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In this extraordinary travelogue Horatio Clare recreates the walk that J S Bach, then an unknown composer and organ teacher, made in the depths of winter in 1705 across Germany to Lubeck. This was the pivotal point in the young composer's life, when he began his journey to becoming the master of the Baroque.

Hinterland provides a close-up view of America's hinterland, populated by towering grain-threshing machines and hunched farmworkers as well as telling the intimate story of a life lived within the hinterland.

A trenchant expose of the effects of automation on worker's lives.

A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together?The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit voteand the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 the worst ever. Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media clich. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isnt one big event, but a long series of smaller ones?In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: its not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation. The devastating effects of cultural nostalgia and the havoc wreaked by social media on public discourse. Most acutely, the various failures of Western governments in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the legacy of the Enlightenment and its virtuesreason, logic, science, evidencehas run its course, how and why has it happened? And where do we go from here?

A wide ranging, intensely personal essay covering everything from open plan architecture and nineteenth=century decor crazes to invisible illness, childhood hardship, and the "original home" of the female body, On Interiors is an alternately swashbuckling and deeply felt ode to the places we call home. In something like a controlled careen, Silcoff coasts from the "obscene drama" of her own "always dying" body to the blandness of Millennial design, from the joy of post-divorce middle aged sex, to the "orgasmic maximalism" rising through pandemic-era shelter magazines, from menopause to antiques, fragile masculinity to "stupidly enormous steel appliances in kitchens." "I am a woman," she begins, "with a confining body who has been confined to a home more than I have been any other thing. In my life, I have been home as much as I have been woman. I see myself as a kind of feminine expert in cloisterment."

Deborah Dundas is a journalist who grew up poor and almost didn¿t make it to university. In On Class, she talks to writers, activists, those who work with the poor and those who are poor about what happens when we don¿t talk about poverty or class¿and what will happen when we do.Stories about poor people are rarely written by the poor¿and when they are written they tend to fit into a hero narrative. Through hard work, smarts, and temerity, the hero pulls themselves up by their bootstraps in a narrative that simply provides an easy exception: look, we don¿t have to give you more, you just have to work harder. On Class is an exploration of the ways we talk about class: of who tells the stories and who doesn¿t, and why that has to change. It asks the question: What don¿t we talk about when we don¿t talk about class? We don¿t talk about luck, or privilege, or entitlement. We don¿t talk about the trauma that goes along with being poor.

In this compelling whodunnit, Elaine Dewar reads the science, follows the money, and connects the geopolitical interests to the spin.When the first TV newscast described a SARS-like flu affecting a distant Chinese metropolis, investigative journalist Elaine Dewar started asking questions: Was SARS-CoV-2 something that came from nature, as leading scientists insisted, or did it come from a lab, and what role might controversial experiments have played in its development? Why was Wuhan the pandemic's ground zero-and why, on the other side of the Atlantic, had two researchers been marched out of a lab in Winnipeg by the RCMP? Why were governments so slow to respond to the emerging pandemic, and why, now, is the government of China refusing to cooperate with the World Health Organization? And who, or what, is DRASTIC?Locked down in Toronto with the world at a standstill, Dewar pored over newspapers and magazines, preprints and peer-reviewed journals, email chains and blacked-out responses to access to information requests; she conducted Zoom interviews and called telephone numbers until someone answered as she hunted down the truth of the virus's origin. In this compelling whodunnit, she reads the science, follows the money, connects the geopolitical interests to the spin-and shows how leading science journals got it wrong, leaving it to interested citizens and junior scientists to pull out the truth.

A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoonand gaining new appreciationamidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and consigned to scrolling screens, On Browsings essays chronicle what weve lost through online shopping, streaming, and the relentless digitization of culture. The latest in the Field Notes series, On Browsing is an elegy for physical media, a polemic in defenseof perusing the world in person, and a love letter to the dying practice of scanning bookshelves, combing CD bins, and losing yourself in the stacks.

"We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it's slipping away? We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as those we call family. In an episodic personal essay, Casey Plett draws on a range of firsthand experiences to start a conversation about the larger implications of community as a word, an idea, and a symbol. With each thread a cumulative definition of community, and what it has come to mean to Plett, emerges. Looking at phenomena from transgender literature, to Mennonite history, to hacker houses of Silicon Valley, and the rise of nationalism in North America, Plett delves into the thorny intractability of community's boons and faults. Deeply personal, authoritative in its illuminations, On Community is an essential contribution to the larger cultural discourse that asks how, and to what socio-political ends, we form bonds with one another."--

What are sports, really? What do we love about them? And what, in our digital age, have they become?As a child, David Macfarlane was an avid sports fan-and yet he almost never saw an athletic competition live. Despite the dusty collection of sports equipment in the basement, his parents had little interest in playing or watching sports, televised games were subject to local blackouts, and poor analog reception made hockey pucks disappear in electric snow. Instead, Macfarlane pored daily over the sports pages and brought box scores to school for Current Events, traded the rumours and predictions of sportswriters with his friends, collected trading cards and played sandlot versions of baseball, football and street hockey. Each of these endeavours took place primarily on the boundless fields of the imagination, the thing professional sport, Macfarlane argues, today sorely lacks-so much so that now he'll as soon profess to loathe sports as to love them. In On Sports, the latest in the Field Notes series, journalist David Macfarlane considers the origins of his love of sport against his discomfort with their commodification. From the pirates, gangsters, and extortionist hooligans of the International Olympic Committee, to the National Hockey League's capitulation to online gambling, to the ballooning of salaries and dumbed-down spectacle that characterize professional competition, to his enduring affection for athletic competition and the athletes who continue to dazzle in spite of it all, Macfarlane asks what sports really are, what it is that we love about them, and what, exactly, they have become.