This week marks the last installment of “Dear Barb” in The Voice Magazine.

Barb let me know with her regular submission that, after nearly 20 years of writing advice for various personal and health related issues, she was feeling she’d done all she could in this area.

In addition, she’s done a number of one-off articles exploring some of the more traumatic events from her own life, and they are always well received, with her article “Mary’s Story” still popping up on occasion on our most read stories of the week.

I expect that publishing five separate books, some of them collections of her better Dear Barb columns, and others being deeper explorations of her own life, and finding her audience has also been a factor, as she no doubt would not mind the additional time to concentrate fully on her own writing, and I don’t blame her one bit.

So, while a loss to those of us here at the Voice Magazine, this is probably not a loss to the wider world, as she’ll still be out there, sharing her wisdom, just, I expect, in a different format from now on.  So best of luck to you Barb, in your future endeavours!

Meanwhile, this week, we’re fortunate enough to have a return of the Minds We Meet column, as Computer Science student Kristen has been kind enough to share a bit of who she is with The Voice Magazine.  One of the things I find most interesting is that she’s looking for a future career ideally in “penetration testing” for cyber-security systems.  Or in other words, she wants to try to break security systems and get paid for it, but legally.  A white-hat hacker.  To me, this raises all kinds of questions about what she does in her off-hours, but some things are probably best kept private, right?   Still, I find myself hearkening back to the wholly inaccurate movie Hackers, and making up stories in my mind about what grand organizations this AU student is taking down in secret, saving us all in the process without us ever knowing.  Or hey, maybe she isn’t, but at AU, you never really know, do you?  That’s half the fun.

Also this week, we have another fiction feature with a bit of a message to it from Lucy D’jorno, about, of all things, one old spoon, and the first part of a new set of articles as Alek Golijanin dives into the links between organized crime, foreign actors, and what Canada, in particular is trying to do about it.

Plus, we have music and book reviews, fun reads from Fly on the Wall and [blue rare], a public apology from Elise Neven-Pugh’s inner critic to, well, Elise Neven-Pugh, a look at the practice of okasame, and why you would want to have this, apparently expensive, meal experience, as well as of course scholarships, events, a return of the student sizzle, a look at one way to figure out how to better make friends and connect with strangers (if that’s what you want to do), the debate of nature vs nurture at the Nobel prize level, and even more!

Enjoy the read!