Maclean’s

There were four options for getting the trapped Thai soccer players out of the flooded cave: the unrealistic one, the deadly one, the torturous one, and the mad one. Sometimes, madness works.

On how Canadians and parents in particular, need to first educate themselves, and then their children on Residential Schools: Canada’s cultural genocide. As a nation, we need to learn the individual stories of people like Phyllis Webstad, Gladys Chapman, and Chanie Wenjack, and about how the government partnered with the Catholic church to remove Indigenous children from their families in a bid to “take the Indian out of the child.”

In Maclean’s, Michael Friscolanti reports on the 14 everyday Canadians who — galvanized by the sickening image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi face-down on the beach — banded together to sponsor a family of Syrian refugees whose names they did not know, in a bid to “do what’s right. To do something.” In a story reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, Maclean’s travelled to war-torn Beirut to find and interview Amal Alkhalaf, the single-mother and her three children, dubbed “family no. 417.”

Facing tighter U.S. immigration restrictions, some refugees are risking their lives in the dead of winter by walking for miles across the U.S. border into Canada.

In this interview, author Kyo Maclear talks of birds and bird-watching as an “ode to the beauty of smallness, of quiet, of seeing the unique in the ordinary,” “in an age in which bombastic noise often triumphs over quiet contemplation.”

Nearly 50 years ago, two 12-year-old Ojibwe boys escaped from an Ontario residential school and froze to death. The Canadian federal government used to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children inside church-run schools. Over 3,200 kids died in them. Others died while fleeing. After famously telling one escapee’s story in 1967, Maclean’s magazine finally gets to tell two of the other boys’ stories.

Jo Aubin is 38 years old and has Alzheimer’s disease.

Tatiana and Krista are not just conjoined, but they are craniopagus, sharing a skull and also a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that processes and relays sensory information to other parts of the brain. Or perhaps in this case, to both brains. There is evidence that they can see through each other’s eyes and perhaps share each other’s unspoken thoughts. And if that proves true, it will be the rarest thing of all. They will be unique in the world.