How we came to put a mushroom cloud on the front of our magazine

An introduction to the Blueprint issue

Deborah Ostrovsky introduces an excerpt from Rutu Modan's gripping new graphic novel.

Short interviews with up-and-coming artists Mercedes Helnwein and Souther Salazar

New to Thuder Bay, andrew Steinmetz finally has time to work on his novel. But first he needs to get buff.

Welcome to the Perimeter Institute where today's Einsteins are hard at work.

Why is Montreal one of the last bastions of unfluoridated drinking water in North America?

In Quartzsite, Arizona, people know how to make do. But are hardscrabble attitudes and religious values redundant in an age of the ready-made?

Poetry

Editor-at-large Meredith Erickson speaks with artist Melvin Charney about art, architecture and the "one size fits all" mentality governing life today.

They number ten million. They live in squalor. Will the Roma fare better in the new Europe?

An excerpt adapted from Stephen Marche's brilliant fictional-anthology-as-novel, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

Film Critic Matthew Hays looks at print media's hidebound, prim, knee-jerk, paternalistic, unthinking, programmatic attitude towards the word "fuck."

Winner of the Quebec Writing Competition, 2007: The Forested Knolls of Elbasan

Text message divorce

The Canadian military is visiting mosques to woo young Muslims. Not everyone is happy.

Poetry

Blueprint for a green fest.