Note to the commenters

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:31 PM - 266 Comments

First off, calm down. Don’t read that as “please calm down”—we’re not asking anymore.

For some reason I’ll generously assume to be a combination of cabin fever and excitement at the onset of spring, things have gotten way too heated and way too personal on the comment boards. It has to stop. You’re driving us nuts.

I understand us web editors may be partly to blame for the confusion over what’s allowed and what isn’t. The truth is there are no hard and fast rules (except, of course, those forbidding content that might get us sued). Sure, we expect civility and good humour and a modicum of intelligence from all of you, but even those rules can be bent a little here and there.

What it comes down to is this: if we think a comment is having a destructive influence on a discussion, we’ll delete it. That’s it, that’s all. This is, of course, an entirely arbitrary rule, and some individual bloggers are bound to have different tolerance thresholds than others. Don’t hold your breath expecting that to change. There’s a reason the overwhelming majority of the discussions here are smart and informative, and we think our (mostly) hands-off approach has a lot to do with it. For the most part, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt has worked well so far and we’re hoping this gentle kick in the behind will set everything straight again. (But don’t kid yourselves: there’s a Plan B if it doesn’t.)

Our other message goes out to those who’ve taken to baiting us into being more aggressive than we’d like to be by overusing the “Report” button every time their feelings get hurt. You know who you are and so do we. Quit it. It’s annoying and we’re not going to tolerate it much longer.

In short, think of the boards as an open-house party—everyone’s welcome and encouraged to mingle, but no one has a right to be there. We will always reserve the right to kick people out of our house when they get too bothersome. You’d do the same at your place.

Sound good?

I’ll be hanging around in the comments if you’ve got any questions.

Conservatives, Liberals, and the Colombian free trade deal

By John Geddes - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:26 PM - 22 Comments

The government’s decision yesterday to accept a Liberal amendment to its free trade agreement with Colombia is being touted by the main architect of the side deal as a case study in how a minority Parliament should work.

Liberal MP Scott Brison, his party’s international trade critic, proposed the amendment to that would see Colombia produce an annual report, with Canadian input, on how the free trade agreement affects human rights.

Trade Minister Peter Van Loan accepted Brison’s proposal, and no wonder, since it guarantees that the Conservative minority in the House will now be backed by Liberal votes on this issue, enough to get legislation enacting the trade pact passed.

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The “Suri Cruise effect”

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:19 PM - 0 Comments

A new survey reveals that British parents are spending more than $1,000 a year on children’s clothing inspired by fashionably, and expensively, dressed celebrity children, most prominently Suri Cruise, the high heel and lipstick-wearing daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. Sixty-three per cent of parents said they didn’t need an occasion to buy their child a new outfit, and 45 per cent shop for new childrenswear at least once a fortnight. In contrast with earlier generations, 57 per cent of parents said they wouldn’t dress children in hand-me-downs if they could afford new clothes. Kate Liszka, head of children’s clothing at British retailer Debenhams said: “Brits are famed for a competitive neighbourly streak. Now it seems that where our kids are concerned, we’re keeping up with the Cruises!”

Daily Mail

Pope implicated in sex abuse scandal

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:12 PM - 1 Comment

Pope Benedict XVI has been further drawn into the sex abuse scandal enveloping the Catholic Church as new documents reveal that back in the 1980s, as then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he failed to discipline Reverend Lawrence Murphy, an American priest who allegedly molested hundreds of deaf boys, despite receiving letters from a number of American bishops imploring him to act. A new lawsuit reveals his second-in-command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed Wisconsin bishops to begin a canonical trial for Father Murphy with the intention of having him defrocked if found guilty; however, that trial was stopped after the Murphy wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger begging for leniency on the grounds that he had already repented and was in poor health. The documents emerged as Pope Benedict faces other accusations that he did not discipline priests accused of sexual abuse, or alert the relevant civilian authorities.

Times Online

The wrath of Bin Laden

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

Osama bin Laden has warned that Americans would be killed in retaliation if a U.S. court sentences Khaled Sheikh Mohammed to death, according to an audio recording broadcast today by the al-Jazeera news channel. Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11th attacks, is expected to stand trial in a U.S. civilian court next year. The Obama administration has already indicated that the toughest sanction is likely to be imposed. The self-styled founder of the al-Qaeda movement added that U.S. politicians have “oppressed us and still do, especially by backing Israel, which occupies the land of Palestine.”

Times Online

Col. Williams appears in court

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

With his military buzzcut growing ever shaggier from his time spent in prison, Col. Russell Williams, the notorious former commander of CFB Trenton, briefly appeared in a Belleville court via video link Thursday. Coming first on a full docket of prisoners broadcasting out of the Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee, Ontario, a downcast Williams was told he’d be remanded in custody until another appearance on April 29, to which he responded “Yes, thank you.” The case is being held over to allow Williams’ lawyer time to examine a disclosure package. The colonel stands accused of the first degree murders of Jessica Lloyd and Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, as well as counts of breaking and entering, forcible confinement and the sexual assault of two other women. He was arrested on February 7th after police at a roadblock noticed similarities between his tires and tracks found near Lloyd’s home, and has spoken openly with investigators about his crimes since being arrested. The story has become so clear the police are visiting him less frequently, although the military is still staying in contact with Williams through its representative overseeing the trial, Lt-Col Tony O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe visited Williams in prison about two weeks ago. “He is where he should be…he’s not the man I know,” he said of his friend of nine years. “He hasn’t said a word… I’m guessing he’s not getting a lot of rest.”

CBC

Globe and Mail

Safe haven for an alleged killer

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:33 AM - 19 Comments

Photograph by Patrick Robert/ Sygma/ Corbis

A former commander in a rebel Liberian army who has been accused by multiple witnesses and former associates of war crimes and crimes against humanity is living freely in Toronto.

Bill Horace was a general in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, a militia that gathered in neighbouring Ivory Coast and invaded Liberia in 1989, plunging the country into more than a decade of intermittent war. That conflict killed tens of thousands and featured the widespread use of child soldiers and mass atrocities against civilians—including sexual slavery, cannibalism, and indiscriminate slaughter. Charles Taylor, who led that army and was eventually elected president before being forced from office in 2003, is now on trial in The Hague on war crimes charges.

Maclean’s spoke with Bill Horace in early 2009. “Yes, I was with NPFL. Of course I was NPFL,” he said during a brief telephone conversation, referring to the National Patriotic Front of Liberia by its initials. Horace said he would speak about his time in the NPFL at a later date, but then ignored numerous messages left on his phone or with his former wife. Reached by phone this January, he refused to discuss his past and said his lawyer would call.

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More CRTC Links and Opinions

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:29 AM - 1 Comment

Another round-up of posts and articles on the CRTC’s recent decision:

- Our own Andrew Coyne says that the CRTC got it mostly right.

- John Doyle argues that the CRTC exists to “find a solution that assuages the interests of corporations and does the best for the consumer, both in the sense of cable’s bill-paying customers and consumers of local news and other Canadian programming.”

- Denis McGrath has his own opinion on the matter, as does

- Howard Bernstein, who says that it’s a “watery half decision that will satisfy no one and resolve little.”

- Bill Brioux is back with thoughts on how this decision will affect the CBC.

- Finally, the Globe’s James Bradshaw writes about the decision’s impact on the creative side of TV, and the loopholes that exist in a new-media age — namely, that with so many different places to show programs, companies can put their Canadian content where they think it will do them the least damage:

The decision will also require the broadcasters to spend 5 per cent of their gross revenues on “programs of national interest,” meaning dramas, comedies, documentaries and Canadian-focused awards shows. But they won’t be told where or when to air them, and in a nod to a public that increasingly gets its television through new media, the broadcasters will be allowed to produce this content on any platform. Some shows could end up as Web-only series, for example.

“It’s great that broadcasters are being told to spend money on Canadian drama, but they’re not being told they have to air it,” said actor Nicholas Campbell, formerly of the hit series Da Vinci’s Inquest. “Instead they’ve been given free rein to dump all of their drama on their specialty channels while feeding Canadians a steady diet of made-in-the U.S. programs in prime time,” Campbell said.

'Way to go, Canada'

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:26 AM - 32 Comments

Esquire‘s Mark Warren, for one, would like to salute this country for its inability to handle the arrival of Ann Coulter. “You’ve achieved the nearly-impossible, and made Ann Coulter a nearly sympathetic figure,” he writes. “And you’ve got me defending the tiresome freak.” As he explains, that’s not how these things are supposed to happen. “You know, it’s funny: If you hadn’t as a country lost your shit last night, and the corrosive harridan had been allowed to freely speak at the academic institution which invited her to speak, you would have in turn been allowed to mock her and laugh at her and put her ‘ideas’ in the garbage where they belong,” he explains. “Instead, you frothed at her idiot provocation and you suppressed her speech and by doing so you have now made her ideas seem—to a certain cohort—much more potent and perhaps even important than they ever ought to be regarded.”

Esquire

Asteroid tracking hurt by funding cuts

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:19 AM - 1 Comment

Funding cuts to the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a U.S. radar facility, could hurt plans to precisely plot the trajectory of an asteroid with a slight risk of hitting Earth in 2036, the BBC reports. Arecibo was set to make radar measurements in January 2013 that could help rule out an impact by Apophis, but due to funding cuts, it might need up to $3 million extra per year to continue. If not, observations planned for 2011 to 2013 may have to be abandoned, the facility director Dr. Michael Nolan told the news service. While Nolan called himself “optimistic” the money could still be found, he noted that Arecibo is the only observatory worldwide that can carry out the job. “If we measure [Apophis] in 2013, there is something like a 95% chance that we’ll be able to prove that it can’t hit the Earth in 2036,” he said. The 300-metre wide asteroid has a one in 250,000 chance of impacting Earth on 13 April 2036, according to NASA projections. On that date in 2029, it would approach Earth at a distance of 29,470 km, close enough to be seen with the naked eye. If Apophis passes through a gravitational “keyhole” in space at this time, it will set the stage for an impact here in 2036. While this is likely to be missed, optical and radar measurements at Arecibo could rule it out entirely. The observatory now operates with a budget of about $12 million per year, but the U.S. National Science Foundation, which operates it, has said it will reduce the budget to $9 million starting in 2011.

BBC News

New human ancestor found?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:08 AM - 1 Comment

A previously unknown type of pre-human, which lived alongside modern humans and Neanderthals, has been discovered after genetic material was recovered from a pinky finger bone unearthed in a Siberian cave, Reuters reports. Nicknamed “Woman X,” this being might have lived as recently as 30,000 years ago, but appears to be only distantly related to modern humans or Neanderthals. In the journal Nature, a team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany said they sequenced DNA from mitochondria in the cell, which is passed down almost entirely intact from woman to child. After comparing it to DNA from humans, Neanderthals and apes, they realized its line diverged about one million years ago from the line that gave rise to humans and Neanderthals which split 500,000 years ago. “It really just looked like something we had never seen before,” researcher Johannes Krause told reporters. “It was a sequence that looked something like humans but really quite different.”

Reuters

They almost had it

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Tannen Maury/EPA

Cheryl Bernard has been curling for a very long time. Since she was a little girl, in fact. But not until her final match as a 2010 Olympian did she understand the true meaning of a steal.

The gold medal was hers. Everyone in the building sure thought so, clanging their cowbells and chanting her name. In the tenth end, when she was still up by two, Bernard was caught flashing that unmistakable smile, the one athletes get when they know they’re about to win, but are trying not to gloat.

And then she lost.

It didn’t happen in a blink of an eye. It actually took quite a few minutes for her gold to melt into silver, right there in front of 5,600 screaming witnesses. But even Anette Norberg, the Swedish skip who ended up with Bernard’s medal, had trouble putting into words exactly what she saw. “It just happened,” she said. “I don’t know how.”

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Ambassador Bridge conflict heats up

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

The longstanding conflict over plans to build a second span of the Ambassador Bridge just got a little uglier. Matty Moroun, who owns the bridge that connects Windsor, Ont., to Detroit, Mich., is suing the governments of both countries, claiming they’re getting in the way of his proposal to twin the crossing. The move comes after Moroun’s permit to build the second span was returned by the U.S Coast Guard. Property conflicts and court orders were among the Coast Guard’s concerns. Moroun was ordered to tear down the duty-free complex he built on the U.S. side after it was deemed to be in conflict with plans to join Detroit’s Interstate 75 and Interstate 96 highways with the bridge. According to Ambassador Bridge spokesman Phil Frame, Moroun believes the government is either trying to take over the bridge, or reduce business to make way for another crossing.

CBC

My New City

By Steven Galloway - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Marcio Sanchez/ Associated Press

First, this admission: I was wrong.

Let’s back up. In 2003, there was a referendum in the city of Vancouver asking, “Do you support or do you oppose the City of Vancouver’s participation in hosting the 2010 Olympic Winter Games and Paralympic Winter Games?” Approximately half of the city turned out to vote, and 64 per cent of Vancouverites were in favour. I was one of the people who voted yes. I hoped it would result in an improvement in the transit system, and that it would force the various levels of government to do something lasting and productive in the Downtown Eastside, Canada’s poorest and most addicted neighbourhood. Plus, the idea of a hockey gold on home soil was irresistible.

In the intervening seven years, I slowly became less and less enthusiastic. A magnificent SkyTrain line did get built from the airport to downtown, and a few other much-needed improvements were made, but absolutely nothing was done in the Downtown Eastside, and the cadre responsible for the Games’ organization, VANOC, behaved in a seemingly inept and callous way toward those who disagreed with them, and the citizens of the city in general.

Perhaps the most representative incident was VANOC’s use of a clip from Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia in its torch-relay promotional video. In the original film, the torch triumphantly enters into a stadium to a crowd of “Heil Hitler” salutes. In VANOC’s version, the salutes have been obscured, as though that solves the problem. It’s hard not to feel deceived when someone’s literally using Nazi propaganda on you.

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The Star Rookies

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

For more than a decade, Hayley Wickenheiser has dominated women’s hockey the way Wayne Gretzky once did the men’s game. But something unexpected happened in Vancouver: Wickenheiser and the rest of Canada’s star veterans—Jayna Hefford, Caroline Ouellette and Kim St-Pierre—were shut out from the tournament all-star team. Honours, instead, went to three standout rookies: 23-year-old goaltender Shannon Szabados, who blanked the Americans 2-0 in the gold medal final, 18-year-old phenom Marie-Philip Poulin, who scored both goals in the game, and Meghan Agosta, 23, who set up the second goal and was named tournament MVP, with 15 points including nine goals—a single-Olympic record. It was a symbolic, yet striking passing of the torch.

In some ways, the final—with a crowd as loud, at points, as it was during Canada’s men’s quarter-final a day earlier—foreshadowed the future of the women’s game. For Canada, it’s in good hands. Yet it’s precisely the deep and growing talent pool that may prove the game’s undoing in the Olympics. Just hours before the Canada-U.S. showdown, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge indicated that his patience with the women’s game is wearing thin. Unless the competition gets serious, and fast, it seems Rogge will see to it that the women’s game joins softball on the Olympic discard heap.

Currently, Canada and the U.S. stand alone, head and shoulders above the competition; that was never in question ahead of these Games. But Canada’s third-straight Olympic gold sure was. Less than a year ago, at the World Championships in Finland, Canada suffered an embarrassing 4-1 loss to the U.S.—the second straight year Canada handed the world crown to its archrivals. After the loss, Mel Davidson, Canada’s head coach, pinned the blame on herself. “Coaching is coaching, and if you don’t perform, you don’t go on,” she told reporters in Hämeenlinna. When you fail, “you have to look from the top down,” she later told Maclean’s. “Maybe Hockey Canada has to look at a change.” At the time, just nine months until Vancouver, Team Canada, famed for its machine-like precision, seemed to be coming undone.

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Hot Pursuit

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Todd Korol/Reuters

You can forgive Denny Morrison for rubbing it in. Fresh from the podium, with the country’s 11th gold medal of the Games dangling from his neck—a wire-to-wire besting of the United States in the men’s speed skating team pursuit—he stopped to make a point. “We’re not just doing this for ourselves. We’re doing this for all of Canada.”

He and teammates Lucas Makowsky and Mathieu Giroux were among the few to believe they had a shot at hitting the top of the podium on the final day of the Olympic long-track competition. But in the preliminaries, the trio laid low defending champions Italy, in an Olympic record time of three minutes, 42.38 seconds. In the second round, they went even faster, beating Norway in 3:42.22. And when it was all on the line, they left a formidable American squad—including five-time medallist Chad Hedrick—eating their dust, crossing the line in 3:41.37, grabbing gold by a margin of 0.21 seconds. It was the first, and only, medal for Canada’s male long-track speed skaters at the 2010 Games. (The women won four despite failing to medal in the team pursuit.) And for Morrison, at least, it was sweet relief.

Olympic redemption doesn’t usually come so quickly. Those who crumble under the immense pressure of the sporting world’s brightest spotlight often have to wait four more years—and sometimes forever—tormented by their own failure, and the media’s insistence on reliving it. Another teammate, Jeremy Wotherspoon, for example, retires after Vancouver 2010 as one of speed skating’s all-time greats, the winner of more World Cup races than any man ever. But his stumble at the starting line in Salt Lake City, and subsequent inability to ever improve on the silver he won as a 21-year-old buck back at the 1998 Nagano Games, became the defining story of his career.

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Yes or no

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:53 AM - 19 Comments

Meanwhile, the government still won’t clarify its foreign policy on abortion.

When asked yesterday if there is a federal government policy against funding groups that facilitate abortions in developing countries, a spokesman for Bev Oda, the Minister for International Co-operation, refused to give a direct reply.

“As we have said many times, the G8 initiative on maternal and child health is about making a positive difference and save the lives of mothers and children in the developing world, not about reopening the debate on abortion,” Jean-Luc Benoît said in an e-mail. Asked to offer a yes or no answer to the question of whether the government would give money to a group that facilitates abortions, Mr. Benoît simply reiterated his first response.

We still love our gas guzzlers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:28 AM - 1 Comment

Remember all that brave talk about fuel efficiency? How governments were going to use their regulatory powers and financial clout over a collapsing auto sector to cure our addiction to size and horsepower? Well, so much for that. Canada’s auto guru, Dennis DesRosiers, has released annual sales figures showing big, fat pickup trucks—the Dodge Ram, the Chevy Silverado and the Ford F-Series—counted among the top-selling vehicles last month compared to February 2009. The Volkswagen Golf did pretty well too, as did the Honda CR-V. But to DesRosiers, the message is clear: “Government regulations are targeted at the car manufacturers, not the consumer. And as witnessed in the first two months of this year, if consumers want a less fuel efficient vehicle, they will find a way to buy it.”

Vancouver Sun

I’m with the ‘intolerant’ Quebecers

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 10:01 AM - 355 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

The other day, a reader wrote to say that, while en vacances au Québec, he had espied me in a restaurant. With a couple of obvious francophones. And, from the snatches of conversation he caught, I appeared to be speaking French. “Appeared” is right, if you’ve ever heard my French. Nevertheless: “You’re a fraud, Steyn!” he thundered. The cut of his jib was that I was merely pretending to be a pro-Yank right-wing bastard while in reality living la vie en rose lounging on chaises longues snorting poutine with louche Frenchie socialists all day long.

I haven’t felt such a hypocrite since I was caught singing The Man That Got Away in a San Francisco bathhouse two days after my column opposing gay marriage. But yes, you’re right. I cannot tell a lie. I have a soft spot for Quebec. Not because of its risible separatist movement, for which the only rational explanation is that it was never anything but one almighty bluff for shakedown purposes. Yet, putting that aside, I’m not unsympathetic to the province’s broader cultural disposition. I regard neither Trudeaupian Canada nor Quietly Revolutionary Quebec as good long-term bets, or even medium-term bets. But, if I had to pick, I’d give marginally better odds to the latter. And the reasons why can be found in the coverage of Ms. Naema Ahmed and her “illegal” niqab, the head-to-toe Islamic covering that only has eyes for you.

The facts—or, at any rate, fact—of the case is well-known: a niqab-garbed immigrant from Egypt has been twice expelled from her French-language classes at the Saint-Laurent CEGEP and the Centre d’appui aux communautés immigrantes by order of the Quebec government. That much is agreed. Thereafter, the English and French press diverge significantly. The ROC reacted reflexively, deploring this assault on Canada’s cherished “values” of “multiculturalism.” In the Calgary Herald, Naomi Lakritz compared Quebec’s government to the Taliban. So did the Globe and Mail, in an editorial titled “Intolerant Intrusion.” In La Presse, Patrick Lagacé responded with a column called “The Globe, Reporting From Mars!”

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Music but not jazz (you’re welcome)

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 9:54 AM - 21 Comments

You either like The Magnetic Fields or you do not like The Magnetic Fields. There is no try. You either think their epic 69 Love Songs is one of the great, hilarious, heartbreaking, weird and sometimes terrible records of all time, or you do not. There is no hemming, and certainly no hawing.

If you’ve never heard The Magnetic Fields and are at all keen to see where you may end up on this spectrum, I recommend listening to their newish song, You Must Be Out of Your Mind – a tune that, I’m sure most fans would agree, condenses into three minutes much of what The Magnetic Fields are about (brooding, despair, sarcasm, crazy lovers, crazier ex-lovers, baritone and general, all-round jangliness). Stephin Merritt writes a lot of lines that make you cringe, and a lot more lines that make you wish you’d written those lines.

From the second verse of You Must Be Out of Your Mind:

You can’t go round just saying stuff because it’s pretty/And I no longer drink enough to think you’re witty.

Other current songs of awesomeness:

Answer to Yourself, The Soft Pack – If you’re an aspiring hipster, you can say things like, “I liked them back when they were called The Muslims and they had credibility, man.” Sure, people will punch you in the face when you say this, but that’s the price of being a hipster. Also, you have to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon. No one said being a hipster would be tasty. (When I was in university, we used to listen to The Cult before exams to psyche/wake ourselves up. I recommend that current university students use this song. It’s a real psycher-upper… so long as you don’t dwell on the lyrics about thinking you’re going to die and everything.)

September Gurls, Big Star – Not a new song by any means, but Continue…

Penguin classics get a makeover

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

For Penguin books, one picture isn’t worth a thousand words; it’s more like the other way around. The British publisher is about to launch a new batch of classic reprints (in collaboration with the AIDS awareness group RED) whose covers have few of the paintings or other images that used to seduce us into buying Anna Karenina. Instead, the covers feature quotes from the novels, with words arranged in unusual patterns. Illustrations are rarely used; when they appear, they’re kept small, like a cartoon swamped by the words on Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Mark Sinclair, an editor for the British design magazine Creative Review, says that this typographical approach is still a new thing: “It’s unusual to see text all over a cover.”

Not that these new Penguins, which will appear in bookstores in May, are the first books to de-emphasize pictures. They’re not even the first Penguin books that use this approach: when the company launched in the ’30s, most of its covers had nothing much on them except the title, the author, and the cute bird who served as the company mascot. More recently, other publishers have tried to let words do the heavy work on the front. Faber & Faber recently published a series of poetry reprints with almost bare covers, creating an emotional impact through colour and letters. And before J.D. Salinger died, he insisted that new reprints of his books could have nothing on them except his name and the title.

But most of those books, including the early Penguins, eliminate pictures as part of a simplified, stripped-down approach. The new Penguins are the exact opposite, using words to create some elaborate, ornate graphic designs in the tradition of works of art like A Humument, where artist Tom Phillips made new designs out of old pages from a Victorian novel. Nathan Burton’s design for Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth takes a quote from the novel—“Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well dressed till we drop”—and rearranges the words with fancy, elaborate type, making the whole thing look like a poster for one of the society events the novel’s heroine might have to attend. The cover for Henry James’s psychological horror story The Turn of the Screw arranges the words in patterns that are almost as confused as the main character’s state of mind. Sinclair, whose blog commenters were mostly ecstatic over the covers, notes that fonts and typefaces are almost a visual art in themselves: “People appreciate the research and craft that goes into selecting the appropriate faces.” Because they combine the power of words and pictures, they may have a more powerful impact than normal illustrations.

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Bestsellers

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of March 22nd, 2010)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Baba's World

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 9:17 PM - 9 Comments

Baba Brinkman is back in the news: His new song, Off That, is an attack on superstition and pseudoscience, and it has gone viral (well, within the science geek community, anyway). Think Buck 65 meets David Hume and you have the flavour of it.

I’ve been a fan of the west-coast hip-hop poet/storyteller ever since I saw him do his rap version of the Canterbury Tales at a museum in Ottawa five or six years ago. “This is gonna suck,” I remember telling a friend, as we stood around drinking crappy wine and wishing we were anywhere but the wilds of east Ottawa. And know what? I was wrong, the show was frigging amazing.

And so I was gobsmacked when he and Dizraeli put together a hip-hopera called The Rebel Cell (partially inspired by The Rebel Sell), which played to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 and 2009. That was followed by The Rap Guide to Evolution, and now he’s off to the middle east, for performances of the Rebel Cell in Egypt and Israel. Go, buddy.

Here’s Off That:

The press as party whips

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 8:15 PM - 144 Comments

Here we go again. The press gallery are universally scornful of the Liberals for being “divided” on a vote: that is, because three Liberal MPs voted as their consciences dictate, rather than falling in line with the party whip.

That may indeed be a concern for the party leadership, but why is the press scoring it the same way? Why are we volunteering to be the enforcers of party discipline? MPs voting their conscience, ie using their brains, is the way the system is supposed to work. We should rather be celebrating those MPs who had the courage to buck the party line on a matter of principle than decrying the “weakness” of their leader.

TALKING OF ABORTION: I don’t doubt the Liberals were playing politics with the issue, but so are the Tories. The Liberals want to provoke a debate on abortion, to smoke out the Tory pro-lifers. And the Tories want to avoid a debate on abortion, for the same reason. But even though the Liberal resolution was defeated, it was revealing in its own way.

One, it’s helpful to know that the Liberal party line is entirely amenable to abortion, albeit in Third World countries, as part of (to quote the resolution) “the full range of family planning, sexual and reproductive health options.” Not just as an ineradicable evil that a society may choose not to restrict by law (though every civilized society but ours has), but as a value-neutral “option,” no more objectionable than birth control.

Two, it’s also helpful to be reminded that there are pro-lifers in every party: it is not just a Tory disease. Perhaps, if the press agreed to report that once in a while, Tory pro-lifers could borrow some backbone from their Liberal counterparts, and start defying their own leader. Or would we then mark the Tories down for being “divided”?

Three, it’s helpful to be reminded, notwithstanding how determined the Conservative leadership is to prevent an honest debate on the issue, how necessary it is to have this debate. More than twenty years after the Morgentaler decision, we remain in a bizarre legislative limbo: as I’ve written before, we did not choose as a nation to have no abortion law. It is not settled, nor was it ever decided, either by Parliament or the courts. Quite the opposite: the Supreme Court went out of its way to invite Parliament to draft a new law, which challenge the House of Commons duly took up, and passed it. The bill died on a tie vote of the Senate.

That’s no way for a democratic country to decide anything. But then, we aren’t really a democratic country, are we?