David Sherman If you chased a variety of romantic rabbits in Montreal, you’d catch them here. A street of broken dreams, unbridled ambitions and indelible memories. On good days, a strip of lightning in a bottle. Hard nights it was home to hard drinking, hard drugs and head-splitting hangovers. It's St. Antoine St., Montreal’s Fleet St. And, much more. Home to the city’s morning English paper, The Gazette, it meandered east and, for reasons unknown, became Craig St., address

There is a moment, quiet and almost offhand, in Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel — Player Piano (1952) — that feels less like satire than like a diagnosis delivered sotto voce. A group of men — men who used to make things — gather in a bar in the fictional town of Ilium (based on Schenectady) in eastern New York state and feed a coin into a player piano. Out comes a stilted but recognizable version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The tune is intact. The timing is correct. The pe

They don’t tell you, when you’re young, that choosing is a subtractive art. It’s presented instead as progress. As expansion — doors opening, paths multiplying, a horizon that keeps obligingly retreating the closer you get to it. There is talk of freedom, of possibility, of becoming. The implicit promise is that more options will yield a better life, in the same way that more toppings, up to a point, seem like they should improve a pizza, right up until the slice collapses un