The Sunday Magazinewith Piya Chattopadhyay

As a funeral director in downtown Toronto, Luann Jones has had a frontline view of what it means to say goodbye in the age of COVID-19. She speaks with Piya Chattopadhyay about bearing witness to grief through an unimaginable year, and the added responsibility she feels in her job, both to the dead, and to the living.

In the latest instalment of Word Processing, internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch joins Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss how email language has evolved, why certain greetings ruffle feathers, and why we all need to cut each other a little more slack when it comes to the words we choose to open our conversations online.

Brantt Myhres' pro hockey career featured more penalty minutes than goals. In 2006, he was handed a lifetime ban for multiple drug and alcohol infractions. After getting sober 13 years ago, he found his way back to the league, working with players facing the same struggles he once did. Myhres tells Piya Chattopadhyay his story and discusses his new book, Pain Killer: A Memoir of Big League Addiction.

New Yorker writer John Colapinto joins Piya Chattopadhyay for a conversation about his book "This Is the Voice", in which he argues that we long for and cherish the human voice because it is part of us, deeply embedded in our brains, and a primary way that we make sense of the world.

Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, speaks with Piya Chattopadhyay about the need for, and pitfalls of, regulating speech on social media, and why he thinks a free exchange of ideas — including some we might find objectionable  — might be a better way to go.

Ron Derrickson, a self-described "hunter and gatherer of business opportunities," is one of the most successful Indigenous entrepreneurs in Canada. He speaks with Piya Chattopadhyay about his memoir "Fight or Submit", the importance of land to his success, and why he thinks it is likewise key to building robust Indigenous economies... and ultimately to paving the road to Indigenous self-determination.

Author Harriet Alida Lye speaks with Piya Chattopadhyay about the parallel journeys of cancer and motherhood she explores in her memoir Natural Killer — and what they've revealed to her about life and death.

Science journalist and Radiolab co-host Lulu Miller joins Piya Chattopadhyay to talk about her new book, Why Fish Don't Exist, a journey into one man's obsession with order and what it taught her about the value of a little chaos.

News of a vaccine for COVID-19 had many of us heaving a sigh of relief, with an end seemingly in sight. But the vaccine rollout has been marred by complications - delays in vaccine supply, issues around distribution, as well as questions about how vaccine hesitancy and new virus variants might affect overall outcomes. The news of possible setbacks keeps coming at us fast and furiously. But taken all together, what does it all mean for the months ahead, and ultimately — the finish line? And are there ways that could get us there faster?

After interviewing well over a hundred people attempting to make a living in the arts, William Deresiewicz, author of the The Death of the Artist, concludes that the Internet and economic forces are crushing them — and the way things are going, the profession of “artist” will soon be obtainable by only a very few, much to everyone’s detriment.

The prevailing theory in the scientific community has been that the virus that causes COVID-19 occurred naturally — jumping from animals to humans. But writer and journalist Nicholson Baker says another hypothesis, which many scientists have largely dismissed, should be considered: that the virus may have originated in a lab, and accidentally leaked out.

For many Canadians, skating and winter go hand in hand. And now, with communities across the country battling COVID-19, outdoor skating rinks are one of the few outlets many of us have, even if they are operating under restricted conditions. But as sociology and anthropology associate professor Mervyn Horgan explains, there’s more to outdoor recreational skating rinks than just getting outside for some exercise and fun.