“Portrait of Elliot”: Painting of brain cyst stars at neuroscience conference

At Museum London on February 20th, a painting of a glowing brain is displayed on an easel. The stylized MRI brain scan, from the back-of-the-head view, is aflame in yellows and reds that form a hazy halo around a starburst of highlighter-green brain fluid. Folds of pale coral-coloured grey matter coalesce into cranial nerves bordered by a streaming blue-violet neck. In the right hemisphere drifts a ghostly cyst.  The piece is called “Portrait of Elliot”, painted by artist Natasha Beaudoin. It is based on a real MRI scan of her boyfriend, Elliot Tomlinson, who was diagnosed with an arachnoid cyst. …

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‘The system itself is flawed’: London community shows up to support sexual assault survivor 

Over 40 people joined together on Tuesday, May 13 outside of the Superior Court in London, Ont., to support survivor E.M. on her seventh day of cross-examination by defense attorneys in the sexual assault trial of five men. E.M. was 20 years old at the time of the reported sexual assaults. The trial began at the end of April this year — nearly seven years later. The five men, Michael MacLeod, Cal Foote, Dillon Dubé, Carter Hart, and Alex Formenton, were hockey players on the Canadian World Juniors hockey team. They were in London in 2018 to celebrate the team’s…

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Full Circle Cooking

Welcome to full circle cooking! My goal with this series is to bring you recipes which help save on grocery costs and offer some tips on how to get the most out of every ingredient. I’m based in the Antler River area so I’m going to point out deals at specific stores in the city, but the general advice will be universal.  Meat on a budget. $20/lb for a butcher’s cut of steak? What the f#&*??! It’s times like these when we’re reminded that meat being a staple is a relatively modern luxury. But it’s doable on a budget by…

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“Ongoing return”: A living archive of Palestine

To cast my net I found the waves Some laughing, some crying The wave asked me ‘what’s the matter?’ I said ‘I’ve lost my beloved’ Truly, I’ve lost my beloved Partition, a film directed by McGill anthropology professor Diana Allan, begins with an Arabic song confessing to the sea. The lyrics ring against granulated black and white footage of the sloping hills and winding roads of Gaza, 1917. The scenes shift to British soldiers marching in synchrony and to explosions – grainy, soundless, and distorted.  Sleep, my son, sleep The slumber of gazelles in the wilderness  Oh Lord, may my…

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London Community rallies together for May Day

On Sunday, more than 70 London workers and community members gathered in Victoria Park to celebrate May Day. The celebration included music, chants, and speeches from local organizations and union chapters. May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, celebrates the labour movement and the workers behind it. The origins of May Day trace back to 1886, following a massive general strike in the United States involving workers across the nation striking to demand an eight-hour work day. In Chicago, on the third day, police officers fired into a crowd of striking workers, which incited a rally at the city’s…

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“Western racism is its DNA”: Talk by Palestinian scholar Saree Makdisi on genocide in Gaza

A protestor with a Palestinian flag. Photo taken by Moses Odida.

Originally published at The Socialist on April 16th, 2025 On Wednesday, March 19, Dr. Saree Makdisi presented at Western University for a public lecture titled, “Gaza and the Question of Palestine.”  Dr. Makdisi is the Chair of the Department of English at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), a prominent scholar of romantic literature, and public intellectual who authored Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (2008) and Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (2022).  He is also the nephew of the late scholar Edward Saïd, who is responsible for foundational work in postcolonial theory. Saïd’s seminal work, Orientalism (1979) describes the West’s…

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