Ksenia Anske might not be a familiar name to you just yet; indeed, you might not even be able to figure out how to pronounce it (ke-SEN-ya ON-ska). Born in Soviet Russia, trained as an architect, and having arrived in the States in 1998 knowing only the crumbs of English...

Dear Sirs and/or Mesdames (but most likely Sirs):

I'm not going to take the usual approach. I'm not going to be hateful. I'm not going to hurl a string of foul-mouthed yet literate abuse at you or imply that you should die painfully in a fire while you are mauled...

Most men find out they're going to be fathers when a little plastic stick turns blue. While the mood swings and crazy demands that often accompany the pregnancies of their partners may give them the vaguest sense of the responsibility and adventure to come, realization often doesn't strike until they...

I'm in my local hipster coffee palace this morning, standing in line for a beverage that takes far too many words to order, when I sense that something's different. Can't put my finger on it exactly, but things just seem lighter, and happier. Like everyone rolled out of bed with...

Up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-A-B-start. If you're a gamer of any kind, you've probably entered that or similar combinations of buttons into your controller, seeking to enable invincibility, infinite ammo or endless power-ups. In today's video games, cheat codes are everywhere -- originating as secret back doors for programmers to enable them to jump...

"The shuttle blew up."

When my friend Robbie told me that in the afternoon of January 28, 1986, I thought he was kidding. I may have even said "You're kidding," in response. For a ten-year-old who'd been fascinated with space exploration and NASA ever since he first asked his father...

Bad news out of the way first: No Best Picture nomination. No nomination for Javier Bardem for Supporting Actor. No nomination for Judi Dench for Supporting Actress. Many felt they were deserving, Bardem in particular. (Not that anyone should feel too bad for the guy, as he already has an...

It's been a bit of a dry spell for us fans of James Bond of late, a drought not seen since the dreaded 1989-1995 hiatus when a combination of lawsuits, hostile takeovers and general public ennui made it seem like 007 had had his day. The financial woes of the...

Today is John Lennon's birthday. The founder of the Beatles, one of the most fascinating musicians of all time would have been 72 had his life not been cut short by a deranged fame-seeking loner. Though he has been gone for over three decades, Lennon remains a compelling figure; a...

An uncounted number of stand-up comedians have worked the quirks and foibles of air travel into their routines at least once in their career, for the simple reason that it's a universal experience that no one has less than a strong opinion about. The old saying about how God would...

She's back. Shona Holmes, the Hamilton, Ontario native who became a poster child for the American right wing in 2009 as the debate over health care reform roared to life, is starring in a new Koch Brothers-funded Super PAC ad warning voters about the pitfalls of socialized medicine...

It's with equal degrees of bemusement and resignation that I read articles speculating on how the real-life breakup of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart may affect the box-office performance of Breaking Dawn, Part II. Nor is it any stretch of the imagination to suspect that the morning following the Aurora...

UrbanDictionary.com defines a "concern troll" as "someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with 'concerns.' The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you're an ally."

There...

I'm what you'd call a second-generation Beatles fan. They'd been broken up for five years by the time I shuffled onto this mortal coil, and my first exposure to their music was through greatest hits compilation LP's and poor-quality mixtapes copied off the radio. Even in the blissfully naïve days...

They call it the World's Largest Art Project for Charity, and it's a mission that would make Sesame Street's "official sponsors" proud -- Peace Love & Photography is Ashley Cooper, a Canadian artist and performer, and Filip Cederholm, a Swedish photographer, who are traveling the globe to capture images of...

You can't read U.S. political news lately without seeing a story about a septuagenarian Republican one-percenter with a hate-on for the president pouring millions of his fortune into a new Super PAC. Thanks to Citizens United, right-wing sugar daddies are emptying their coffers to Karl Rove and ilk to flood...

There is a first-season episode of The West Wing in which a pollster played by John de Lancie advises President Bartlet that he can sew up re-election by supporting a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning, as the numbers indicate that a vast majority of Americans are in favour of such an...

I first saw Star Wars on Beta. (Those of you born after 1985 are scratching your heads right now wondering what that is.) It was a bad, commercial-laden dub off the local TV station: the picture quality was dreadful, the sound was worse and the story was interrupted every five...

"If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn't swim." - Margaret Thatcher (great line regardless of whether you supported her or not)

We have a conscious choice to make when we start writing anything, whether to be positive or negative. Given...

Maiden, mother, crone; child, witch, whore; the meek and the bold, the submissive and the dominant, the loving and the cruel. The infinite and mesmerizing complexity of the feminine was embodied by the incredible women of Game of Thrones in this past episode, "Garden of Bones." While the show can...