I was 24 when I was sent by the Toronto Star to write about the slaughter of female engineering students, all around my age; fourteen of them. Looking back, I fear I sanitized the event of its feminist anger and then infantilized and diminished the victims, turning them from elite engineering students who’d fought for a place among men into teddy-bear loving daughters, sisters and girlfriends.

"Before I consciously understood that I couldn’t move, my first thoughts were of a feature story due the next day, an air ball I doinked in the last basketball game of an inauspicious season for Carleton University, and a gnawing hunger for carbs." I remember the day my life changed at the hands of a serious autoimmune disease, and how I learned to survive the rigours of the old newsrooms on a daily dose of prednisone

Whole kingdoms of people and their possessions have vanished off this Earth, but not from Marie Louise Meilleur's memory. In a sterile room, a prison to all but her mind, the oldest women in the world sits in a life raft-sized easy chair and she talks. She talks about her life as though everything she ever was, she is again.

During a recent game at a girls' hockey tournament in Ottawa, I couldn’t help but notice there was another Chinese girl on the other team. Like our daughter, she was petite. She was also very speedy. She looked familiar. Had they met year's earlier in a tiny orphanage in Hunan, China? We'd find out after my daughter tripped her as she drove to the net with the puck.

The Canadians who found themselves atop the north tower on Sept. 11, 2001 were from the same mould: High flyers, who on that clear, late-autumn day, would have enjoyed a breathtaking glimpse of all of Manhattan before the offices became hell on Earth.

You’ve heard of MAMILs? Middle-aged men in Lycra (those old dudes out on weekends with their $10,000 racing bikes). I now live with a MAMOG-DSB. A middle-aged man on guitar — desperately seeking bandmates. Similar specifics, different affliction.

The matching room was cramped and dingy, documents heaped in every corner and the matching done by hand But with fees paid by thousands of adopting parents, it was moved into a glass building where files are stored in gleaming metal cabinets and computers handle the matching. In 2007, before the Chinese adoption slow down I was allowed a rare visit to this room. My visit foretold, the end of Chinese adoption as I, an adoptive mother, had experienced it.

Scott Heggart was a big, strapping teenager, who topped out at six-foot-four. He played football, basketball, softball and hockey. For openly gay jock, coming out to teammates the hardest part...

Can the paywall save Canadian newspapers? Amid a precipitous free fall, newspapers are looking to readers to save them, by making a rather awkward request: please pay for content you have previously enjoyed without charge.

Dr. Bernie Sheridan slowly makes his way through the streets of Vienna, the city of his childhood, the city of a million secrets. An old man now, shrunken to five feet tall, Dr. Sheridan is weighted to Earth by a gigantic briefcase that holds a fragile piece of paper from his past: his baptism certificate from the Holy Rosary Cathedral in Regina, Canada, dated Nov. 24, 1952. He climbs the steps of the old city hall, pulls out the certificate, and says in quiet German to a clerk, ``I would like this invalidated.'' He says in the same whisper, ``I would like to redeclare myself as a Jew.'' Dr. Bernie Sheridan, once a prominent eye surgeon in Ottawa, now 84 years old, is filled with fear.

It is a long way from Metropolis to this snowbound bungalow in rural Ontario. And the man sitting in its cozy centre, he is no superhero, assuming we know what superheroes really look like. He is the tiniest of men: monk-like, small-chested, grey-haired, weak on one side of his body. And he is long past the age where he can leap even a fence. Still, if most of us weren't closed to the mysteries of this world, we very well might look at this man (his name is Alvin Schwartz and he is 81) and notice a shadowy presence leaning over his shoulder -- an aura, if you will -- that looks very much like Superman. The Man of Steel. The alter ego of Alvin Schwartz. The alter ego of us all. This is the strangest of stories.

At 7:40 p.m. last March 27, 2008, Pénélope McKeague was born dead. CPR restarted her heart. Fourteen minutes after birth, she gasped for air. In the endless days and sleepless nights to follow, the parents were side-swiped first by prognosis, next by exhaustion and then by heartbreak: In order to secure residential care, they must give up custody of their daughter. Shelley Page reports.