Chances are that you haven’t done much international travelling in the past seven months. The most you’ve probably been able to do is ride the 506 Westbound from Chinatown to Little Italy. In the meantime, you can travel vicariously with the following two hapless and naïve travellers who have much more in common than might appear at first. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: streaming on Amazon...
As we depart midterm season and finals loom not far around the corner, I thought it would be appropriate to compile a short list of pieces of classical music that can give you that extra oomph you need to crush your exams. Mozart, 12 Variations in C Major ‘Ah vous dirai-je, Maman’ You’ve just finished a difficult term full of essays, cold calls, and briefs. Now the real...
It’s that dreaded time of the year again: it is always dark, the weather is getting colder, and exams are approaching. Along with this comes annoying tasks such as bringing out your winter coat, getting your car tires changed, and having a constant battle about the thermostat with those you live with (or if you are like me, literally fighting myself about window open versus window closed). Not to...
Do our mixed feelings on advanced A.I. and tantalizing screens, merely reflect our own moral failings? Elon Musk is scared of artificial intelligence (A.I.). In a 2014 tweet, Elon compared A.I. development to “summoning the demon.” Unlike the countless podcast hosts and academics who routinely engage in such doomsday speculation, Elon put his money where his mouth is. Fifteen days into 2015, when...
Decades into her decorated career as a director, Sofia Coppola has little left to prove and it’s this assuredness and lack of insecurity that shines through in her latest full-length feature, On The Rocks. Tapping the likes of Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans, and an ever-disarming Bill Murray, Coppola follows up 2017’s The Beguiled with a more everyday subject matter: a marriage. Released...
Winged Words Story #4 When I moved to London in 2017, I knew nothing except the address of my empty, waiting apartment, and the name of my supervisor at work. Paris had signed the first email I was ever sent with a meme of the Queen of England waving through the screen, and beyond that, I had absolutely no idea what my future boss would be like. I walked into my office for the first time, heavily...
One student’s account of the online recruitment process Over the past two months, I participated in an entirely virtual recruitment process for 2L summer positions in the Calgary market. This process included a formal OCI day in early September, followed up by a second round of interviews and networking events in October. I thought I would share my experience and tips on virtual recruitment with...
In the summer between ninth and tenth grade, my friend and I would frequently visit the Newmarket Public Library. We’d spend afternoons browsing the dim aisles of the fiction section, checking out books, and strolling around the nearby lake and trail that led back to our neighborhoods. I didn’t know how else to fill my time other than with books. All my other friends at the time were engrossed in...
How our opinions on dystopias reflect who we are as individuals On October 21, 1949, George Orwell received a remarkable letter. It was penned by Orwell’s former French teacher and fellow writer, Aldous Huxley, whose own dystopian novel, Brave New World, had been published in 1932. The letter’s message was foremost congratulatory, as Orwell had recently published 1984. While Huxley...
There is no Kent Monkman retrospective planned for the AGO next month. A virtual vernissage occasionally drifts by, but no popup galleries feature his work amongst red wine in paper cups, and the list of his upcoming exhibitions dwindles with every month of COVID-19 closures. This doesn’t mean the art world has forgotten the Cree Two-Spirited artist, as his pieces still sell steadily for five and...
My father, a native New Yorker was particularly affected when the Twin Towers fell. In December of 2001, on the way home from one of our many trips visiting extended family, we detoured past Ground Zero. Three months had elapsed, yet small fires continued to smolder. Upon returning home, my father’s psyche collapsed. He developed migraines that have been with him since. To escape the ceaseless...
Schitt’s Creek features an ensemble cast of some of the most well-known names in Canadian media, including father-son duo Dan and Eugene Levy, and Catherine O’Hara. It follows the Rose family, down-on-their-luck former millionaires, who are stranded in a town originally bought by Eugene Levy’s character Johnny Rose as a joke. The Rose family camps out in a roadside motel, but manages to hang onto...
As the leaves begin to change, and we find ourselves spending more time at home, Obiter wants to provide you with some recommendations to keep you busy during your study (or procrastination) breaks. Documentary – Knock Down the House (Netflix) This documentary follows the primary campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) and three other female progressive Democrats who ran for Congress in...
“The better you do in Legal Ethics, the more corrupt you are as a lawyer.” This was told to me by a senior (and evidently, jaded) lawyer when I first began at Osgoode. I believe the underlying assumption of this perspective is that Legal Ethics, as it is traditionally taught, tests your ability to manipulate and argue rules, rather than cultivate “goodness” as a lawyer. Consequently, this...
Welcome to Osgoode. You’ve made it. Congratulations! Over the past few years, you’ve worked to earn stellar grades, experienced the blissful joy of writing the LSAT, and spent countless hours thinking about your wonderful self as you prepared your personal statement. Reality check. You’re smart and sharp. So is everyone else. And now, you’ll be graded on a curve in a school where everyone wants...
The question of who ought to possess the legal right to vote, or who should form the electorate, warrants serious attention. I defend posthumous voting: the view that deceased persons should be permitted to vote. I argue that posthumous events, including state actions, can affect the well-being of persons who are dead. This fact, I argue, warrants the inclusion of the dead in the electorate...
Get Active on Your Professional Social Media Accounts Soon after being accepted into law school, I contacted a few law students that were in my network to ask them for advice on what to expect during 1L. Ali, a 3L at Windsor Law and a former colleague of mine, sent me some general advice. At the top of that list was to get on Twitter professionally. I had been a Twitter user since high school...
Human beings are knowledge-seeking creatures. Evolutionary biologists explain this phenomenon as associated with our awareness of our own vulnerability and mortality. As such, people are sensitive to the amount of information that they possess or lack at any given moment. Intriguingly, we are bothered by either knowing too much or too little. On the one hand, we risk misapprehending the risks in...
Winged Words Story # 1 In 2017, I visited an old friend in New York, to see her city through her eyes and to take advantage of her kindness and free couch. I fell in love with it and vowed to return again in some capacity, if one day I could. It’s the only American city I can see myself calling home one day, there’s something about its vibrance and dynamism, there’s a magic in being lost in a sea...
Elevation and depth in the world serve to complicate one’s wish to move in a linear manner. Yet life is a non-linear journey, and so we find beauty in things that rise and tower above us, and mystery in the incalculable things that plunge below us. There is value, it seems, in viewing things in a complex manner. On the other hand, when we eliminate the complexity of our world, as totalitarians...
Everyone I speak to quickly learns that I’m interested in pursuing criminal law, so it should be no surprise that I enjoy the occasional true crime story or two. The genre has become prolific, especially on Netflix, and there is no shortage of media to consume. I have particularly enjoyed the following stories, and I hope you find something that piques your interest whether you’re an experienced...
Obiter’s Survey of Books on China Continues At the heart of Canadian historian Timothy Brook’s new book, Great State: China and the World (Harper, 2020), is a desire to show that China’s interactions with the rest of the world—at least since the thirteenth century—have been varied and complex. Indeed, China did not exist in splendid isolation until being “opened up” in the eighteenth and...
That was one of the questions put to viewers by Netflix’s recent documentary, The Social Dilemma. The documentary interviews prominent technological experts who helped design some of the most iconic social media functions: for example, Facebook’s “like” button. The documentary begins with experts acknowledging there is a problem but having difficulty labelling and defining the problem. Of...
A few weeks ago, the French film Cuties landed on Netflix amid a torrent of criticism that the movie promotes pedophilia. The outrage was largely tied to the image that Netflix had chosen to market the film, which showed the movie’s 11-year-old protagonists—a group of girls who form a dance troupe—in sexually suggestive poses and clad in skin-tight, barely-there costumes. The image was, as...
On August 28th, the world got the shocking news that actor Chadwick Boseman had passed away at the age of 43 after a 4-year battle with colon cancer. We learned that day that Boseman chose to keep his illness a secret while working on the projects that brought him to fame. Needless to say, Hollywood and, more significantly, the Black community is in mourning over the loss of an actor that took...