REVIEW: How Carrots Won the Trojan War: Curious but True Stories of Common Vegetables

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 7:05 AM - 0 Comments

Modern-day food wars, over what’s good for us (in ethical and health terms) and just plain good to eat, have a long history. Back in the 19th century, when Americans were boiling green beans for 90 minutes, full-blown vegetarianism was starting to emerge, with both sides claiming the moral high ground. George Bernard Shaw might announce that “a man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses,” but fellow Briton J.B. Morton denounced “the wicked, shifty eyes” of vegetarians, and the way they “laugh in a cold, calculating manner.”

Rupp’s book is full of details about the origin and spread of some of our most common foods and, most entertainingly, what people traditionally considered their effects. Any vegetable that even vaguely resembled a penis was thought an aphrodisiac, but none more so (naturally) than asparagus. During the Renaissance, it vied with dried fox testicles as a popular pre-Viagra remedy for the afflicted, and as late as the 19th century the vegetable was kept off the table in French girls’ schools lest it give rise to thoughts unsuitable for young ladies.

Carrots were considered anti-laxatives, which is why, according to legend, the Greek soldiers hiding in the Trojan Horse ate them to “bind their bowels,” so they wouldn’t have to exit the horse and give the game away. The variety that Greeks imagined Agamemnon’s men munching would have been purple-coloured and multi-branched natives of Afghanistan: conical carrots didn’t turn up in Europe until the 12th century, and it took Dutch breeders—no surprise there—to develop orange varieties four centuries later.

Something similar happened to sweet peas, bred from an ancestor so tough biologists figure our ancestors must have peeled and roasted them, but what happened to corn was an order of magnitude different. Now “a biological monstrosity,” corn is so dependent on human agency that it can no longer manage its own reproduction. Should humans die out, corn would rapidly follow. If we are what we eat, and our most “natural” foods have long been shaped to our hands, what does that say about us?

Bragging their way to the top

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

There’s a serious lack of women in the top ranks of business, but maybe that’s because men are better braggers, says a new study. U.S. and Spanish researchers asked M.B.A. students to do math problems, finding that men and women performed about the same. But when they were asked to recall how well they scored over a year later, the men ranked their performance 30 per cent better than it actually was; for women, it was 15 per cent.

Participants were then asked to do the math problems in groups, with each group picking a leader. Cash was offered to whichever team won, making sure teams picked a leader they felt was strongest; some leaders got cash incentives, too, adding a reason to boast about their past results. Both men and women were willing to lie, they found, but men exaggerated their abilities more. Women were selected one-third less often as leaders.

Researchers chalked it up to “honest overconfidence,” since men seem to unconsciously inflate their abilities, and warned employers not to mistake this for true performance. “It’s not just a matter of telling men not to lie,” says co-author Ernesto Reuben of Columbia Business School, since men seem to honestly believe their skills are that good—a finding likely to induce some eye-rolling among female counterparts.

Toronto critics name ‘Tree of Life’ Best Picture

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 12:01 AM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in 'The Tree of Life'

Breaking news from the Toronto Film Critics Association. (Full disclosure: I’m TFCA president, so if  much of what follows may appear to plagiarize the official press release, that’s because I can write this stuff only so many times.)

Two cosmic dramas about stubborn American patriarchs emerged as the biggest winners of the 2011 TFCA Awards. The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s transcendental epic about boyhood and the end of innocence in 1950s Texas won Best Picture, while Malick was named Best Director. Also honoured with two TFCA awards was Take Shelter: Michael Shannon won Best Actor for his portrayal of a father plagued by apocalyptic visions, and Jessica Chastain was named Best Supporting Actress for her role as his conflicted spouse. (Chastain was also a runner-up in the Supporting Actress category for The Tree of Life.)

By championing The Tree of Life, the TFCA diverged from the New York and Boston critics groups, which both chose The Artist, and from the L.A. critics, who picked The Descendants—two films that ranked as runners- up among the TFCA’s three Best Picture nominees.

Michelle Williams was voted Best Actress for her seductive, in-the-moment portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. Canada’s Christopher Plummer won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Beginners as an elderly man who comes out of the closet after learning he has terminal cancer. And Best Screenplay went to Moneyball, the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, story by Stan Chervin, based on the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis. Continue…

Our 10 favourite news photos of 2011

By Andrew Tolson - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 6:43 PM - 0 Comments

Every year, thousands of photographs are viewed, edited argued over, and finally selected by Maclean’s photo department for the pages of the magazine. For the Year in Pictures issue, we were looking for the best images that told the story of 2011. A great news photograph must do many things besides record a moment, the most important of which is to create an emotional response in the reader. Joy, outrage, sympathy, laughter; you know it when you see it. Below are our 10 favourite news photos of 2011.

Anti-Mubarak demonstrators clash with Mubarak supporters on the outer edge of Tahrir Square in Cairo for a second day. Most of the conflict involved throwing stones though the occasional molotov cocktail was also used. (Photograph by Roger Lemoyne)

Continue…

The Commons: Tomorrow’s problem

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 6:26 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. Turning to the English portion of her remarks, Nycole Turmel attempted to round on the Prime Minister.

“The Conservatives are turning their backs on the world. The Conservatives are betraying future generations. They have set up bogus homemade targets and are not even a quarter of the way toward meeting this lame attempt at saving face,” she ventured in her particular way. “When will the Prime Minister take climate change seriously?”

This question was almost entirely rhetorical and almost definitely futile, but it was almost surely the query the NDP wanted on the evening news—a furious condemnation wrapped in a plaintive cry.

The Prime Minister was quite happy for the opportunity to stand and speak seriously. Continue…

Longest TV Credit Sequence?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 6:19 PM - 0 Comments

I was talking elsewhere about the credits to Homeland. I don’t dislike them. They are controversial, though, and some people find that they are the one false note in an excellent show. It’s a disorienting sequence, but it also sometimes seems a bit on-the-nose in its description of what the show is about, which may give an impression that we’re about to watch a much less subtle show. Still, I feel like it does the job of setting up the show’s premise, its tone and its place of residence (inside Carrie’s mind) efficiently enough. Its unsubtle style may help free the show up to be more subtle elsewhere.

The Homeland sequence is a minute and 22 seconds, which further cements the place of pay cable as the last haven for long title sequences. (You sometimes find them going up to a minute on kids’ TV, though.) As you know, title sequences on broadcast TV probably hit their peak length in the late ’70s and ’80s, tapering off as networks started adding more commercials – and as networks became reluctant to start a show with the opening titles. (A long title sequence is sometimes redundant if you have a scene before it. The point of a long main title on commercial TV is that it is intended to stand alone and lead into the first commercial; a short sequence makes you feel unsatisfied when the commercial arrives.) I actually started wondering what the longest one was, and whether there was one that broke two minutes.

The closest I found was this one, from the 1984 soap Paper Dolls – and man, were there ever a lot of prime-time soaps – which clocks in at almost exactly two minutes. Between the length, the Mark Snow theme song, the names in the credits, the hair, the fashions, and the uncertain nods to MTV style, this is arguably the most ’80s of all credit sequences, even if it isn’t the longest. The fact that the episode that follows is directed by “Alan Smithee” is also perfect. Plus, “Dack Rambo,” which I think would be a better fake name than “Alan Smithee.”

Reprehensible, but not against the rules

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 3:37 PM - 0 Comments

While allowing that “all reasonable people would agree that attempting to sow confusion in the minds of voters as to whether or not their Member is about to resign is a reprehensible tactic,” Speaker Scheer has ruled just now that, on technical grounds, the campaign against Irwin Cotler does not constitute a case of privilege.

Mr. Cotler’s interventions in this regard are here, here, here, here and here. Previous coverage here, here and here.

And below, the prepared text of the Speaker’s ruling. Continue…

We don’t really want to fight climate change

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 2:49 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Gordon invokes the law of revealed preference to explain Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto.

Notwithstanding economically illiterate attempts to pretend otherwise, higher consumer prices for GHG-emitting goods and services are an essential component of any serious attempt to reduce emissions … It doesn’t matter what Canadians tell pollsters about how much they are concerned with climate change; what matters is the choices we make. And whenever we have been offered the choice of accepting personal inconvenience in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or of making sure that fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful, we have consistently and overwhelmingly chosen the latter.

Canada’s household debt keeps climbing

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 1:42 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian consumers kept piling on debt for a third consecutive quarter between July and September, according to Statistics Canada figures, the Globe and Mail reports. The ratio of debt to personal disposable income, the key measure of household debt sustainability, was 152.98 per cent in the third quarter, up from 150.57 per cent in the previous three months. The report comes as Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney warned that Canadian families’ credit burden, which has surpassed levels seen in the U.S. and U.K,. represents the biggest domestic threat to the economy.

The Globe and Mail

Time gentlemen

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 1:37 PM - 0 Comments

The Liberals have released figures documenting what they believe to be Mr. Harper’s abuse of power.

By their reckoning, 21 government bills have been debated over the first 66 days of this Parliament. Five of those bills (23.8%) have been subject to time allocation motions and time allocation motions have been passed a total of nine times. By comparison, they say, under the last Liberal majority government Parliament sat for 419 days and debated 153 government bills. Eight of those (5.2%) were subject to time allocation motions and a total of ten time allocation motions were passed.

The Liberals report that, per sitting day, the Harper government has used time allocation more than any government since time allocation was added to the standing orders in the mid-1960s. Furthermore, they say time allocation has been invoked after an average of three hours and 53 minutes of debate, while the last Liberal majority did so after an average of eight hours and 22 minutes.

Previous coverage of this issue is compiled here.

Belgium: Gunman kills three, then himself

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 1:23 PM - 0 Comments

Four people died and 75 more were injured when a gunman threw grenades and opened fire from a rifle at a busy central square in the Belgian city of Liege on Tuesday, before shooting himself, Reuters reports. It was not immediately clear what the attacker’s motive was, and he appears to have no history of terrorist attacks, according to prosecutors. However, justice officials told Reuters that the man was due to appear before police on Tuesday and had previous convictions for illegal possession of arms and drugs.

Reuters

Values and religion

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Selley sees Jason Kenney’s argument as a matter of values, not practicalities.

He mentioned it in the same breath as other initiatives he has championed, such as beefing up language requirements, the citizenship test and the Citizenship Guide. “This is part of a broader action plan to invest greater value in Canadian citizenship,” he told CBC. But he also stressed, correctly, that this is no “technical or practical” tweak. “It is, rather, a matter of pure principle, which lies at the heart of our identity and our values with respect to openness and equality,” he said at a speech in Montreal.

It’s controversial, and he didn’t shy away. He expressed his personal distaste for the burka: “It’s a cultural tradition, which I think reflects a certain view about women that we don’t accept in Canada,” he told CBC.

Teachers mulled replacing Tanenbaum to enable takeover

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Unhappy with an initial failure of takeover talks in late November, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan was ready to shake up the board of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, going as far as replacing long-time chairman Larry Tanenbaum, the Globe and Mail reports. The pension fund put its 80 per cent stake in MLSE up for sale earlier this year, and sold it to telecommunications giants Rogers, which owns Maclean’s, and Bell last week. Though some sources speaking with Globe reporters challenged the idea that Teachers had the authority to replace Tanenbaum, days after the threat of introducing changes to the board a takeover deal was reached.

The Globe and Mail

‘An act of sabotage’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 0 Comments

Japan, India and Tuvalu add their concerns.

The tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, one those most at risk from rising sea levels caused by climate change, was more blunt. ”For a vulnerable country like Tuvalu, its an act of sabotage on our future,” Ian Fry, its lead negotiator said. ”Withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol is a reckless and totally irresponsible act,” he said in an email to Reuters.

Critics in Australia are using the Harper government’s decision to scorn the Australian government.

Leading the world

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 10:14 AM - 0 Comments

France is unimpressed.

“Canada’s announcement that it is withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol is bad news for the fight against climate change,” ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told journalists. ”It is out of the question to relax our efforts or to break the dynamic of the Durban agreement,” he said.

China too. The Guardian, New York Times and CNN take note. John Ibbitson says we should all be ashamed. NDP MP Laurin Liu says the Environment Minister was sidelined at Durban.

Crosby back to the bench with concussion-like symptoms

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 10:11 AM - 0 Comments

Sidney Crosby announced on Monday that he will not be able to play for the Pittsburgh Penguins after receiving a hit to head during a game on Dec. 5 against the Boston Bruinshe that revived some concussion symptoms. “I know I got hit on the head there,” Crosby said. Experts say that some setbacks on the way to recovery from a serious concussions are not unusual, and that it may be too soon to speak about forced retirement for Crosby, the Globe and Mail reports. The Pittsburgh Penguins provided no timetable for Crosby’s return.

The Globe and Mail

Canada first out of Kyoto protocol

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Canada became the first country to pull out of the troubled Kyoto protocol on Monday, Reuters reports. Environment Minister Peter Kent announced Ottawa’s formal withdrawal on his return from climate talks in Durban, South Africa, where countries agreed to extend the Kyoto treaty for another five years and negotiate a new global arrangement with binding rules for the all the world’s major polluters by 2015. “As we’ve said, Kyoto for Canada is in the past … We are invoking our legal right to formally withdraw from Kyoto,” Kent said. China’s Foreign Ministry called Canada’s decision to abandon the treaty “regrettable.”

Reuters

In conversation: Alberta Premier Alison Redford

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Jason Franson

Since she clinched the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives in October to become premier, Alison Redford has focused her efforts on promoting the province’s interests across Canada and the U.S., including the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which was put on hold by the Obama administration last month. Her whirlwind tour through Washington, New York, Toronto and Ottawa in November was a sharp contrast with Redford’s homebody forerunner Ed Stelmach. But her approach is no surprise to those familiar with the important work she did on the international stage, which she has rarely discussed in detail.

Q: The potted biographies about your international work are very jargony—“she facilitated this,” “she served in such-and-such an office.”

A: Well, I think part of the reason for that is the biographies are written by people that don’t have international backgrounds. They’re written for the way my political life has been for the past two or three years, as opposed to when you get into the guts of it.

Q: Can you talk about your career in plain English, then?

A: I’d gone to law school in Saskatchewan and taken a lot of human rights law, on top of the regular training, and I had always been involved in politics, so I spent time in Ottawa working for Joe Clark, who was then chair of the Commonwealth Ministers on South Africa. That’s where the debates were happening over whether sanctions should be applied to South Africa—debates that involved Mulroney and Reagan and Thatcher. I worked for Clark on a regional desk that included South Africa, and then I went back and articled, but I never got it out of my system.

I had an opportunity in about 1990 to go back to South Africa on what was originally a six-week contract, working for the European Union. At that time in South Africa you had a government that was getting ready for transition. Nobody knew what it was going to look like. You had the African National Congress, which was not just a political force but was really almost becoming a de facto government. Essentially, a government in parallel was beginning to be established there.

Q: What was your role there?

A: I was a technical adviser to the legal and constitutional affairs committee of the ANC, which was providing advice to the most senior leadership levels of the ANC. The constitution was essentially being written and negotiated at the same time. So I worked on that; and I also worked on individual special projects. They were going to have to create a public broadcaster with a governance board; they were going to have to create a human rights commission. So I would go out and work with Canadian experts, or experts from other countries, and provide policy recommendations on institutional change. And then they would make decisions as to what they wanted to do.

When a lot of that work started to get done, I went to work for the Australian Embassy doing what you would think of as nuts-and-bolts development work. I funded projects through the embassy on things like sports development, HIV/AIDS, theatre groups that were teaching local communities about education. We built water projects, we dealt with domestic violence. All of the issues about huge, transformative social change, but at a community level.

I was there until 1996 and then I came back to Calgary and I practised family law. I was in a partnership with a couple of people who were criminal defence lawyers, but I didn’t like that.

Q: Why not?

A: I’d come out of a South African tradition, which involved mediation, intraspace bargaining, all that kind of stuff. It was the beginning of the “getting to yes” model of the world. And I came back to Canada and practised family law, and saw a criminal law that was completely litigious and adversarial. I practised law for about four or five years in Calgary and then decided I wanted to go back to development work. I moved to Ottawa and managed a constitutional development project for the Canadian Bar Association. Our partner in South Africa was called the Legal Resources Centre; it did a lot of test-case litigation on freedom of expression, employee rights, whether pregnant women had the right to antiretroviral HIV drugs, that kind of stuff.

Q: Was there a moment when you considered committing to South Africa permanently?

A: Yes. When I lived in South Africa in 1995, I applied for citizenship. And they turned me down. I don’t think South Africa in 1995 was looking for a lot of white people to immigrate, quite honestly. So I just went through the normal process and didn’t get accepted, and I thought, well, that’s fate telling me it’s time to come home. Which it probably was.

Q: In a hypothetical future after politics, is there a chance you’d go back?

A: No, no. The second time I went back I had the chance to spend a year in Cape Town, on and off, not working, just living. I really did love it. But it felt like I’d been there long enough. And so we came back to Calgary, and that’s when my daughter was born, in 2002. I carried on in Calgary doing international development work for a company called Agriteam Canada, which would run projects for the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, that sort of thing. They’d done education, health care, water, but they’d never done governance. We started to get projects around things like judicial training in Vietnam, judicial training in Bosnia. And I managed three or four of those projects over a long period of time.

Q: And is that what ultimately put you in Afghanistan?

A: I was in Afghanistan in 2005 for the first parliamentary elections. It’s a compelling country. I felt very fortunate to get to go. It wasn’t dangerous like being there during the worst of it, and I think it’s more dangerous now than in 2005, but there was so much to do and we were starting from nothing. That was the first time that I’d taken one of the most senior leadership roles in an election system. We ended up not just having to organize a system where you were telling people it was okay to vote, and safe to vote. I’d be going and talking to women about what a vote was. They knew it was something important, because I’d go to these meetings and they’d bring their daughters. This was very fundamental voter education, with comic books and theatre and trying to get communication to the mosques and imams.

We also had to draft the election law. When I got there the first night, I said to my two colleagues, an American and an Australian, “Okay, where’s the elections act?” “Well, you’re writing it.” A group of us wrote the election act, took it to cabinet, and got it approved. We were doing things like negotiating who was going to be allowed to run as a candidate; we’d have rules, like, if you still funded your own private standing army, we didn’t think you should be able to run. That was really difficult to get through cabinet, because there were some people at the table who had private armies.

Q: Is your international experience going to be a particular asset to you as premier? You took the Keystone XL pipeline file by the throat with your recent trip, and it makes one wonder why this sort of thing wasn’t tried before things started to get out of control in D.C.

A: Well, first of all, the process of making a regulatory decision on Keystone is one that has to run domestically in the United States and we needed to respect that. The citizens of the United States need to talk about how that infrastructure project will impact communities and state governments and all of that.

What I do think is that it’s a really big world out there. There are a lot of players. There’s no doubt that we have known for some time that we were going to start to see the agenda around energy issues and environmental issues change. And my view has always been that it’s possible to be effective in that arena if you can anticipate what’s coming next. I’ll tell you that I believe that in the last while Alberta hasn’t had leadership that understood Alberta’s role internationally. We needed to understand that decision-makers in Europe could impact us, not just decision-makers in Ottawa. It’s not just us in control of our own destiny. We are part of a global economy, and a global energy sphere, and we need to understand the impact that the political dialogue could have on our province.

Q: Is that part of why you won?

A: I believe Albertans saw in this leadership campaign that it was time to have a leader who understood all that. I’ve gotta tell you, I’m a little surprised by some of the commentary around the fact that [I’ve done] a lot of travel. Really? In my life? This isn’t a lot of travel.

Q: So we should expect to see you on the road a lot more then?

A: I’m very ambitious and bold on trade missions. I think Alberta’s future is China, India and Vietnam. We need to be in those countries. I look at the people in this province, whether they live in Edmonton or Fort McMurray or Calgary, and the way that they do business. They move around this globe pretty fast. They’re doing it effectively and making important decisions and attracting investment to this province, and I think Albertans want their government to be that way. And we’re gonna be that way.

Occupy Parliament

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 9:07 AM - 0 Comments

Noting the campaign against Irwin Cotler and the general state of the House, former Liberal MP Glen Pearson challenges this Parliament.

Do today’s MPs have the courage to stand with the House of the people against their own political masters when the occasion demands it? To date the answer would have to be a clear “no”. Perhaps what they require is the courage, mustered by their own citizens and constituents, to do the honourable thing and stop silently condoning what surely must be one of the saddest eras in Canada’s parliamentary democracy.

It is surely time for our federal political representatives to occupy the very House their constituents voted them in to. As Edmund Burke famously put it, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” I have learned that good men and women occupy the House of Commons. They question now is: will they at last show up to rescue Parliament from its more debased instincts and speak for us?

Canada out of Kyoto

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 6:14 PM - 0 Comments

Freshly returned from Durban, Peter Kent announces a withdrawal from Kyoto.

“We are invoking Canada’s legal right to formally withdraw from Kyoto,” Kent said outside the House of Commons. ”This decision formalizes what we’ve said since 2006, that we will not implement the Kyoto Protocol.”

Canada signed Kyoto in the late 1990s, but neither the current Conservative government nor their Liberal predecessors met targets. Kent says the move saves Canada $14 billion in penalties for not achieving its Kyoto targets.

Andrew Leach has tried to sort out the idea that staying in Kyoto would actually mean, so far as penalties might be concerned. More from Andrew here and here.

Full statement from the Environment Minister after the jump. Continue…

Like he said in the first place

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 4:38 PM - 0 Comments

Asked this afternoon about his helicopter ride, the Defence Minister reverted to his original explanation—the one the government had seemingly abandoned.

Mr. Speaker, as I have said in this House many times, I left time off to go back to work. Before leaving Gander, I took part in a search and rescue demonstration that has been confirmed by retired Cormorant Squadron Leader and Pilot, Major Stephen Reid, who stated that the participation in this training exercise they viewed as a win-win situation. As I said, I took part in this demonstration and then as requested I went on to complete further government business.

Later, Stephane Dion rose and challenged Mr. MacKay to step out into the foyer and take questions from reporters. The Defence Minister declared that “in almost 15 years in this place, I have never walked out the back door of this chamber.” After Question Period, Mr. MacKay did walk out into the foyer, taking a few steps before turning and walking up the stairs as a reporter shouted questions at him.

A Science-ish Q&A: Dr. Ben Goldacre

By Julia Belluz - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Rhys Stacker

With his “Bad Science” column in the Guardian newspaper and a best-selling book of the same title, U.K. physician Ben Goldacre has been leading the international charge in quack-busting, unpicking dubious scientific claims made by everyone from politicians to alternative-medicine practitioners and nutritionists. But Dr. Goldacre doesn’t scrutinize only the most obvious quacks among us. As he told an audience of health professionals, policy-makers, and researchers at the Evidence2011 evidence-based medicine conference in London, “We’re on a quack continuum and our work here today is unpicking the details of evidence to make sure we stay at the saintly end of that continuum rather than the dodgy one.”

As of this fall, Dr. Goldacre was on a break from the bedside to work as a research fellow on clinical trials and publication bias at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. (He’s also the Science-ish patron saint.) Julia Belluz sat down with him in London to learn about how other doctors can undertake similar quack-busting work, about his forthcoming book on the pharmaceutical industry, and why understanding the mechanics of bad science is the best way to arrive at good science.

Q: In a presentation here, you said we can put all evidence on a “quack continuum.” Can you explain what that is? Continue…

Incest Plots Replace Hoarder Plots

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM - 0 Comments

Every little while – maybe even every month – there’s some plot point that multiple shows bring up at the same time. You remember the Hoarders craze, which may not even be over yet. Recently there were two shows in one week writing vision boards into the story. And TV viewers of an earlier generation were accustomed to seeing Soviet defector stories popping up everywhere at once. And now, as Dave Itzikoff points out, the big plot point that everyone wants to share is… incest. Two different shows on HBO have recently done stories about incest, and Game of Thrones already incorporated it. And not only wasn’t all this co-ordinated, the head of HBO wasn’t aware of the overlap until it was pointed out to him. Also, one of HBO’s busiest directors, Tim Van Patten, worked on both Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, and according to this interview with Boardwalk creator Terence Winter, the overlap didn’t occur to Van Patten until the relevant Boardwalk episode had already aired. Incest is to HBO as hoarding is to the broadcast networks, something that seems to be on everyone’s mind.

There are several reasons why incest is a perfect HBO subject. It’s a taboo subject, and taboo subjects are what HBO producers are always on the lookout for. (Broadcast shows sometimes flirt with the issue but stop short of actually making anything illegal happen; Profit, often considered a broadcast ancestor of the HBO style, had the title character kiss a woman passionately and call her “Mom,” but she was his stepmother, making it immoral and icky but not biologically incestuous.) More than that, it’s a taboo subject that carries with it classical, highbrow allusions – to Oedipus, to Siegmund and Sieglinde – and allusions to Chinatown, one of the classic ’70s New Hollywood movies whose style has done so much to shape the HBO style. There is nothing more appropriate for an HBO show than a subject that a) Advertisers would probably not want to pay for and b) Has a certain grandeur and scope automatically associated with it.

Plus, as the bar gets raised for sociopathic or problematic behaviour on TV, an incest story is one of the few things remaining that can be instantly shocking to the TV audience. You could, at one time, shock the audience by showing that a character was cheating on his wife, because that just didn’t happen on TV. You can still do that on broadcast TV, actually (adultery is still rare enough in commercial TV that The Job could surprise us by having Denis Leary in an adulterous relationship). But on cable, you have to go bigger.

Speaking of Boardwalk Empire, the interview with Terence Winter is worth reading. The show made a big leap forward in quality this season – not perfect (and the overall points it’s making with its central character, it sometimes seems uneasily in Breaking Bad territory) but with more entertaining scripts to go with the handsome look of the production, and with writing that plays more to what Steve Buscemi does well.

The path to Stornoway

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

Alice Funke assesses the NDP leadership campaign so far and where it might go from here.

Suppose Mulcair dominates in Quebec, and shows well in various pockets across the country. Combined with Cullen, Ashton, and perhaps even Singh, that would be a reasonable path for him to win on.

Suppose Topp maintains strength in BC, and benefits from sign-ups and a base of support amongst the private sector unions, from artists, and from his contacts in greater Montreal. That’s a base of support that would be well complemented by either Nash’s public sector union and activist base or Dewar’s regional bases, though many supporters of those other two candidates made their choices after mentally ruling out the supposed top two. If the positions were reversed, on the other hand, Topp could play a decisive role in choosing the final winner as between the two of them. Dewar and Nash could also team up, but would likely need significant support from BC (either themselves or through for example Singh or Cullen) to assemble a winning tally.