Unpublished Newswire

It was not the post about an X Games vert champion or someone catapulting themselves down multiple sets of stairs on a skateboard that received immediate support from followers on my Instagram account. The post featured Liz Bevington (RIP)—a German-born, Venice Beach misfit who learned to skateboard at age fifty-two in 1976. She wasn’t content to sit around and watch her son have all the fun, and when Bevington was eventually widowed, skateboarding became her core social outlet. The history of women in skateboarding is the focus of my account, and the popular post included photos of...

In the end, the verdict came late on a Friday afternoon when Toronto’s courthouse was quiet, and the only other observers in the gallery were a few curious staff. But two weeks previously, it was a bright and bustling fall morning when Tamar Cupid, 27, was formally placed in the hands of his jury. Cupid stood up beside his lawyers. The robed registrar spoke. “Members of the jury, look upon the accused, and hearken to his charges.” The registrar read them aloud. Manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery. And then, with a rhetorical flourish scripted long ago, the registrar spoke the...