous villain succeeds in defeating Metro Man, the Superman-like hero, giving Megamind control of Metro City. But after moving into city hall and exhausting his list of destructive pranks (launching fire trucks into the sides of buildings, painting blue moustaches on portraits), Megamind[Read More…]
After Obamania, McGill’s Americans mail ballots once more
As a heated U.S. midterm election campaign enters its final week, American students at McGill appear to be voting in fairly large numbers, despite the hassle of requesting absentee ballots and the lack of a presidential contest. When Barack Obama squared off against John McCain for the presidency two years[Read More…]
Councillors move to debate QPIRG’s fee
Several Students’ Society councillors took the first step on Monday toward introducing a referendum question asking undergraduates to abolish the student fee that support McGill’s chapter of the Quebec Public Interest Research Group, a student-run environmental and social justice organization on campus. The proposed motion, if approved first by SSMU[Read More…]
500 million is the loneliest number
junebugreview.com In the opening minutes of The Social Network, David Fincher’s new film about the founding of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with him in a Cambridge bar. “You’re going to be successful and rich,” she tells him as she gets up to leave. “But you’re[Read More…]
SSMU will support campus food boycott
In an effort to pressure the McGill administration to reopen the Architecture Café, the McGill Students’ Society Council voted to support a student boycott of McGill Food and Dining Services at its meeting on Thursday, despite the vocal opposition of several councillors. The motion, brought to council by Arts Senator[Read More…]
Drinking in the footsteps of Richler
Alice Walker Alice Walker Mordecai Richler never attended McGill University, but it’s likely the university’s administrators wish he had. Richler, the acclaimed Montreal novelist whose works depict the city in gritty detail, is the namesake of McGill’s new writer-in-residence program, which will bring two authors—one Anglophone, one Francophone—to McGill to[Read More…]
Arts Execs reveal $30,000 Frosh budget deficit at Council
The Arts Undergraduate Society announced on Wednesday that Arts Frosh had taken in far less than what was needed to cover the event’s expenditures, resulting in a budget deficit of $30,105. AUS Vice-President Finance Majd Al Khaldi spent more than an hour detailing how the event went so deeply into[Read More…]
Lunchtime science
For McGill students, Midnight Kitchen is usually the best bet for snagging a free lunch on campus. But for one week at the beginning of each semester, Soup and Science edges out the vegan cooperative, offering free soup, sandwiches, and lectures by some of McGill’s brightest young professors.
For the Gazette, no more Sundays
Twenty-two years after its introduction, the last copy of the Sunday Gazette hit Montreal’s dépanneurs and doorsteps on August 1, cutting the Gazette’s printed editions down to six days per week. The venerable newspaper-Montreal’s sole English-language daily-made the announcement in mid-July, citing the small amount of advertising dollars brought in by the Sunday edition.
Governer General Reaches Out to Youth in Montreal North
addressed an auditorium full of youth and community leaders in the Montreal North borough at a youth forum on Tuesday August 31. Jean attempted to dispel some of the public anger that has simmered there since the shooting death of Fredy Villanueva two years ago.
The Tribune’s Guide to Electives
There are hundreds of great electives to choose from this year, but if you’re number 25 on the waitlist, try one of these courses you never knew existed. CHEM 180, 181, 182, 183: World of Chemistry Profs: Ariel Fenster, David Nobel Harpp, Joe Schwartz The founders of the Office for Science and Society team up again for the faculty’s most popular course series.
In Switzerland, accelerator begins smashing protons at full speed
At 12:58 p.m. local time last Tuesday, the Large Hadron Collider, a mammoth particle accelerator buried 100 metres beneath Geneva, Switzerland, finally began smashing subatomic particles together at record-high speeds. Though the LHC’s first successful particle collisions occurred in November, on Tuesday physicists at the accelerator recorded the first collisions at the energy level – about seven trillion electron volts (TeV) – at which the collider will operate for about the next year and a half.
Glazer discusses segregation, immigration, and education
Nathan Glazer, the prominent sociologist and professor emeritus at Harvard, delivered two lectures at McGill last week. Glazer is perhaps best known for Beyond the Melting Pot, a pioneering study of different ethnic groups in New York City that he co-authored with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963.
CAMPUS: Controversy over travel directive continues
After working to send McGill student teachers to Indonesia for over a year, professor Fiona Benson was “gobsmacked” to learn that the university’s new travel directive would force the trip’s cancellation less than a month before departure. “I was given a green light to go to Indonesia by [Faculty of Education Dean Hélène Perrault] and by the administration,” said Benson, who is also the director of the Faculty of Education’s Office of Student Teaching.
Five Days for the Homeless fundraiser comes to McGill campus
As most McGill students went to bed on a rainy Sunday night last week, Jennifer Sault, Andreas Mertens, and a handful of other students huddled in sleeping bags under an overhang outside the Bronfman Building. The students had committed to spending the next five nights sleeping outdoors on campus as part of the Five Days for the Homeless, an annual campaign to raise money and awareness for the homeless.
THIRD MAN IN: Lovin’ the Cubs
In years past, Chicago has been called the most segregated city in America, in reference to the city’s heavily black South Side and the mostly white neighbourhoods of the North Side. The city’s most persistent divide, however, has little to do with race. To a much greater extent than either New York or Los Angeles, Chicago is a city divided by baseball.
For Anglo-Montrealers, Super Sandwich is the place for lunch
Though downtown Montreal is filled with dépanneurs, the small establishment in the basement of the Cartier Building on Peel and Sherbrooke Streets is the only one that has several hundred loaves of bread delivered fresh every morning. That dépanneur, known as Super Sandwich because of the red-and-blue neon sign advertising “Super Sandwiches” mounted in the window, needs the loaves in order to make the hundreds of sandwiches it sells each afternoon.
In Brooklyn, fresh Montreal bagels now for sale by the dozen
Minutes after they finished watching the Canadian Olympic hockey team defeat the Slovakians last Friday, Joel Tietolman and Jon Leitner walked into St.-Viateur Bagel, paid for the 115 dozen bagels they had pre-ordered, and began loading them in Tietolman’s Volkswagen Passat.
Colm Tóibín, the award-winning Irish writer, on crafting prose
Colm Tóibín is a writer fascinated by other writers. Tóibín, the award-winning Irish journalist and author, first considered writing a novel after reading the work of other journalists who wrote fiction: Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and V.
Law Students’ Association considers cutting ties to SSMU
The Law Students’ Association Council recently voted to establish a committee that will evaluate its relationship with the Students’ Society, opening the door to the possibility that the LSA will disaffiliate from SSMU. The motion, put forward by LSA President Alexandre Shee, requires the new five-person committee make suggestions as to how its relationship with SSMU can be improved.
McMUN keynote speaker Justin Trudeau talks politics and more
Justin Trudeau, the Liberal MP for the northern Montreal riding of Papineau, served as the keynote speaker at the McGill Model United Nations conference on Thursday. Trudeau, the son of the late prime minister, sat down with the Tribune to discuss his undergraduate days at McGill, prorogation, and his life outside of politics.
Hébert talks Canadian politics
In 2003, Stephen Harper, then the leader of the Canadian Alliance, and Peter MacKay, the Progressive Conservatives’ leader, shook hands to celebrate the merger of their two right-leaning parties. That handshake, political commentator Chantal Hébert argues, changed the Canadian political landscape more than any other event of the decade.
Provincial government clashes with McGill over MBA tuition rise
The McGill administration’s decision to switch to a self-funded model for its Master of Business Administration program, which would forgo provincial funding by substantially raising tuition, has recently drawn criticism from the provincial government. McGill’s Board of Governors originally approved the switch to a self-funded program at a meeting in July.
New fee: it’s complicated
In an effort to close a multimillion-dollar shortfall in the university’s budget, the McGill administration has introduced a small charge on all revenues received by the university’s self-funding units. These units, which include Students Services, Athletics, Food & Dining Services, and the residence system, operate semi-autonomously from the rest of the university, at least in a financial sense.
Talking to John F. Burns, the globetrotting foreign correspondent
On a Saturday evening several weeks ago, John F. Burns and I filed into King’s College, Cambridge, for evening services. Burns, the chief foreign correspondent for The New York Times, does not seem at first glance like a particularly religious man. The 65-year-old McGill graduate is a tall man, solidly built, with a mop of curly, light grey hair and a white beard.