Keith Johnston

Jean-Louis Beaudry devoted his life to public service, but few Montrealers know about him. In L.A., meanwhile, kid brother Prudent continues to be venerated.

An abolitionist standard, now with nutmeg.

Animal Trainer. Filmmaker. Fraudster.

He was called a “savant” and a “savior,” thought a contender for a Nobel Prize and named alongside John Steinbeck as an American “genius whose work will live on through the centuries.” Four years later he was dead of a heart attack, though one former colleague called it a suicide.

Conducting an orchestra is among the most rarefied and coveted positions in the performing arts. But during the pandemic, it’s a job that’s been upended like everyone else’s.

“It’s very unsettling because we don’t know how to do our jobs in the way we’ve always done them,” says Rosemary Thomson, Music Director of the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra. “But there’s two sides to that coin.”

There are many kinds of lunch. There are brown-bag ones, three-martini ones, power ones, and working ones. There are ones “for wimps” and ones for “ladies,” though, alas, there are no “free” ones.

Herbert Cumberland Wilson was a man of extraordinary musical gifts, but also many misdeeds.

City’s history has seen multiple variations since Champlain named the site after a seditious royal who backed the wrong Duke.

On a hot November day in 1926, a 13-year-old boy dressed as the Pied Piper led more than 1,000 children not out of town, but to the Central Library of Los Angeles.

It's all about a love of lucubration.

* Featured on Slate's Political Gabfest

We’re used to taking it figuratively. One “slays” on guitar, is a “killer” pianist, or wants to “die” listening to a miraculous piece of music. History, though, is surprisingly rich with examples of people actually killed by musical instruments.

In the spring of 1892 Arthur Rankin was in trouble. A hefty mortgage on his property adjoining the east side of Sault Ste. Marie was overdue. His lender, one of the richest men in Toronto, had already taken Rankin to court to force its sale. An arrangement with another financial backer had cost him a third of his equity and bought him only a year to find a buyer. The year was up.

* Featured on CBC Radio's "Tapestry."

The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard became briefly notorious in 2009 (though not for the first or last time) when she was bleeped at length on NPR for quoting an ancient Roman poem—in Latin.

It came as a surprise to everyone gathered at the Sault Ste. Marie post office when the two men arrived; they had just been reported dead.