Editor’s Letter

My first magazine job was at Saturday Night, then Canada’s oldest generalinterest magazine. Our offices were a few blocks from the St. Lawrence Market, in a nondescript building that also housed the offices of a rumoured cult and a forgettable coffee shop. When I joined The Walrus a couple of years ago, it was a surprise to find myself not only still working in journalism but doing so a few blocks from the same building where I started out — and still eating lunch at the Patrician Grill. Certain aspects of the job have greatly changed. In the 1990s, when you wanted to fact-check a story about a certain kind of fish, you might have no choice but to call an ichthyologist at a university in Australia; today, much basic information is available through Google. But, in many ways, journalism adheres to the processes that have existed at magazines for a century. We still work far too late into the night, we rely on a network of incredibly dedicated and hard-working writers, and we fact-check rigorously. Journalism has never faced so many threats — financial, technologyrelated, ideological—but it has never felt more vital to do this work. Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, especially, my colleagues and I have been checking our phones in the middle of the night for breaking news—and lying awake thinking about whether and how we should cover the surrounding issues the next day. Many of our staff attended The Walrus Talks Canada 150 events last year around the country and observed that, in the midst of celebrations, many needed conversations were emerging about reconciliation, gender, the economy, and the state of immigration. When it came time to create the fifteenth anniversary issue of this magazine, our minds turned not to the past but to the future. (This is partly because journalists are not very patient people.) We knew what conversations we were already having, and we wondered what conversations we should be having. We turned to experts across subject areas: science, history, politics. The stories on the following pages are the result of many on- and off-the-record conversations, all of which helped to inform the oversized issue you are reading. There are people so familiar they are immediately associated with a subject, such as David Suzuki (“The Future of Nature”), and experts who may be new, like Kate Sloan (“The Future of Sex”), because their subject areas are still emerging. We are heartened that some of our correspondents see the future in the past, like David Sax in his piece (“Conserve and Protect”) on the challenge of building archives for the digital age. All of this is only a slice of the compendium that could have been, but we hope it will spark the conversations we need to start having, now and into tomorrow. It’s no secret that the continued success of The Walrus is partly due to a charitable, non-profit business model our founders presciently established a few years after the magazine’s inception. At a time when other publications are dying out, or having to find new sources of revenue, we are fortunate to be able to continue to produce well-researched, considered, fact-checked journalism to the highest possible standard. That doesn’t mean that we don’t fear the future, though. By the time this magazine’s next milestone anniversary rolls around, artificial intelligence may have advanced so that executive editors won’t have to type. Bots are already writing articles at some major news organizations (though they do mostly stick to reporting sports scores and stock reports). “Are we all going to be replaced by robots?” I asked my colleague Maxime St.Pierre of Radio-canada—which happens to be an industry leader in digital journalism. “No,” he answered. “Well,” he qualified, “things will change, but there will always be a need for human beings to make sense of the news.” With that in mind, we hope that this issue provides some of that insight. We also hope you’ll continue the conversation—send us your responses and ideas for future stories at pitches@thewalrus.ca. —