UPDATE, October 29 - My old stories and columns for the various incarnations of Alberta Report are no longer available online. I've decided to make local copies of a few of the Google-cached ones, thus rescuing a fragment of my past from obscurity. The links below point to about 20 representative print articles from 2001-02, all of which were picked because they have at least some meagre merit (often one good joke, or a core premise that never was picked up in the mainstream press). A few hold up surprisingly well. I'm a lazy reporter, and I used to be mocked for it at the Report, with some justice--but in retrospect, it's also true that the fairly narrow-minded journalistic culture there militated firmly against the lively short one- or two-interview piece. The rule of thumb at the Report was that the more you were paid, the less habitual reading of other magazines you did; this was a medium-serious gash among the thousand cuts that killed the magazine. - The Management

UP FRONT Columns
10/8/01: First column after 9/11
12/3/01: Langley Schools Music Project, public-school fraud, John Callahan's Quads
12/17/01: Horny sailors, race-profiling mail, bribing Mrs. Mandela
1/21/02: Buzkashi, abused words, drunken Klein
4/15/02: Psychiatric ennui, school kirpans, army torture
5/13/02: Puck machines, frenectomy, anti-tobacco pharmcos
7/8/02: The Gretzky of video games, OED Tolkien
9/23/02: Kennewick Man, homeless economics, Hanoverian legitimacy
10/21/02: Star on Kyoto, ozone and climate change, breast self-exams

Stand-alone pieces
2/5/01: Absinthe's surprise return to Western culture
3/19/01: Picking on a farmer gets Ottawa in $428M worth of trouble
4/16/01: Canada Customs mail snoops, part one: the story breaks
4/30/01: Harried advertisers in a world of instant e-mail
5/14/01: Canada Customs mail snoops, part two: we'll keep doing it
6/11/01: The future of insurance in a DNA-sequencing world
6/11/01: C.S. Lewis fans decry plans for new Narnia novels
7/9/01: A Scientology critic takes refuge in Canada
12/17/01: A psychiatrist reluctantly breaks patient confidentiality to prevent an unfair trial
1/22/02: The Salvation Army's "Vatican II" moment
3/4/02: The new family-law trend: "collaborative" divorce
3/18/02: Orthorexia: the hidden eating disorder
4/15/02: Ever had real wasabi? Are you sure?
5/28/02: Cataract surgery in Manitoba: a case study in healthcare rationing
6/10/02: The illegal bank of Burns Lake, B.C.
7/8/02: Canadians reject a justiciable "right to welfare", but the courts don't
7/22/02: The Canadian inventor of Botox