Published by the SPT, a student society of McGill University
Keep on Commuting
April 5, 2022
Gino McTuff’s journey to the library
March 29, 2022
Keep on Commuting
April 5, 2022
Gino McTuff’s journey to the library
March 29, 2022
Know Your Artist: Theodore A. Harris
May 27, 2026
The forgotten history of the Montreal coffeehouse
April 7, 2026
Preserving childhood magic in adulthood
April 7, 2026
American Utopia might be David Byrne’s first solo record in 14 years, but the former Talking Heads frontman has been hard at work on an eclectic mix of side projects since the 2004 release of his last album, Grown Backwards. Perhaps the most intriguing of his ventures is the launch of his website Reasons to be Cheerful, a collection of local news stories from around the world. The website endeavours to highlight small-scale good in an effort to counteract the overwhelming doom and gloom of the rest of the daily news. American Utopia depicts the world in a similar way: Big and scary in a macro sense, but beautiful up close.
Though officially a solo album, American Utopia boasts an impressive, although unfortunately exclusively male, list of 25 collaborators. Among them is longtime friend and fellow synth enthusiast, Brian Eno, whose signature full-bodied, warm sound is especially evident on the tracks “Gasoline and Dirty Sheets” and “Everybody’s Coming to My House.”
Byrne stays true to the frantic—yet deliberate—style that he perfected in the late ‘70s, peppering his tracks with lazy percussion and urgent guitar riffs. In the moody, saxophone-heavy lead single, “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” Byrne revisits his fondness for brass instruments, first exhibited on his 2012 collaboration with St. Vincent. Byrne’s lyrics also remain as outrageously profound as ever. “The cockroach might eat Mona Lisa / The pope don’t mean shit to a dog!” he croons on “Every Day is a Miracle.”
American Utopia is not without moments of darkness. In “I Dance Like This,” Byrne’s disdain for capitalism is apparent as he sings, “And the truth don’t mean nothin’ / If you ain’t got the cash.” The album is a thoughtful reaction to the pessimism and anxiety of our time, but it’s also a reminder to be cheerful about the simple and the small. Byrne says it best in the chorus of “Dog’s Mind” when he sings, “We are dogs in our own paradise / In a theme park of our own/ Doggy dancers doing doody / Doggy dreaming all day long.”
Know Your Artist: Theodore A. Harris
May 27, 2026
The forgotten history of the Montreal coffeehouse
April 7, 2026
Preserving childhood magic in adulthood
April 7, 2026
Unlike for other escapist genres, it’s been a long time since “taking itself seriously” could be considered enough to validate a science fiction film. While the 2000s saw Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) and Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) transforming traditionally “low genres” into Oscar-winning milestones, filmmakers have used futuristic technology to tell complex, human stories for as long as there have been sci-fi films. With this in mind, it’s only natural to expect more from modern sci-fi than technical competence. Writer/director Alex Garland has proven himself capable of straddling the line between hard science and more humanist fiction before with AI thriller Ex Machina (2015). With his latest release, Annihilation, he revisits similar themes of technology and identity, albeit with mixed results. While the film features staggering visual and philosophical set pieces, it falters by approaching characters with the same didactic coldness as its science.
Annihilation follows Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist and former soldier whose husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) has recently returned from a top secret military mission under mysterious circumstances. As time passes, Lena is drawn in by the same shadowy government organization that employed her husband. His mission is revealed to concern “the Shimmer,” an enigmatic, expanding region apparently unhinged from earth’s physical rules, from which Kane is the only person to have ever returned. Lena embarks to the Shimmer herself, along with a team of fellow scientist-soldiers played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny.
In addition to his film resume, Alex Garland has worked on several video games in the past, an experience that shows in Annihilation’s pacing and dialogue. After entering the Shimmer, events play out much like a game: The characters venture into a new area, discover clues and items related to the overarching mystery, and then encounter a new monster several times over. The repetitive pacing has the same potential as a well-made adventure game to produce a more fleshed out world, but it is held back by a reliance on dialogue that sounds more like a gameplay tutorial than real conversation. Garland’s screenplay promises a gorgeous, expansive world, but, instead of actually showing this universe, relies on exposition and description. This is perhaps most glaring in a scene that opens with Lena describing the Shimmer’s beauty with a foreboding, wide-eyed fascination, only for the camera to be dragged back down to two characters reciting their minimal, clichéd, tragic backstories.
Despite Garland’s crutch of Halo-level dialogue, the film’s final half-hour does finally grasp the scientific and philosophical potential it promises. The world’s science becomes clear enough to stand on its own and the exposition finally melts away, allowing questions to become visual and more complex. The recent buzz surrounding Annihilation has made overt comparisons to heady films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972), but it is only Annihilation’s climax that truly warrants those comparisons. It’s a shame that viewers must first plod through so much underdeveloped dialogue, but it’s hard to imagine anyone walking out of these operatic final scenes feeling anything less than astonishment.
Annihilation benefits from taking its headier philosophical concepts seriously, something that boils over beautifully in its climax. Unfortunately, it chooses to also treat its characters like scientific theories that need broad definitions. For a film with such an awe-inspiring outer world, it is hard to understand why characters’ interiorities need to be stripped down to groan-inducing lines like “all work and no play,” or, shudder, “you don’t hate me, you hate yourself.” The theoretical side of Garland’s film makes it ultimately rewarding; but, in a cruel irony, this same approach applied to its narrative holds it back from being a truly successful work.
In the Liberal Party of Canada’s Budget 2018, the government of Canada announced that it would invest heavily in research, allocating a total of $6.6 billion to science and innovation. This is a $1.2 billion increase from the 2017 budget. For students at McGill, the increase in funding will allow more students to pursue research, earn federal grants, and receive compensation for their work.
According to Canada’s Finance Minister Bill Morneau, this is the largest investment in investigator-led research in Canada’s history.
“We’ll make sure that the new money for research supports the next generation of researchers, so that we can build a science community that looks more like Canada, more diverse, and with a greater number of women,” Morneau said during his remarks following the release of the budget.
This increase in spending is based on recommendations from the Naylor Report, a document written in 2017 by a panel featuring researchers from universities all across Canada, including McGill’s Martha Crago, current vice-principal of Research and Innovation. The report mainly advocates for increases in government funding for research, and recommended a $1.3 billion increase in investigator-led research for science, given the fact that Canada’s research output has been declining since 2005.
“Canada’s performance in winning international prizes is trailing traditional powerhouses such as the U.S. and U.K.,” the Naylor Report reads. “It is also well behind Australia, which now outperforms Canada on several other measures. In recent decades, twice as many Canadians have won research-related Nobel prizes while working in the U.S. as have been awarded to Canadian-born or foreign-born scientists working in Canada.”
The report also addressed the need to attract more young people to research in Canada by eliminating funding barriers. Currently, the odds of securing a federal grant are only eight to 12 per cent for projects in health research, which discourages students from pursuing research in this field. The budget attempts to remedy this by increasing the money available to finance grants, resources, and technology available to researchers.
The new budget greatly increases allocations to fundamental research in particular, which refers to studies directed at understanding the fundamental features of observable facts without a specific application in mind.
“[Fundamental research is] basically making the foundational discoveries that allow you or others to then seek application of them,” Crago said. “It’s the basis, discovering anything in any field that is underlying [and] not done as an application that is investigator-driven. In past budgets, though there has been increases to councils, it’s always been for [specific] areas. This is whatever the investigator feels like studying and can convince through peer-review people that they have the capability and capacity to do it and do it well.”
Researchers at McGill have recently expressed concerns about the possibility of continuing to do their research in light of budget cuts, despite McGill’s strength as a research institution. The increase in budget allocation means that more researchers will have the opportunity to pursue their studies without worrying about how to finance their projects.
“I think [the increase in funding] will be very helpful because there were a lot of people because in the council who were beginning to feel really nervous about [the lack of money for this kind of research]. [….] With this injection of money, this should really help the number of people that get funded,” Crago said. “It will have an influence on students because [about 50 per cent of research grants go to] graduate students and [postdoctoral researchers], so the more grant money there is, the more money there is to attract graduate students and to pay them.”
Know Your Artist: Theodore A. Harris
May 27, 2026
The forgotten history of the Montreal coffeehouse
April 7, 2026
Preserving childhood magic in adulthood
April 7, 2026
There was a moving moment during the 90th Academy Awards where Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek, and Annabella Sciorra stood onstage to deliver a message. Their connection? All have accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct. In a year of watershed moments for transparency and accountability, the #MeToo and #TIMESUP movements have ascended, guided by the voices of survivors like Judd and Hayek, allowing for discourse on abuses of power and privilege in Hollywood. As these four women stood onstage at the Dolby Theatre, a short montage highlighted meaningful advances in representation and equity in the film industry. Yet, when it came down to the moments that matter—to the envelopes and the hardware—the Academy failed to stand for the beliefs it claimed to exemplify. Kobe Bryant, accused of rape in 2003, and Gary Oldman, a known Mel Gibson defender who was accused of beating his ex-wife Donya Fiorentino in front of their two children in 2001, both walked away with statues. The Academy showed that it remains as hypocritical and self-congratulatory as ever.
It’s no secret that the Academy awards abusers. From Casey Affleck, to Roman Polanski, to Woody Allen, if you’re a straight white man, and you make an acclaimed movie, the Academy is willing to forgive you for any number of past crimes. After the Year Of Weinstein, and the turning tide against abusive men in power, there was hope that the cultural zeitgeist could seriously affect the awards circuit. To a certain extent, it did—James Franco was left off of the Oscar ballot after sexual misconduct allegations from five women emerged, and Weinstein was expelled from the Academy. Still, Bryant and Oldman won Best Animated Short Film and Best Actor in a Leading Role, respectively.
What makes these men immune to the fates that have befallen Weinstein and Franco? Why are they, alongside Affleck and Allen, who continues to work in Hollywood after decades of abuse allegations by his former step-daughter Dylan Farrow, exempt from the same exclusion and public shaming? The Academy can pat its own back for kicking out Weinstein, but silently ignore the fact that he remained on the Academy for years, continuing to abuse women with no consequence. The small segment devoted to the #MeToo movement—a fraction of the screen time devoted to the War Movie Appreciation montage, or the more general Movie Appreciation montage—sought to cover up the fact that at the end of the day, the Academy cares about its members’ behaviour only to the extent that it affects ticket sales. The Academy selectively chooses who is culpable, co-opting activism to appease the general public.
In the opening monologue, human carpet bag Jimmy Kimmel quipped “But what happened with Harvey, and what’s happening all over, was long overdue. We can’t let bad behaviour slide anymore. The world is watching us. We need to set an example.” What example is that? That feminism is only useful to increase revenue and save the face of an outdated and out-of-touch organization? During Hollywood’s most important night of the year, the Academy had the chance to provide a platform for the under-represented. Instead, two known abusers walked off the stage carrying statuettes.
‘Journalism After Gaza’ panel discusses media bias and the future of reporting in Palestine
April 26, 2026
Winter 2026 report card: On-campus dining
April 7, 2026
Finding home in Montreal
April 7, 2026
McGill’s Board of Governors (BoG) held its fifth annual Board-Student forum on March 1, giving students and Governors the opportunity to discuss their respective roles at McGill. In the first part of the forum, Board members were assigned tables while students rotated, giving students a chance to debate issues with every board member.
Following this conversation period, six student groups, including the Black Students’ Network (BSN), McGill Student Emergency Response Team (M-SERT), and Divest McGill gave short presentations on their objectives and logistical needs for 2018. Some used the opportunity to voice their concerns about students’ ability to stay informed about the BoG’s proceedings—particularly concerning the Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility’s (CAMSR) terms of reference, which are currently under review.
The BSN is a Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) service that aims to make McGill safe and accessible for black students and to support their academic success, mental health, and physical well-being. Next year, BSN will push for the implementation of an Africana Studies program at McGill. This year they will hold a fee levy referendum, aiming to increase their student fee from $0.40 to $1.00 for full-time students.
“[The fee levy] will support the institutionalization of our service,” Christelle Tessono, vice president political for BSN, said in their presentation at the forum. “It’s very hard to continue providing so many services when you’re not paid.”
Divest McGill’s presentation primarily focused on their concerns regarding the proposed changes to the CAMSR terms of reference, which would prohibit it from endorsing investments based on social or political considerations. CAMSR meets on an ad hoc basis and is tasked with advising the BoG on investing in a socially responsible manner.
Divest McGill previously interrupted the BoG’s meeting on Dec. 12 to protest the proposal. More recently, on Feb. 15, the BoG held a community session in which members of the McGill community were able to ask questions about the changes to the mandate. However, questions related to the wording of the new mandate were rejected and referred to CAMSR during its confidential meeting several days later. Associate Professor Edith Zorychta, who sits on the Nominating, Governance and Ethics committee, explained during the forum tabling session why CAMSR’s meetings are not open to the public.
“Every institution has to have some kind of watchdog to make decisions about the finances,” Zorychta said. “It’s a conflict of interest if you [have an open meeting] and you’re making decisions about hiring administration, what their salaries are going to be.”
However, Divest McGill members present at the meeting asserted that CAMSR’s mandate is not about finances or hiring decisions. They called upon CAMSR to hold open sessions and make its minutes public, like the BoG does.
“[CAMSR’s] argument [for holding closed sessions] is that people express their truest ideas in private,” Divest McGill member Jed Lenetsky said. “But they are decision-makers for the university and they are accountable to students.”
Divest presented several recommendations for the proposed changes to CAMSR in a letter, including keeping the frequency of CAMSR reviews at every three years rather than the proposed every five years and removing the proposed change to the mandate. Lenetsky and Annabelle Couture-Guillet believe that the BoG did not conduct thorough research before submitting the proposed changes.
“[The BoG] consulted six experts,” Lenetsky said. “It was only after [Divest] held a week-long sit-in outside Suzanne Fortier’s office that the BoG released [the experts’] names and testimonies, and only five out of six [were released].”
In addition to greater transparency, Divest is pushing for more informed discussions.
“These experts were from McGill, with expertise in their own fields, people from the economics department, a green chemist, experts in sustainability,” Lenetsky said. “But not experts in ethical investing, which is what CAMSR is all about.”
Alice Lefebvre, student representative to CAMSR, assured during the forum tabling session that student voices have been heard through community consultations.
“I’ve been talking to students and other members of the McGill community about the proposed changes, and really listening to why the changes were made,” Lefebvre said. “I’ve seen both sides [of the issue], so [we can] make the best decision.”
Lefebvre explained that, although only one student representative sits on CAMSR, this position is sufficient to convey student interests.
“There aren’t many students on the BoG, and CAMSR is a small committee,” Lefebvre said. “I feel that CAMSR received a lot of comments on the changes from students. Even if I was the only student representative on the committee, there’s still openness.”
CAMSR will meet again on March 21 to discuss the changes to its mandate.
At the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS) Council meeting on Feb. 21, councillors addressed the tenuous relationship between student federations and McGill Athletics and Recreation. Francois Miller, manager of the McGill Office of Sustainability, also briefly presented the Vision 2020 sustainability strategy.
Following this, Council moved on to reviewing and approving the reports of PGSS financial affairs and member service officers. Finally, new business was briefly discussed, including the approval of a motion to ratify the Innovation Commissioner’s resignation.
The McGill Athletics and Recreation Advisory Board (MARAB) is one of several committees advising various student services on campus. Jason Blakeburn, the PGSS representative on MARAB, opened the floor to discussion of what Athletics and Recreation can do to improve its services for the graduate student population. He cited the failure of the Winter 2017 fee levy referendum, which proposed a three per cent increase, raising the fee to $3.63 per term for postgraduates, as an indication of a tenuous relationship between Athletics and Recreation and the student body.
“[McGill Athletics and Recreation] realized last year, after the failed referendum, that there was a lack of trust, or transparency, or just communication going on, so they want to hear from grad students how we can better serve them,” Blakeburn said.
PGSS Financial Affairs Officer Matthew Satterthwaite, a former employee of McGill Athletics, voiced his concerns regarding the department’s organization and unnecessarily large employee costs.
“I would really like to see athletics […] maybe going through a process of really looking at their organizational structure, who’s accountable to who, [and] how many people do you actually need to do the jobs,” Satterthwaite said. “From an organizational standpoint there’s a lot of money wasted.”
Blakeburn closed the conversation with an invitation to PGSS members to reach out to him personally with further concerns.
At its previous meeting on Jan. 17, PGSS tabled a discussion on affiliating with the Quebec Student Union (QSU) or the Association for the Voice of Education in Quebec (AVEQ), two provincial student federations that represent university student governments at the provincial and federal level. External Affairs Officer Hocine Slimani reopened the issue, standing firm in his position that, after careful review of both organizations, the QSU is better suited to serve the interests of members of the PGSS. Slimani also expressed his desire for PGSS to prioritize QSU affiliation in its upcoming referendum.
“It’s a bad idea to put two options on the ballot because people are not informed enough,” Slimani said. “Referendum questions […] should be yes or no questions. I think it is our job here, all of us as representatives, that we choose the option that will serve the best interests of our constituents.”
Slimani’s assertion that the graduate student populace is uninformed was met with criticism from members of the audience, including Bradley Por, a graduate student in the Faculty of Law. Por questioned Slimani’s impartiality and argued that the most democratic course of action would be to invite both groups to present before the PGSS at its annual general meeting (AGM) on April 11. Jacquie Safieh, a member of the Family Medicine Graduate Student Society (FMGSS), motioned to invite AVEQ to speak at the AGM but it failed to pass.
“My mandate was to prioritize the QSU,” Slimani said. “My frustration is that I am at the end of my mandate [which was] to come up with a referendum question […] and yet we are running in circles [….]”
After nearly 50 minutes of debate on the matter, Satterthwaite motioned to postpone discussion until the next PGSS Council meeting, to be held on March 21.
DNA ancestry tests from services like 23andMe, AncestryDNA, Family Tree, and MyHeritage are becoming increasingly popular methods of delving into our genetic histories, often at steep prices. While their methods used to retrace an individual’s ancestry may vary, each compares the genomes of their customers using DNA databases.
Ancestry tests owe their existence, and success, to genome sequencing that allows scientists to discover the order of the nucleotides that make up the DNA of an organism.
“The human genome can be thought of as a long molecule which forms a chain of three billion letters, which we label A, C, G, and T,” Simon Gravel, assistant professor in McGill’s Department of Human Genetics, said in an interview with The McGill Tribune. “Most of those are the same across […] every human on the planet. There are a few differences here and there, about one in a thousand, roughly, between any two genomes.”
The human genome was first sequenced successfully in 2003. Since then, hundreds of thousands of human genomes have been sequenced. This practice has in turn allowed scientists to identify places in the genome that are variable across individuals.
Larger companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA use genotyping chips—a technology that measures the genome of one person at around one million positions along a chain of nucleotides. Genotyping chips allow one person’s DNA to be compared to another’s. Other companies, such as the San Francisco-based startup Genos, sequence the person’s entire genome instead.
Unfortunately, the industry overall does not always operate in the interest of providing customers with their genetic history. Companies often sell genetic information to pharmaceutical companies for research. Good companies will disclose all potential uses, so it’s important for customers to look at the contractual clauses of the service they’re using.
“It’s a race between [AncestryDNA] and [23andMe] about who’s going to get the most customers,” Gravel said. “And the more customers you have, the better your results are for ancestry and things like that, but also the more you can make money on the back end.”
Accuracy is assured by using simulations of genomes that are developed and then reproduced after accounting for possible issues in the system. A good way of testing for fraudulent companies—which often return random results and don’t ask for their clients’ permission to sell their genetic data—is by comparing the results that they give for twins, who should receive identical results. If the company is committing fraud, the twins’ results will not be the same.
Generally speaking, genetic testing companies attempt to guess where an individual’s ancestors might have lived hundreds of years ago; before diasporas and diffusion. According to Gravel, this works well when tracing ancestry at the continent-level. Matching an individual’s DNA with that of people who come from or live in Europe, for example, leads to the reasonable conclusion that the individual has European ancestors. At the country-level, however, there is some inaccuracy—after all, people move around in Europe quite a bit.
“You have to go back 600 years and know exactly where all the ancestors of this person lived,” Gravel said. “And usually for the vast, vast majority of people, we don’t have this information.”
Accuracy also varies based on the individual’s background. For example, commercial tests don’t have a large record of genomes from First Nations individuals, so the accuracy in retracing the ethnicity of customers with First Nations history is not very high. The same is true for medical research.
“Because genetic researchers have tended to focus more on people of European ancestry, […] if you try to predict a disease from genetic data, you’re going to do a better job in Europeans than in other populations,” Gravel said.
Ultimately, companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA have similar accuracy overall, but differ slightly in their results because they use different DNA databases. And while you may be 35 per cent South American, a genetic test won’t be able to tell you that your great-great-grandmother’s side of the family hailed from a tiny town in Uruguay. However, with the help of personal family records, genome sequencing might help you reach similar conclusions or confirm your suspicions.
