In May 2026, a familiar piece of downtown Dallas disappeared. For nearly thirty years, Robert Wyland's Whaling Wall #82 "Ocean Life," an 82-foot mural of breaching whales, had been part of the Dallas cityscape. Then it was painted over to make way for FIFA World Cup promotional artwork. Wyland says he learned about it after the fact and responded with a $25 million lawsuit under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), a 1990 American law that protects artists of "recognized sta

There’s a code for that. Down in Washington, workers recently spent weeks painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool a colour the president called “American flag blue.” The project has drawn lawsuits, ridicule, and widespread confusion over why the result looks patchy rather than patriotic. The reason – just my opinion – may simply be that nobody looked up the actual colour code before ordering the paint. There is, in fact, an official American flag blue. It has a Pantone

Ask most English-speaking Canadian adults how the alphabet ends and they will say zed without hesitation. Ask many of their children and you will hear zee. That generational gap turns out to be a small but revealing window into how Canadian identity actually works. Where the pronunciations came from Zed is the older form. It traces through the French zède to the Greek zeta, and was standard in English throughout the Middle Ages. Zee emerged as a variant in the 1600s, likely b

Grand-Pré and Longfellow's Evangeline. When was the last time you turned down an invitation because staying in seemed easier? On April 5, 1840, a small group of friends gathered for dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In attendance were two of America's most acclaimed authors: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Another guest, Boston reverend Horace Conolly, told a story that he hoped one of them would turn into a novel. Reverend Conolly had heard the story fr

The word "Canadiana" first appeared in print in 1837, as the title of a book about politics in Upper Canada. At that time, there were two British colonies, Upper and Lower Canada. People living there called themselves Canadians, so the place was unambiguously Canada. It just wasn't a single nation yet, not until Confederation in 1867. The suffix "-ana" has long been a familiar bibliographic convention, used for collections of writings about a person or place. So "Canadiana" w

The rules were simple. Competing vessels had to be working schooners that had completed an active fishing season on the North Atlantic grounds that year. They had to be crewed by fishermen. And the race would be sailed in whatever weather the North Atlantic chose to provide -- no postponements, no exceptions, none of the polite accommodations made for wealthy yachtsmen at the America's Cup.

What William Roué can teach us about credentials, craft, and who gets hired The Bluenose schooner was at the height of her career throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as both a champion racing vessel and a prosperous fishing vessel. One hundred years later, most Canadians still recognize the Bluenose the moment they see it, so iconic in Canadian culture has she become. She lives on the back of the dime, on Canada's most celebrated stamp, and on the side of a Halifax brewery truck.

I've been crafting since childhood. Cross-stitch, as a textile artform, lends itself beautifully to country home and cottage décor, and there is no shortage of gorgeous patterns in that tradition. But for my own home, I wanted something elegant and vintage and nostalgic, yet timeless. As all cross-stitchers know, a project is a real time commitment, and it's worth searching until you find something that genuinely excites you. For me, that turned out to be vintage Canadiana. I