Year in pictures – September & October

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Year in pictures – Oscars

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Year in pictures – January

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Year in pictures – May and June

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Year in pictures – Vancouver 2010

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Istanbul's powder keg

By Adnan R. Khan - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 2 Comments

Protesters respond to increased violence caused by Kurdish radicals; On Oct. 31, a suicide bomber from a radical Kurdish faction injured 32 people in Istanbul a ceasefire ended in October | Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images; Murad Sezer/Reuters

There are many telling details in the way the mafia don sits: the stiffness of his spine, his legs planted on the ground like two monstrous sledgehammers, eyes angrily darting around the tiny teahouse. His tension is palpable. “There are half a dozen small wars going on in Istanbul right now,” he says, dumping two cubes of sugar into his tea. “Everything is changing in this city, too quickly. There is chaos.”

On Oct. 31, a suicide bomber brought that chaos onto the streets of Turkey’s roiling megalopolis, blowing himself up in a crowd of police officers in Taksim Square and injuring 32 people, including 17 civilians. The choice of venue was no accident: Taksim is Istanbul’s symbol of modernity and pluralism, where immigrants come in search of a new life and foreigners throng to experience Turkey’s oft-cited convergence of East and West. Near the site of the blast, the Independence Monument replays the struggle of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in a permanently frozen tableau, as if the country’s future was set in stone decades ago.

Continue…

NFL Picks Week 16: Come on feel the penultimateness!

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 11:29 AM - 2 Comments

Scott Feschuk Last week: 9-6-1 Season: 112-87-9

Scott Reid Last week: 5-10-1 Season: 95-104-9

• • •

Carolina (plus 14) at Pittsburgh, Thursday night

Reid: I know that Pittsburgh will win this game. But can you imagine what would happen if they actually lost to the Panthers? I feel it would mean something significant for the universe. Like maybe just this once, the little guy could climb the podium. Like – I don’t know, it sounds crazy to say out loud – but part of me wonders if Carolina could go to Heinz Field in December and win this matchup then maybe the rest of us might see our dreams come true.

Pick: Pittsburgh.

Feschuk: I too long for a utopian future of abundant Beckinsales, but let’s face it: this’ll be yet another dog of a Thursday nighter. I’m not saying last Thursday’s game between the Niners and Chargers was tedious but midway through the second quarter, the following words were actually uttered by a man for the first time: “Well, I think I’m going to flip over to Grey’s Anatomy.” What’s weird is they were uttered by Joe Theismann, who was calling the game. Pick: Pittsburgh.

• • •

Dallas (minus 6.5) at Arizona, Saturday night

Feschuk: Do you despise your family? Sometimes it’s hard to know for sure. Happily, the NFL is here to help. You’ll know for certain that you hate your loved ones if you Continue…

Mitchel Raphael on what MPs plan for the holidays and Rob Ford's scary habit

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

Had a few? This MP will drive you home
As the House wound down for the holidays, Bloc MP Meili Faille could be seen sporting a pin of a reindeer with an oversized red nose, to promote Quebec’s Opération Nez Rouge drive-home service. During the holidays, people who become too intoxicated to drive can call the service, which sends a volunteer to collect the tipsy person and another volunteer to drive the partier’s car home. One of those volunteer drivers is Faille, who has given a few days of her time to the cause for several years now. These days, she drives a Dodge Grand Caravan, so she can convey up to five revellers at a time.

Iggy plummets in the puppet polls
Ottawa-based textile artist Gabe Thirlwall is known for her handmade finger puppets of prominent MPs. Recently, she has expanded her collection, adding puppets of some less conspicuous politicians. There’s a Megan Leslie puppet, for instance, and the NDP MP for Halifax even received a free one. Thirlwall says she has a strict policy on freebies: only if a politician is “not a douche” does he or she qualify. (The fact that Leslie recently gave Thirlwall a lift to a mutual friend’s wedding no doubt counted in her favour.) The artist has also introduced historical figures like Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Sir John A. Macdonald, and Tommy Douglas, “but they don’t get a free one because they are old or dead.” At the recent One of a Kind craft show in Toronto, an 11-day affair, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff bombed, sales-wise. Even the Stéphane Dion puppet sold better. Stephen Harper and Jack Layton sales were so brisk that Thirlwall had to make more puppets every night. Now she says she needs to create a Tony Clement puppet because people have been demanding one, and telling her they follow the industry minister on Twitter. The puppets are available at www.fishonfridays.ca.

Continue…

A fine state they're in

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Sarah Palin speaks at an Oct. 23 fundraising rally in Florida; Republican legislatures will have a big say in redrawing congressional districts | Matt Stroshane/Getty Images

“Republican gains are massive,” gloated conservative activist Erick Erickson on the blog Red State, the day after the Nov. 2 U.S. mid-term elections. He wasn’t talking primarily about Washington. The Republicans had mixed results in congressional elections, winning control of the House of Representatives but not the Senate. But the party’s performance was almost flawless at the state level: before Nov. 2, Democrats controlled the vast majority of state legislatures, and now most of them are in Republican hands. While the party won’t be able to do much in Congress, with President Barack Obama poised to veto its legislation, its new-found power in the states will enable the GOP to do many of the things it has been trying to do for years—and that could also pave the way for more Republican gains in the House and even the presidency in 2012.

A big year for a party at the national level affects races further down on the ballot; the Democrats picked up many state legislative seats in their own mid-term blowout in 2006. But this year’s Republican sweep, which by some estimates gained the GOP as many as 700 state-level seats, came at the best possible time. That’s because in 2011, U.S. states will redraw congressional districts based on census information. And state legislatures, along with governors, usually have a big say in how those maps are drawn.

Continue…

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of December 20th, 2010)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Stephen Harper: the brain in a jar

By Paul Wells - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 202 Comments

On Wednesday I listed my blog posts that provoked the biggest brawls on the comment boards. Today I’ve measured the pieces that appeared in print in the magazine, including columns and longer articles, in a different way. Our software tracks the number of page views everything on the website gets. I made a list of my most-viewed articles from 2010.

A common theme popped out. With one exception, what most of you really wanted to read from me in 2010 was long analyses of Stephen Harper’s governing style and philosophy. Continue…

Good news about Canada’s education system

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 13 Comments

Canadian students have come a long way | Tannis Toohey/Toronto Star

The end of the year is a hopeful and generous time for Canadians, a time when we indulge our better instincts and tend to look on the bright side of things. How strange then, that recent good news about Canada’s education system has prompted a sudden bout of pessimism.

Last week saw the release of a massive comparison of school systems around the world. The Programme for International School Assessment (PISA) is run every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and tests 470,000 15-year-old students across 65 countries and regions in reading, math and science. Canada, once again, found itself among the world’s leaders in educational performance.

Continue…

Music: a moment and its aftermath

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:22 PM - 2 Comments

In January Ottawa’s Thirteen Strings Chamber Orchestra played one of its regular season concerts at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Wellington Street. Here is some online discussion of the concert among excited fans of that evening’s soloist, cellist Paul Marleyn. I volunteer on the little orchestra’s board so I attend every concert, but this one was special for two reasons.

First, the repertoire was ideal. For me the highlight was the Impromptu by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. A seven-minute arrangement for strings of some piano music he’d written, the Impromptu is a nearly perfect piece, dark and wistful. Played right, it seems to unfold in one long, inevitable phrase. Our orchestra played it right. I heard great orchestras this year but tonight it’s that Sibelius in the church that sticks with me.

The other special thing about the concert was the guest conductor, Kevin Mallon, Northern Irish by way of Toronto. On the strength of this one performance (and his dynamite c.v.)  we hired him more or less straightaway as the new music director for Thirteen Strings. Since then the little orchestra and its redhead conductor have started to create a buzz. Ticket sales for our Christmas concert were up 30% from a year earlier. This new momentum will continue with our Jan. 22 concert, featuring Vivaldi, some good British material, stellar soloists… and our new regular, Kevin Mallon.

Yes, this is just a plug for the orchestra I volunteer for. I’ll return to weightier matters on Thursday. But one of the year’s happier discoveries for me was that there’s something even better than hearing good music: helping it get heard.

A year's politics in 12 chapters

By John Geddes - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 9:38 PM - 3 Comments

Eggs in a carton, apostles in stained glass, forwards needed to ice four lines in hockey—twelve is the magic number. For our purposes here, in this season for taking stock of the year nearly past, it’s the 12 calendar months that matter. Pick just one political story for each page, and 2010 begins to feel almost coherent.

Continue…

Christmas in May 1947

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 4:35 PM - 2 Comments

Just for a Filler Clip™, here’s the original trailer for my favourite Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street. Most people who make movies about the Christmas Spirit, including people who have made remakes of Miracle, try to pump up the sentimentality and teach us about the true meaning of the season. But George Seaton, writer-director of Miracle, made an uplifting movie that is cynical about humanity. Every “miracle” that happens in the movie happens because people act selfishly (the judge trying to be re-elected) or apathetically (the mail guys have to find something to do with the kids’ useless letters to Santa, so they might as well send them to this crazy guy they read about in the papers). And the whole movie makes perfect sense whether you think Edmund Gwenn really is Santa Claus or just some crazy old man. It’s somehow more genuinely uplifting and inspiring to see Maureen O’Hara melt and learn to have faith in a world where she’s actually, for the most part, right to be cynical. She and the other leads rise above the rest of the world and make it better.

(Another cool thing about the movie is that it was able to portray the leading lady not only as a career woman, but a divorcée who doesn’t get re-married to her first husband. The Catholic Legion of Decency had been trying to keep a lid on that sort of thing, and their power finally started to crumble in 1947 when Fox released two films — this and Gentleman’s Agreement — where the heroine is divorced and the hero isn’t the man she’s divorced from.)

Anyway, the trailer of Miracle famously had to conceal the fact that it was a Christmas movie, because it was released in May. (Not because the studio didn’t have faith in it, but because they did, and Christmastime was a not a good time to release a movie with box-office potential.) So the trailer contains testimonials about what a wonderful and charming and funny movie it is, but fudges on what it’s about and when it takes place. Peggy Ann Garner, who had just starred in Fox’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, also demonstrates in the trailer that “Groovy” — or as it’s spelled here, “groovey” — was already familiar teenage slang in the ’40s.

Chyron of the Year: "Holocaust Winner"

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 2:12 PM - 5 Comments

Just before 2010 ends, we get a TV news typo that obliterates all the others. Whoever types these things up for Fox News apparently couldn’t decide whether to identify Elie Wiesel as a Holocaust Survivor or Nobel Prize Winner, so here’s what we got:

(Via Outside the Beltway)

Inkless in review: the year in big comment-board fights

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 2:03 PM - 76 Comments

Six posts on this blog this year drew more than 300 comments.

In March I returned from Michael Ignatieff’s big Montreal thinkers’ conference to point out that he had eliminated the biggest policy differences between his party and the NDP, so now they could merge! Readers weren’t sure they agreed.

In April, when a lot of people still thought the government’s refusal to release documents pertaining to the possible abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan was a big deal (seems so long ago!), I tried to predict Stephen Harper’s reaction to the Speaker’s ruling against his government. I thought Harper would fight. I did not realize he wouldn’t have to because the Liberals didn’t care enough.

In early August when a lot of Americans thought the prospect of a “Ground Zero Mosque” was a present danger to the safety and dignity of the Republic (seems so long ago!), I quoted from Michael Bloomberg’s great speech defending American values.

Nine days later I suggested that Stephen Harper was pressing ahead with the abandonment of the mandatory long-form census because he believed he was doing something important and worth any political cost.

At the end of August I endorsed John Geddes’ superb reporting on the government’s attempts to gin up fake research on the InSite safe-injection site in Vancouver.

In October I picked a fight with Chantal Hébert over our coverage of corruption in Quebec, and readers had a merry time debating whether I’d managed to beat myself up.

I’ll repeat the same exercise soon with my print columns and articles from the magazine.

The Year in Sketches

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 12:27 PM - 1 Comment

Here are the 15 most-read sketches of 2010.

1. Aboard this tiny ship June 3
2. Sergeant Harper deploys his decibels October 28
3. A question of maturity March 31
4. ‘I shouldn’t have to be here’ January 23
5. Iggy’s sharp right hook September 22
6. Your deferential silence is appreciated May 4
7. ‘I’m sorry if there’s been any confusion’ April 21
8. Delighting in the missteps of one’s opponent October 6
9. Vic Toews makes a funny September 27
10. When it rains July 13
11. The House always wins April 27
12. Checking in on Michael Ignatieff’s inevitable doom November 30
13. Smirking towards the future March 29
14. Anatomy of an outrage June 2
15. Who loves ya, baby? October 21

Moms who take folic acid have smarter kids, study suggests

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 12:12 PM - 13 Comments

According to U.S. researchers, children in rural Nepal whose mothers took iron and folic acid supplements during pregnancy had children who were smarter, more organized, and had better fine motor skills than those whose mothers didn’t get the supplements, Reuters reports. Making sure pregnant women get such basic prenatal care could have a big effect on children who live in poor communities, they noted, where iron deficiency is common. Iron is important for the central nervous system, noted the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and early iron deficiency can interfere with everything from nerve development to metabolism. Even so, iron deficiency is the most common nutritional disorder in the world and affects 2 billion people.

Reuters

Early test for Alzheimer’s might be possible: experts

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

Experts in the UK say they might have found an early test for Alzheimer’s, the BBC reports, using a lumbar puncture test and a brainscan to pinpoint patients with early signs of dementia. One day, doctors could use this test to prescribe drugs to slow or stop the disease. There are many potential drugs that could work, but it’s hard for doctors to test how effective they are because dementia is usually only diagnosed once the disease is fairly advanced. To detect the most common form of dementia, which is Alzheimer’s, at its earliest stage might be possible, according to Dr. Jonathan Schott and colleagues at the Institute of Neurology, University College of London. They check for brain shrinkage and lower-than-normal levels of a protein called amyloid in fluid around the brain and spinal cord.

BBC News

President Obama signs 'Don't ask, don't tell' repeal

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:29 AM - 17 Comments

Finally fulfilling a 2008 campaign promise, President Barack Obama signed a landmark law repealing the ban on gay men and women serving openly in the armed services. However, the policy will not end overnight: service chiefs must complete implementation plans before lifting the old law, and they must prove that it won’t damage combat readiness, as critics believe it will. In any case, the signing ceremony was a breakthrough moment for the nation’s gay community, the military and for Obama. The president vowed during his 2008 campaign to repeal the law and faced pressure from liberals who complained he was not acting swiftly enough. “No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder in order to serve the country that they love,” Obama said.

Bloomberg

G20 officer charged in alleged protester assault

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:23 AM - 8 Comments

The civilian organization tasked with investigating complaints against police for their conduct during the Toronto G20 summit has announced that Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani has been charged with assault with a weapon for the alleged beating by police of protester Adam Nobody. The Special Investigations Unit had previously decided that it was impossible to identify the perpetrator from the YouTube video of the incident, but additional video provided by the Toronto Star and cooperation from a police witness led them to reverse their decision. Nobody further alleged that he was beaten a second time after his initial arrest, but the SIU says it hasn’t found enough evidence to lay a charge. The Toronto police service is also reviewing the conduct of its officers, and is disciplining nearly 100 for not wearing their name tags. Several further investigations into police activity at the summit are ongoing.

CTV News

Larry Smith: Mon nom est québécois

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:19 AM - 130 Comments

When Chantal Hébert predicted this whole Larry Smith business in an eerily well-informed Dec. 3 column, I took a moment to mourn the spectacle of a Conservative party so unmoored from modern-day Quebec that its next star candidate would be named “Smith.” Don’t get me wrong: A guy named Smith or Wells is always greeted with a smile in Chicoutimi or Quebec City, but he is unlikely to pick up a lot of votes from a Ouimet or a Côté. Smith is a well-regarded professional-sports executive with solid French, but that’ll get an anglo the same sort of cool respect a James Moore or a Jack Layton gets among francophone voters.

Anyway, I’m slow but maybe not hopeless. Three weeks later I realize that’s not where the game is. Continue…

I heart Winnipeg

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 10:13 AM - 7 Comments

I went to Winnipeg recently to write about hip hop. I was struck by the uncommon loveliness of the people there, and I post the above with them in mind. The cynical soul watches  this and expects it to be an ad for Nike or a bank, or something. But it isn’t. It’s just a couple of ‘Peg City dudes being nice. Bless.