Many royal brides who pledged to ‘obey’ neither obeyed nor stayed

By John Fraser - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

The amiable, articulate priest was standing outside his church after the 11:15 a.m. Eucharist, greeting his varied flock one by one, with warm words for those from far away and an easy familiarity for his regulars. He was not exactly an ordinary priest, though. In a week or so, he will be presiding over the service at his “church”—Westminster Abbey—that will join Prince William and Catherine Middleton in holy matrimony.

There’s a lot riding on this marriage, like the future of the monarchy, but the Very Rev. John Hall, dean of Westminster, wasn’t revealing any important secrets. One visitor wondered if he knew what “the gown” would look like. The dean laughed. “No,” he said, “but I am sure she’ll be wearing one.”

The dean was open about what will happen to his former Benedictine monastery on April 29. There will be no scaffolding built, as it is during a coronation, but the “sardine tin” element will be to the fore. “We can get more than 2,000 in here if we have to, and we will really have to.”

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White House releases Obama birth certificate

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:51 AM - 10 Comments

The White House released President Barack Obama’s birth certificate on Wednesday in order to counter ongoing rumours that he wasn’t born in the U.S. A previously released certificate of live birth showed he was born in Hawaii. But “birther” theorists, including potential Republican candidate Donald Trump, have continued to insist he was born in Kenya, his father’s birthplace, thus making him ineligible to be president, the BBC reports. On Wednesday, Obama described the unprecedented move as aimed at ridding the political debate of a conspiracy theory that has grown into a national distraction over the years. “We have better stuff to do. I have better stuff to do,” he said. His long form birth certificate has been stored in a vault in Hawaii since his birth in August 1961.

BBC News

The sorcerer’s apprentices: a season in the kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elbulli

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

It is well documented that the pilgrimage to the otherwise unremarkable town of Roses in Spain to dine at elBulli requires fanatical dedication: each year up to two million apply for a magical 30-course meal, and the available 8,000 spots are allocated in a single day. But even more zealous than these foodies are the apprentices who toil under chef Ferran Adrià.

Take Myungsun Jang—known as “Luke”—who discovered his passion for food while working as an army cook. After deciding he needs to leave South Korea for a culinary education, he saves $15,000 to eat at the finest restaurants of Europe and Asia, sleeping rough and hitchhiking (with a backpack containing a suit for fine dining). Instead of applying for the six-month elBulli internship (32 of 3,000 get in), he shows up and begs for a job. Rejection doesn’t deter him: Luke pitches a tent near Adrià’s house until the chef can no longer refuse. Like all apprentices, he works 14-hour days in exchange for one meal, no pay, and a bed. These young people perform the dullest tasks: squeezing germ from thousands of kernels of corn, moulding slippery balls of Gorgonzola foam that behave like mercury, forming impeccable sheets of yuba from the skin at the top of a pot of boiling milk. “This is the paradox of elBulli,” Abend writes, “that the most exciting dining experience in the world depends on the most extreme absence of excitement.”

Indeed, there’s no room for Alice Waters sex romps or Anthony Bourdain-esque benders. In clean, spare prose, Abend documents the inner workings of the kitchen—all the more precious since Adrià has said 2011 will be his last season. He and his brigade continually emphasize “the importance of a kind of universal precision.” While impressive, this can sometimes make for a dull read. “Writing everything down is monotonous,” says one of Adrià’s right-hand men of meticulously recording every recipe and morsel of food in the kitchen. “It’s incredibly boring. But like Ferran says, you have to have monotony to have anarchy.”

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'Bad information is an occupational hazard'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 36 Comments

The CEO of Sun Media says—and the Conservative campaign confirms—that a Conservative strategist forwarded a dubious photo of Michael Ignatieff.

Three weeks ago, our vice-president for Sun News, Kory Teneycke, was contacted by the former deputy chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper, Patrick Muttart. He claimed to be in possession of a report prepared by a “U.S. source”, outlining the activities and whereabouts of Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in the weeks and months leading to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The report suggested that rather than being an observer from the sidelines, as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece after he entered Canadian politics, Ignatieff was in fact on the front lines and on the ground at a forward operating base in Kuwait, assisting U.S. State Department and American military officials in their strategy sessions. Muttart also provided a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002.

What Mr. Muttart provided was apparently enough for the Sun papers to run a story that claimed Mr. Ignatieff was “was on the front lines of pre-invasion planning when he worked in the U.S.” Still, Mr. Peladeau believes this was part of an effort to discredit both Mr. Ignatieff and Sun media and that this episode should debunk any notion that the Sun is a tool of the Conservative party of Canada.

Reading my father: A memoir

By Mireille Silcoff - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

For a biographer with the luxury of distance, William Styron—most famously the author of Sophie’s Choice, and a strapping mid-century Southern novelist whose small but powerful oeuvre seems ripe for a revival of interest—is a juicy subject. Styron was a bon vivant, a scene-maker, but also a bad-tempered melancholic, his flow of writing choked by rampant perfectionism, his lifespan cut short by depression-borne illness. For the author of this memoir, Styron is more and less: this is the story of what it’s like growing up with such a character as Daddy.

The younger Styron understandably has major issues concerning her father, and the first half of her memoir is rife with poor-me moments: Styron telling his daughter that her horse will be sent to the glue factory, or calling her a “creep” and a “hateful” “princess” for not performing a chore, or marooning her in a boarding school she describes as Dickensian in its punishments. Although we never get to what feels like the deep truth of the gigantic Styron hurt in these periods—Alexandra writes that in her youth, she “shut down” from her father with a near-autistic fierceness—her last years with her father, who died of pneumonia in 2006, after a messy, ugly 20-year battle with clinical depression, are valiantly and beautifully detailed.

There are, throughout Reading my Father, some pretty scenes of preppy succour in Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard, and a big rolling Rolodex of famous names—Teddy Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut all tinkle their ice cubes in a decades-long succession of highballs. In one scene, Styron describes being a young girl, watching illustrious party guests use the toilet from a hole in her bedroom’s floor. And there is something of that in her memoir: the view is narrow, but it is plentiful in its fascinations.

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New York, Paris, Berlin…Winnipeg?

By Marc Mayer - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 17 Comments

David Zwirner

One of Canada’s more fascinating cultural features is the spectacular international success of the Vancouver art scene. But that’s old news. More surprising is Canada’s No. 2 spot. It belongs neither to Toronto nor Montreal, but to Winnipeg. These days, when foreign art lovers talk about Canadian art, they generally mean western Canadian art.

The success of the Winnipeg scene is hard to explain because it’s exceptional in so many ways. For example, as a rule, the biggest cities harbour the liveliest vanguard art communities: New York, London, Paris, Berlin…So what’s the deal with Winnipeg?

The capital of Manitoba is known for being rough around the edges and yet, art-wise, you couldn’t call it disadvantaged. For starters, the University of Manitoba runs a decent school of art (est.1913); then there’s the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a centenary art museum now new and improved; and Plug In, a one-time artist-run centre now pushing 40, just morphed into an Institute of Contemporary Art with fancy new digs. There’s also Border Crossings, a classy art magazine that keeps a sharp eye on the home front.

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Putin the powerful

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 3 Comments

Shemetov Maxim/ITAR-TASS/AP

From China to Tajikistan, the turmoil that has roiled the Middle East in recent months is spoiling the sleep of authoritarian leaders across the world. Not that of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, though. The former president’s popularity held up through both a small war, in Georgia in 2008, and a serious recession, in 2008-2009. Now, with his personal approval rating hovering around 70 per cent, he has said he may run for the presidency in 2012.

Putin has certainly remained front and centre in Russian politics. Roughly a decade after first rising to power in 1999, he still enjoys idol status at home. Admittedly, some of his latest sightings among Hollywood’s glitzy posse may have been a little over the top, even for the Russian public—the PM’s uneasy musical rendering of Blueberry Hill before a beaming Sharon Stone and others at a charity event in St. Petersburg last year apparently didn’t sit well with the home audience. But Putin’s carefully crafted macho-man image, which has seen him hunting in Siberia wearing only green fatigues, whitewater rafting, and even demonstrating judo moves in a popular instructional video, hasn’t tired the Russian public yet.

It projects strength, health and self-discipline. And those virtues are nothing short of inspirational for a nation where a former president, Boris Yeltsin, was drunk in public, where alcoholism and addiction have spread like epidemics, and which came terrifyingly close to social and political meltdown only a decade ago, says Edward Lucas, the author of The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West. Unlike Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, whose images as nationalist heroes faded decades ago, Russia observers say Putin is still riding high on political credit for having rescued the Russia of the Yeltsin years from anarchy and near disintegration.

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Bismarck: A life

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

“Great men are nearly always bad men,” declared the British historian Lord Acton. Perhaps he had in mind his era’s greatest statesman, but Otto von Bismarck—a genius of cynicism—fits Acton’s description to a T. Unhindered by anything resembling principle, prepared to start three wars to accomplish his goals but thereafter prudent and restrained in his diplomacy, ferocious to his enemies and not much kinder to family and friends, Bismarck towered over not just his nation—and Germany was his nation—but his continent.

Steinberg’s biography is a superb, finely written demonstration of the importance of individuals to history. Bismarck had no better or more enduring power base than the trust of his elderly Prussian king (and later German emperor). Wilhelm I was 65 and Bismarck 47 when they began their 26-year collaboration in 1862. The rest of the royal family hated the king’s iron chancellor, and if Wilhelm had not lived until 91, Bismarck would not have had the opportunity to weld 37 German-speaking states into a world power. And he did it all—keeping Wilhelm on his side despite Bismarck’s massive temper tantrums and endless bouts of hypochondriacal illnesses—through sheer force of personality. Everything about Bismarck was outsized: his capacity for work, his command of detail, his misogyny, his rages, his appetite—even his other bodily functions, according to one house guest who marvelled, starry-eyed, over the size of the chancellor’s chamber pots.

Since he was dedicated to nothing except keeping Prussian absolutism—and that feudal relic, the Prussian Junker class—in charge of the most advanced industrial nation in Europe, Bismarck accommodated liberal concepts (universal suffrage) and socialist demands (old-age pensions and workplace insurance) to garner popular support for his militaristic reactionary monarchy. In so doing he set up a state so finely tuned for his personal rule, and so accustomed to blind obedience, that it was bound to be both menacing and unstable in others’ hands—Kaiser Wilhelm II, for one, or Adolf Hitler.

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Designated drivers for a non-car trip

By Rebecca Eckler - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 4 Comments

There’s a new breed of “designated driver” out there. Known as “salvia spotters,” or “salvia sitters,” they offer guidance and support for those who want to fire up a bong and experience the hallucinatory qualities of the psychoactive plant salvia. “I have been a ‘spotter’ for salvia trips at least 30 times,” says Louis Marc Vautour, 36, of Toronto, who describes himself as a musician, barista and politician. A spotter “sits in front of the voyager, the one taking it, and usually holds the combustion apparatus.” The most basic function, he explains, “is to ensure the voyager is safe and doesn’t harm themselves or others—you would not want to drop burning embers onto a carpet, for example.” An experienced spotter, he adds, is also “the guide or guru for the trip.”

Salvia is a potent hallucinogenic plant sold openly online and in head shops across the country. Its popularity has increased because of all the YouTube videos people have posted of their salvia trips, including one that went viral late last year of Miley Cyrus taking salvia. Technically, because salvia is considered a natural health product, it has to be authorized by Health Canada before it can be sold; Christelle Legault, a spokesperson for Health Canada, told the Canadian Press last year that, “to date, Health Canada has not licensed for sale any drug that contains salvia as an ingredient.” Still, head shops openly sell vials of salvia extract, for $20 to $80 a gram, depending on the potency.

“When people take salvia,” says Vautour, “they experience ‘ego death,’ or what the Buddhists call the ‘Clear Light of Illumination.’ It is a powerful experience and can be extremely awe inspiring but also can be accompanied by fear.” People react in different ways, he explains, from “babbling incoherently for a few minutes,” to “having the desire to get up and move.” Some “thrash around.” Others “fall down immediately.” He’s also seen people throwing the bong and smashing it. “Some people lose consciousness. There are a number of physical risks the salvia spotter should be prepared to handle.”

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Say her name

By Joanne Latimer - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

This American author could hardly believe his luck when he won the heart of a beautiful young Spanish literature student named Aura Estrada. She was doing her Ph.D. at Columbia University and looked like a “Mexican Björk.” In his mid-forties when they met, Goldman felt he was in danger of getting carried away, “like a romping puppy in a field of tulips.” In 2007, his elation was cut short when Aura died, just 30 years old, in a surfing accident in Mexico. This is the set-up for Say Her Name, a heartbreaking novel born from Goldman’s personal loss, with a self-titled lead character trying to carry on under the same circumstances.

With tremendous skill, Goldman describes the way grief can blindside a widower—he stumbles upon the indentation of Aura’s fingers, “like fossils,” in her body scrub. He reads her unfinished fiction. He sleeps with her friends (not as creepy as it sounds, the way Goldman describes it) and quits his teaching job. While coping with feelings of complicity in Aura’s accident, he must also deflect the blame coming his way from Aura’s formidable mother and uncle in Mexico. The mystery surrounding the protagonist’s guilt is the most interesting and unexpected aspect of the book, keeping the suspense high and acting as a release valve from all the grieving.

“Four years [with Aura]—are those too few years to hold such significance in a grown man’s life?” he asks, rhetorically. Goldman, the character and author blurring together, is afraid he’ll never recover, and readers share his concern. “You have to, can only, live this on your own,” he says of losing a spouse.

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Music and politics make Nick Clegg cry

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Jaime Avalos/ZUMAPRESS.com/Keystone Press

As if Nick Clegg hadn’t taken enough of a political beating of late. Last week, Britain’s embattled deputy prime minister had a run-in with the bulldog pensioner from Rochdale, England, Gillian Duffy, who became Gordon Brown’s scourge during the general election last year when the then-Labour PM was overheard calling her a “bigoted woman.” As Clegg, her most recent victim, entered a factory on a visit last week, Duffy—a Labour supporter—accosted him about whether he was happy with his Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition government’s policies.

Unlike “Bigotgate,” though, when Brown forgot that he was still wearing a microphone, Clegg was genial to the grandma and managed to get away unscathed. Sort of. Duffy’s question continued to resonate because what’s happening with the coalition government has brought Clegg to what may be the nadir of his political life, and his party to near single-figure lows in the opinion polls.

Quite a turn from Clegg’s arrival in his post. The Lib Dem leader rolled into the position on a wave of Cleggmania, seeing his poll ratings surge after emerging as the undisputed champion of the televised general election debates a year ago. He cheered the British electorate with calls for a “radical, reforming government,” adding that the Lib Dems would deliver something different from the “old parties.” Planting the seeds of future disappointment, he told them, “I believe the way things are is not the way things have to be.”

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The uncoupling

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Only a novelist as skilled as Meg Wolitzer could pull off the preposterous conceit that animates her playful new novel: a “formidable wind” blows through a small New Jersey community, casting a spell that causes women, one by one, to lose desire for their partners. There’s more: this mysterious collective not-tonight-dear headache takes grip just as the local high school is preparing to stage a production of Lysistrata, the famed Greek comedy in which women organize a sex strike to stop a war.

In lesser hands, such an ambitious high-concept scenario could have descended into magic-realism preciosity. Yet the American writer deftly renders the twinned scenarios utterly plausible, even realistic, and uses them to explore big themes: the complexities of mid-life marriage, the waxing and waning of sexual desire, and ultimately how much we really know those to whom we’re closest.

Multiple interconnected relationships are tested and redefined by this mysterious spell—among them, once smugly married high school teachers Robby and Dory Lang, their teenage daughter, Willa, and her first love, Eli, and a philandering principal and his school-psychologist mistress. Along the way, Wolitzer, a reliably witty, trenchant social observer, takes on the politics of high school faculties, riffing on the burdens of social kissing, bringing hummus to a pot-luck dinner and weight gain and desire. But most of the book’s focus plays to her greatest strength: depicting the profundity of ordinary lives. Wolitzer’s usually gleaming prose is more gently burnished in this outing: a scene in which Robby Lang brings home an adult game, “The Game of Want,” in a desperate bid to reboot his wife’s libido, is both comic and poignant. The novel’s greatest triumph, however, lies in a resolution that sees its two themes converge, both literally and figuratively, to bring this fantastical tale back to reality. Just when the reader is questioning whether it’s even possible, Wolitzer makes it happen, like magic.

Kate’s royal catwalk is a hit

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

TEAA/ZDS/Keystone Press

Every outing is a minefield, every greeting a potential made-for-YouTube train wreck. Take the woman who turned up last month to Kate and William’s whistle-stop appearance in Belfast: she drew a laugh with her vain attempt to get the couple to don silly caps labelled “bride” and “groom.” But her too personal remark about Kate’s recent weight loss—well, that wasn’t so amusing. “It’s all part of the wedding plan,” the bride-to-be replied gamely, stifling any urge to tell the woman to mind her own body mass.

Being Kate Middleton is not easy. The former art history student has made four public appearances in official capacity since Prince William proposed, each time drawing a frenzy of scrutiny. Her hemlines have been measured, her posture checked, her smiles reviewed for width and authenticity. If, heaven forbid, she were to utter an offensive word in public, it would travel the globe at warp factor nine.

Yet unlike Diana, who appeared stricken in her first official outings, Kate moves naturally under the public gaze. “She’s not put a foot wrong,” says Claudia Joseph, the author of Kate: Princess in Waiting. Her poise suggests not only intuition but studiousness, says Joseph, as “Kate the commoner” has reportedly undergone rigorous training over the past five months in the myriad anachronisms known as royal protocol. An archaic requirement to stay two steps behind the prince can be trying: she’s as great an attraction as her fiancé, and gets held up by admirers while William is forging down greeting lines.

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The firm’s got buzz

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

In many ways, the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton is a story that writes itself. The groom: a future king, whose mother’s life ended in tragedy, but only after her own marriage provided years of salacious tabloid fodder. The bride: a brown-haired commoner with a down-to-Earth reputation—one that promises to keep the high-profile union anchored firmly in reality, or as close as you can get in the rarefied world of British royalty.

Even so, the monarchy isn’t taking any chances. With the scandals involving Prince Charles and Diana, princess of Wales still fresh in people’s minds, the royal family has spotted a rare opportunity in William and Kate’s walk down the aisle to reinvigorate a tarnished royal brand that contributes not only to Britain’s global prestige, but an estimated $800 million annually to the national economy.

Buckingham Palace has gone to great lengths to make sure the feel-good nature of the upcoming wedding is experienced by as many people as possible—and they’re relying heavily on the latest in digital technology to do it. In addition to being televised, the royal wedding is expected to be streamed live on the Web. The happy couple have also used Twitter to release details about the big day, including news of the engagement itself, while an official royal wedding album will be available “almost instantly” on iTunes, with a portion of the proceeds going to charity. The entire package is being wrapped together with a dedicated website that was set up with the help of no less than Google. “The buzz value on this wedding is global and huge,” says Alan Middleton, a professor of marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business, who grew up in Britain (but bears no relation to the bride). “And the palace is all over it.”

The modern monarchy has a history of using the latest communication technologies to further its public relations aims. In 1953, the Queen wanted her coronation widely televised, marking the first time in British history that a major royal event—from the swelling crowds that lined the procession route to the solemn ceremony inside the abbey—was viewed live by tens of millions of people in Britain and parts of Europe (part of King George VI’s was also broadcast in 1937, but it only reached about 10,000 people). North American audiences only had to wait a few more hours until RAF Canberra jet bombers sped high over the Atlantic, delivering kinescope recordings of the day’s pomp and circumstance to local networks. In the end, more than 200 million people watched the historic proceedings, helping to boost the image of the monarchy even as its actual importance continued to wane.

Now, as then, the royal family often behaves exactly like a corporation with a product to sell. How else to explain William and Kate’s recent pre-wedding tour—those in the corporate world might refer to it as a marketing “road show”—of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where they participated in a series of speaking engagements and other public events before giddy crowds?

It’s also telling that the royal family turns to some of the same places as companies do when looking for public relations help. For example, a British consulting firm called Bang Communications Ltd., which specializes in “public sector branding, corporate and digital communications,” was brought in to work on the relaunch of the monarchy’s official website in 2009. A Bang representative declined to speak with Maclean’s about the firm’s special client, but the unveiling of the new royal site was a suitably splashy PR affair. The Queen herself flipped the “on” switch, and Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist who is considered the inventor of the World Wide Web, was on hand to talk to journalists even though he didn’t appear to have any actual involvement with the project. As for the site itself, which receives roughly 250,000 visitors a month, it has a surprisingly clean, modern look despite the stuffy subject matter, ranging from official residences to royal pets.

These days, though, there’s more to being a techno-savvy monarch than just staking out a spot on the Internet for you and your corgis. Just as corporations ranging from General Mills to General Motors have incorporated social media tools into their marketing strategies, the royal family has also ventured into the Web 2.0 world, albeit somewhat cautiously. The royal household worked with Google to launch a Royal Channel on YouTube in 2007, recording 10.6 million video views over the last four years. In 2009, a Twitter account was added, followed by Facebook and Flickr accounts in 2010.

Of course, it’s not like the royals are uploading videos to YouTube and banging out tweets on their mobile devices (although there are persistent rumours the Queen owns a BlackBerry). “On a daily basis, it’s very much run by staff,” says a spokesperson for the official royal Web team, which consists of one part-time and two full-time employees at Buckingham Palace, another two at Clarence House (the official residence of the Prince of Wales, his wife Camilla, duchess of Cornwall, Prince William and Prince Harry), and one more employee who works with the Royal Collection, the art collection of the British royal family. “But the Queen is obviously consulted before any big initiative is launched.”

In anticipation of intense public interest surrounding the upcoming royal wedding, the royal household approached Google and consulting firm Accenture to help create a dedicated website for the event. It has so far been crammed with details about William and Kate’s pre-wedding tour, information on how to make a charitable donation as gift to the bride and groom, and the status of the flower beds near Buckingham Palace. It’s also expected that the site, powered by Google’s App Engine, will live stream the wedding to a large global audience. “It’s a great way to run apps quickly, more securely, and at a scale which makes it ideal for such an important international occasion,” says Wendy Rozeluk, a spokesperson for the search giant. “The site will be regularly updated by St. James’s Palace in the run-up to the wedding day.” A spokesperson for Accenture did not return a call seeking comment.

All of these tools give the royal family more ways to reach the public directly, ostensibly giving them more control over their message. They also promise to help neuter the paparazzi by satiating the public appetite for candid photographs with approved Flickr photos and YouTube videos of royal family members, including William and Kate. “What we learned with the previous generation, with Charles and Diana, is that the media exposure went overboard,” says Estelle Bouthillier, a royal expert and information and documentation analyst in Concordia University’s office of the president. “I’m sure that Prince William will not want his wife to face all of the same problems.”

Yet there are limits to what the royal family can achieve, from a social media marketing standpoint, by attempting to wrest complete control of the message. Contrary to what most social marketers preach, the royal family’s tendency has been to restrict two-way communication with the public on sites like YouTube videos and Flickr, where comments have been disabled. Middleton, the marketing professor, cited business case studies which show that corporations that embrace social media’s unique capacity for public engagement typically generate far more Web traffic—and therefore public interest—than those that maintain a top-down approach, although they do risk exposing their carefully protected brands to some negative publicity in the process. “You’ve got to be prepared to let go,” he says.

This is particularly true in the case of Facebook, which is all about community. That may be why the royal family was convinced to allow comments on its official page, a decision that helped to boost traffic (the page boasts some 26 million “interactions,” which refers to users who click “like” or post comments), but, predictably, also created a minor controversy after some posters used the forum to criticize the monarchy or argue for its abolishment. The site’s moderators stepped in and took down some of the more abusive posts, although they argued that they didn’t single out republicans. “We’re aware that when we launch these channels, it’s riskier than it is for a lot of other organizations,” a spokesperson for the Web team says.

It may be uncharted territory for the monarchy, but it’s not entirely unfamiliar. The Queen’s insistence that television cameras be allowed to record her coronation was met with stiff protest from conservatives and traditionalists, including prime minister Sir Winston Churchill. There was a fear that broadcasting such an important regal ceremony would somehow cheapen it. “People were saying no, it wouldn’t be proper to have television cameras in the abbey because people might be drinking beer while they are watching at home,” says Bouthillier. “Her grandmother, Queen Mary, was really against it.” One can only imagine how Mary, a stickler for royal formality and propriety, would have reacted to the possibility of a royal wedding YouTube mash-up.

British bachelors not welcome in Krakow

By Jen Cutts - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Katja Hoffmann/Redux

It’ll soon be stag season in Krakow, and this year, police are vowing to control the herds—not of deer, but of boorish British bachelors and their mates as they descend on the Polish city. Krakow is a popular getaway for raucous, weekend-long bashes for soon-to-be-married Brits, thanks to no-frills flights, cheap beer and numerous strip clubs. But, unimpressed with the conduct of past visitors, Krakow police are increasing patrols and threatening unruly partiers with fines and stints in the drunk tank.

While the income is a boon for the city’s hotels and nightclubs, many locals are losing patience. “We recently had one man who just stood up and took off his trousers, and then others did it,” a restaurant manager told Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper. “We had to ask the entire group to leave.” Bar owners aren’t confident the fines will deter the wild behaviour—at $15, most tourists can afford to pay up and carry on. Past efforts by proprietors to curb the rowdiness have included a ban on kilts, after a rash of flashing incidents. In 2008, a Brit partying in Riga, Latvia, another popular party spot, spent five days in jail after urinating on a public monument.

Good night, Lady Di

By Rosalind Miles - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 3 Comments

Anwar Hussein/Wireimage/Getty Images

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is warmly welcomed in Britain and elsewhere. A young couple deeply in love, a much-needed fillip for the royal family, a handsome prince, a stylish young bride and, in time, the patter of tiny feet—what’s not to like? In corporate terms, the Windsors are refreshing the brand. And everybody wants in.

Gossip columnists from Lake Louise to Louisiana are buzzing about who’s been invited to the wedding, and who’s not. Leaks have revealed old lovers of both groom and bride, new staff discreetly supporting both, and various chums of various older royals, present for various reasons, don’t ask why. One name did not appear on any list, or any roll call of the living for the last 14 years. But she’ll be there, invited or not. Who’d be more welcome than a mother at the marriage of her elder son? Hence the need of the young couple to call up Diana’s shade, and honour her plangent absence at the feast.

And hence the brilliant and simple idea to bring her back into the fold—by recycling the ring. Someone in royal circles foresaw this as a major part of the story—even in the “informal” Mario Testino snaps, the ring takes centre stage, almost eclipsing the two lovers. Formerly one of the most famous sapphire rings in the world, it had lain unseen and forgotten for a decade and a half. Bringing it to light was a startling and unexpected PR coup, which officially launched a new season of Diana marriage coverage. It gave the media royal permission to revisit every detail of her wedding preparations from the gown to the honeymoon, thereby recalling and enshrining Diana, princess of Wales at the highest point of her value to the monarchy, when she’d attracted huge affection as Charles’s bride, and before she undermined it by upstaging him.

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No logo. We mean it.

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Daniel Munoz/Reuters

In Italy and France, it’s Marlboro. Norwegians puff on Prince and Bangladeshis favour John Player. But by next year, Australians won’t be able to easily tell one brand of cigarette from another. The world leader in the war against smoking will now become the first to enforce plain packaging for cigarettes. “The only thing to distinguish one brand from another,” said Health Minister Nicola Roxon, “will be the brand and product name in a standard colour, standard position and standard font size and style.” That means logos are gone, and all cigarette packs will be a standardized olive green (the least attractive colour, according to research) with health warnings. The industry won’t go brand-free without a fight, though. Tobacco companies claim the measures infringe on trademark and intellectual property laws, and that they will not curb smoking. For Roxon, though, “the glamour is gone.”

Kate Middleton's middle-class advantage

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 2 Comments

Alan Davidson/Rex Features/CP

At the marriage of the century, two families will be seated at the front of the ancient sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. On the left will be Kate Middleton’s family; the royal relatives of Prince William will be on the right.

But make no mistake: this isn’t a typical marital merger. It’s a takeover. When commoner Kate Middleton enters the house of Windsor, the rest of her family will stay on the periphery, associated with the royal family yet never part of it. All the milestones of her life from April 29 onward will be celebrated from within the gilded confines of her husband’s world. There will be no sharing of big family get-togethers like Christmas Day—one year with her family, the next with his. She will spend her holidays with her husband’s family on their estates. Forever.

Yet Kate and her family have a huge ace in the hole in this particular corporate takeover—call it the middle-class advantage. For all their ambitions, the Middletons are staunchly middle class, and so are their values. And those values are shared by the most important Windsor: Queen Elizabeth II.

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Swedish wares, U.S. benefits

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

The U.S. is to Ikea as Mexico is to U.S. corporations. That’s what workers in Danville, Va., discovered after the Swedish furniture giant built its first American plant in the southern rural community. In Sweden, Ikea has a reputation for paying high wages, giving good benefits, and accepting unions. Even when it built factories in Eastern Europe, its good image remained intact. But in Danville, according to the Los Angeles Times, the three years since the Ikea factory opened have seen workers complaining about “eliminated raises, a frenzied pace and mandatory overtime.” Many workers aren’t even entitled to the meagre benefits and wages of the regular employees, since a third of them are temps.

When the employees tried to form a union, the factory hired one of America’s most prominent union-busting law firms. And there have been accusations of racial discrimination; six African-American workers have already filed grievances, claiming that black workers “are assigned to the lowest-paying departments and to the least desirable third shift” for making difficult-to-assemble furniture. In Sweden, people are shocked to see Ikea throw away what Swedish union boss Per-Olaf Sjoo called its “good Swedishness,” turning into a typical capitalist behemoth.

Why would a company abandon its friendly corporate culture? One explanation is the same reason why U.S. firms outsource to other countries, or why carmakers set up non-union shops in the southern U.S. Ingrid Steen, a spokeswoman for Ikea’s parent company Swedwood, told the Times that the difference in wages “is related to the standard of living and general conditions in the different countries,” and people in Sweden expect a higher standard of living than in the U.S.

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The early returns

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 9:01 AM - 12 Comments

Elections Canada reports on the turnout at last weekend’s advance polls.

According to the preliminary figures, 2,056,001 electors voted at the advance polls in this federal general election. This is a 34.5% increase from the 1,528,780 electors who voted in advance in the 40th general election in 2008. Over 676,000 Canadians voted on Friday and over 823,000 on Monday, representing the two (2) busiest days of advance voting ever.

The NDP, Quebec and the constitution

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 8:01 AM - 116 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Yesterday on a campaign swing through Quebec, Jack Layton was asked whether as prime minister he would accept the result of a Parti Québécois referendum on sovereignty. “La réponse est oui,” he said cheerfully. That seemed to me a bit short.

The Supreme Court has had quite a bit to say on the matter. Other provinces have legislation on the books requiring a referendum to ratify constitutional amendments affecting those provinces, and constitutional amendments would be required for secession to be legal. And there is, of course, the Clarity Act, which calls on the House of Commons to judge the clarity of any referendum question, and then again of the referendum result. The NDP voted in favour of the Clarity Act after Alexa McDonough learned, in very late innings in 1999, that there is real and substantial political cost outside Quebec for trying to be as insouciant about all these matters as the Parti Québécois likes to be.

But as Joan Bryden of CP pointed out last night, the NDP’s record on these matters under Jack Layton’s leadership has continued to be a bit of a mess. Continue…

The economists want in

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 1:42 AM - 20 Comments

Canadian Business considers the emergence of economists in this election.

When the prime minister announced in early April that the Conservatives would double the amount Canadians could contribute to tax-free savings accounts, University of British Columbia economist Kevin Milligan crunched the numbers in real-time on Twitter. “Normally it would just be us yelling at the faculty lunchroom walls about these things, but now we can do it on Twitter and get these views out to the world,” says Milligan. “I think it’s an important role for us. It’s about trying to steer the conversation a bit more toward where the evidence is, more immediately.”

For recent evidence, see Stephen Gordon on tax policy and Andrew Leach on environmental policy.

And now a word from Bob Rae and Ujjal Dosanjh

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 7:51 PM - 60 Comments

In a statement sent out by the Liberal campaign, the two Liberal MPs confirm that they prefer the Liberal platform.

As former leaders of NDP governments at the provincial level, we are today proud supporters of Michael Ignatieff and the progressive Liberal platform that he is presenting to the Canadian people in this election. We have taken a hard look at the other two platforms, and neither Mr. Harper’s nor Mr. Layton’s pass basic tests. 

The Commons: The daring Mr. Harper

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 6:13 PM - 149 Comments

Stephen Harper would rather not be here.

“We didn’t want this election,” he pleads. “We wanted to be in Parliament, working.”

He says this or something like this in a ballroom in Mississauga, a gymnasium in Campbell River, a backyard Saanich, a college in Sault Ste Marie and an Italian community hall in Windsor. He says he wishes he was back in Ottawa and back in Parliament so that he could be getting back to the important business of minding the tenuous economic recovery. He says this again and again.

Here Stephen Harper seems to ask only that you disregard—or remain entirely unaware of—recent events, and bow in total deference to what he is saying to you now.

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