After decades of newspaper and magazine writing, alongside my longer UN career, I am presenting here a Web portfolio. It will be an expansive package, displaying new stories regularly while updating older pieces as events unfold.
This writing stresses politics, culture and society, but will venture often into history, art and sports topics. Stay tuned.
CAREER NOTES: In the mid-1970s I spent a memorably bohemian year in Paris studying politics at haute école Sciences Po, before graduating from McGill U in 1980. Quickly I began writing for many(!) little Montreal magazines, mostly political and literary, but also including a stint as editor of a suddenly bankrupt popular-science magazine.
In the early 1980s I scrambled for freelance work at the then-Entertainment sections of the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette, largely on film and literary themes. One journalism adventure led me to West Berlin, covering its film festival for the soon-bankrupt Cinema Canada (you see the pattern). I observed the then-divided city intently on foot and U-bahn, before travelling onward aboard an eery nighttime train ramble across East Germany (see https://tinyurl.com/Berlin-1984).
Back in Canada, I worked five years on the nightshift (hic!) as a copy editor at The Gazette. There I published several features. Some of those vintage articles — on the irascible Trump-baiting Spy magazine and its celebrity editor Graydon Carter; on a top Canadiens star I trailed as he moved down to minor-league hockey in France; and on a 1979 Pierre Trudeau election shocker (see https://tinyurl.com/The-real-Trudeau) — are reposted here for your amusement.
In 1992, I joined UN New York’s editorial service, first handling the proceedings of the General Assembly and Security Council, before moving abroad to a similar post at UN Geneva. There I worked closely on a multilingual team with UN human-rights bodies, State reps, investigative experts and special rapporteurs.
A Geneva-based magazine, UN Special, opened the door for foreign reporting around Europe, from Central and East Africa, as well as in Southeast Asia. Some of those UNS stories — on racing around Bangkok, the push to save tigers in Siberia, Dag’s mysterious 1961 plane-crash death, and on the perks and perils of Central African election-observation missions (see https://tinyurl.com/Africa-votes) — are now highlighted on the DW site.
After returning to Montreal in 2013 as editorial chief at the UN civil-aviation agency, I again took contrarian stances on hot-button Quebec and Canadian issues (see https://tinyurl.com/Anglo-angst), but also reported on sports galore — from hockey in frigid Montreal to baseball in steamy Havana (see https://tinyurl.com/Beisbol-Cuba).
Recently, I have wrestled with more urgent world concerns, notably the Covid-19 pandemic, framed by a very personal view as to how well or poorly WHO has reacted to all that (see https://tinyurl.com/What-is-WHO). Reactions to Covid have stressed total lockdowns, which one Canadian public-health authority decries as counterproductive (see https://tinyurl.com/Schabas-interview ). Finally, Sweden was widely decried for its lighter-lockdown approach, but public-health data show its science was humane and broadly correct (http://tinyurl.com/Sweden-wager-succeeds ).
As the world turns, I hope to again expand my reporting, including on the save-the-tiger beat (see https://tinyurl.com/Tigers-cause ) and its future. This roaring inquiry may encourage even the greenest readers of http://davidwinch.website.
Meanwhile, drink up! (http://davidwinch.website/to-your-health-sante/ )
Enjoy the read, and of course, reader comments welcome!