Kickstart

How did Pratt go from engineering student to respected, professional artist?

A (more than slightly tangential) continuation from yesterday’s post: 

Has it been eight years already? It feels like just yesterday when I was bemoaning the new, anti-intellectual president elect from Texas. Time flies, it seems, when you have a focus for your hatred. But now that Bush, by the time of this printing, will already be gone, [...]

It isn’t just the twenty-somethings who are asking questions

You can learn a lot by not asking about the scandals

Why Godfrey built a career before becoming a politician

Well, another Canadian federal election is underway…
We thought we’d offer a small contribution to the debate by adding a more “human” element. Although it can be said that, unlike with our American friends, politics up here mostly ignores the characters involved in favour of more policy-centred coverage. If we have foresaken the cult of ego, [...]

Over the summer, I was able to spend some time with three great books: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie and, most recently, Herzog by Saul Bellow. All three, coming highly recommended by friends whose judgment have my utmost respect, shone for me. And this is not to say [...]

Last week, I was in Chicago, taking a short holiday, visiting some friends and catching up on the latest trends in skyscraper architecture (which point, by the way, very high – 150 storeys high, to be exact, which is the lofty ceiling of the new Santiago Calatrava spire going up at the mouth of the [...]

When we first started the interviews that eventually led to Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started, we didn’t really know what to expect. Wouldn’t it be difficult to sit down with so many well-known people, especially considering the three of us were literary nobodies?
We had no publisher, no agent and very little experience (I think [...]

Yesterday, we rounded each other up and drove out to Wilfrid Laurier to speak at Youth in Motion’s Courage to Soar conference. As previously mentioned, the conference is for the organization’s recent award-winners and finalists, as well past alumni.
As it turned out (and, to be honest, as we expected), the kids had more to teach [...]