On the ground in central London

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 15 Comments

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

You know you’re in England when locals gather at the scene of a prospective riot armed only with cups of tea. On Camden High Street in central London—just across from the dank, urine-scented waters of the once-bustling Regent’s Canal—residents gathered Tuesday evening on the rooftops of boarded-up buildings to await pandemonium. They brought cameras and refreshments.

The night before, the neighbourhood was visited by hundreds of rioters, who wrestled with police from nightfall to early morning. The clash was part of a wave of violence that started Saturday in rough-and-tumble Tottenham, then spread, immobilizing large swaths of North London. Quivering (only slightly) in my bed, in a flat above a dollar store on gritty Camden Road, I listened to sirens, the patter of running and some especially foul-mouthed hollering.

A day later, Masud stood guard in front of his Camden Road convenience store. After Monday night, he was feeling nervous and planned to close early. His young employees were stationed up and down the street, ready to report the first sign of trouble. “I’ll close the minute I see something,” Masud said. As we talked, three Northumbria Police vans barrelled down the road. Evidently, the city had called for national backup.

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The hollowed halls

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 4 Comments

Eddie Keogh/Reuters

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh famously depicted Oxford in his classic novel Brideshead Revisited as a place where young people spend their days “twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sightseeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches.” Six-and-a-half decades later, things in the whimsical college town are far less civilized. Oxford University students spent much of the fall term staging angry protests, gathering in town by the hundreds to demonstrate against the government. Meanwhile, at its historic rival Cambridge, a 2½-hour train ride away, students are equally fired up. After a number of boisterous marches in November, about 1,000 students staged an 11-day occupation of a university building. At issue is Britain’s massive new austerity package, which includes an 80 per cent cut to higher education teaching grants by 2012, and a potential tripling of tuition fees. The protests were “a wake-up call,” says Tom, a Cambridge Ph.D. student and one of the occupation organizers, who spoke with Maclean’s on the condition of anonymity. “The things the government are calling for seem extreme,” he says. “And extremely dangerous to education.”

Protests have taken place across Britain. But students at Oxford and Cambridge are motivated by a more pressing fear: that the new cuts will end the centuries-old reign of the institutions collectively called Oxbridge. Some are afraid the famed Oxbridge “tutorial system” is in jeopardy. Since their conception, Oxford and Cambridge have dismissed the traditional lecture system. Instead, undergrads are taught largely through one-on-one “tutorials” with professors. In between the weekly or fortnightly meetings, students work through massive reading lists, and write papers to later discuss with their tutors. “It makes the best use of bright students,” says David Palfreyman, an Oxford tutor and editor of The Oxford Tutorial. Students at the two schools work harder—10 to 15 hours a week more than average students, he says—“because [they] can’t escape in the tutorial system.” And it teaches them to think more creatively; many papers aren’t formally assessed, so students “can be a bit adventurous.”

It certainly attracts some keeners. David Barclay, an Oxford undergrad and president of the student union, says the tutorial system was one of the things that drew him to Oxford from Scotland, where he grew up. “It’s the best way of teaching,” he says. “One-on-one interaction with the best minds in the world.” At a coffee shop near the history department, Barclay recounts some particularly memorable classes, including one on 20th-century political history taught by a sitting member of Parliament. “Tutorials can be pretty scary,” he grinned. “But I love them.”

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Maman Mia comes to Paris

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

Dominique Charriau/WireImage/Getty Images

Move over, Sartre! Au revoir, Camus! Eleven years after it debuted in London, Mamma Mia! has finally arrived on the Parisian stage. French theatregoers, once less than shy about their distaste for “Anglo-Saxon” productions, are flocking in droves. More than 125,000 advance tickets were sold before the show opened last month. Of course, the lyrics have been translated—and not always seamlessly. “Mamma Mia, here I go again,” now reads “Mamma Mia, c’est la même rengaine” (“Mamma Mia, it’s the same old tune”). The confident claim to “Knowing me, knowing you” has been replaced by the more introspective “Qui je suis, qui sommes nous?” (“Who am I, who are we?”).

Though the changes were approved by ABBA co-founder Björn Ulvaeus, Gilles Médioni, musical critic for L’Express, is unconvinced. “[The audience] doesn’t know these versions,” he bemoans. “It can’t sing along, like in a concert!” Words aside, Paris’s appetite for the pop classic may signal a larger shift. Jerome Pradon, who stars as Sam in this latest production, says that Paris has finally embraced the kitsch and sparkle of musical theatre and is learning from “Anglo-American savoir faire.”

The 'Superjuez' under fire

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

JACQUES BRINON/AP

He’s inspired tens of thousands of Spaniards to protest on his behalf—and support his efforts to uncover the crimes of Spain’s Fascist past. In 2008, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón opened the historical floodgates, announcing an official investigation into 114,000 disappearances during Spain’s bloody 1936-1939 civil war, and the subsequent years of Gen. Francisco Franco’s rule. And he did more than strike against the unofficial pacto del olvido, or pact of silence, that has existed since the dictatorship ended in 1975. He charged Franco and his associates with crimes against humanity, for the first time, and vowed to exhume Franco-era mass graves.

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What the bleep?

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 11 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

Dr. Dante Morra likes to say that “in the 1990s, the only people who used pagers were gangs and doctors.” His punchline: “Now, it’s only doctors. The gangs have moved on.” Danielle Kain, a medical resident in Halifax, recently became one of those doctors. At the start of her residency, she was assigned a basic pager—“a big, clunky, ’90s-style thing . . . not quite as big as a deck of cards.” Now Kain says she gets paged for “anything from ‘this patient is nauseated’ to ‘this patient is complaining of chest pain.’ ” Either way, she drops what she is doing and runs to the nearest phone.

There are few professions where the sound of a beeper still inspires panic. A decade ago, Motorola, the industry king, announced it was bowing out of the pager biz because of lagging profits. Tech writers penned obituaries for the corporate toy. “Death of the Pager?”, mused Forbes in 2001.

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Mexico’s drug cartels: Is Canada next?

By Katie Engelhart - Monday, June 7, 2010 at 11:23 AM - 102 Comments

Shaul Schwarz / Getty Images

When councilman Beto O’Rourke looks out the 10th-floor window of the El Paso, Texas, city hall, he sees a fence: “a big, ugly, Berlin-style fence. It’s disgusting.” The structure separates dusty El Paso from its proximal sister city: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which is, by all accounts, under siege. More than 850 people were killed in the northern Chihuahua city this year, nearly all of them in drug cartel-related violence. “Juárez has become the deadliest city in the world,” O’Rourke insists. “It’s a crazy, f–ked up situation.”

In response, the Obama administration announced last week that it will send 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol along the southwest border—this just weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano agreed to dispatch aerial drones to prowl the Texas skies. Four decades after the U.S. launched its “war on drugs,” battle lines are hardening. But the new initiatives may be a case of too little, too late. While most eyes have been focused on the violence in Mexico—some 23,000 people have died since 2006 as drug cartels vie for control in places such as Juárez and Tijuana along the U.S. border, battling each other and the Mexican authorities who are trying to stamp them out—there has already been a more dire development: the push by cartels into the United States itself.

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Selling soccer

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 10:56 AM - 4 Comments

Nike Write the Future (2010)
Days after being released, this epic 3-minute masterpiece set a viral record for most views of a viral video ad in a single week. The commercial was directed by famed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and stars renowned footballers Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, and Cristiano Ronaldo. If you believe Iñárritu, the film has a profound message behind it: that the legacy of a player, a team, or a country can hinge on a single second of performance.

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The Braille crisis

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

The first fight over Braille took place 181 years ago, not long after 20-year-old Louis Braille unveiled his revolutionary code—the system of raised dots that would soon be the blind child’s equivalent of the printed word in much of the world. Students, on the one hand, were euphoric. Once condemned to illiteracy, they could finally read and write. But the Royal Institute for the Young Blind in Paris, accustomed to making money off crafts produced by its boarders, wasn’t pleased. Hoping to stamp out the student body’s new independence, the institute’s director had all of Braille’s handcrafted books gathered together and burned.

Another kind of battle is on as Braille once again faces extinction—this time as a result of overstretched school budgets and the ever-evolving portable audio book. In the 1950s about half of all blind children learned Braille, says the U.S. National Federation of the Blind. Today, that number has fallen to 10 per cent—and it’s about the same in Canada. For some, like NFB director Mark Riccobono, that means we’re letting blind children grow up as illiterate as Braille’s 19th-century contemporaries. “If only 10 per cent of sighted children were being taught [to read],” he told Maclean’s, “that would be considered a crisis.”

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A 12-year- old’s divorce

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 6 Comments

CP Images

It is said that the Prophet Muhammad’s last and most beloved wife, Aisha, was nine years old when the two wed. Fourteen centuries later, their marriage is held up by many in Saudi Arabia as justification for the continued practice of child marriages. But last week, in a landmark ruling, a Saudi court allowed a 12-year-old girl to divorce her 80-year-old husband: a move that many hope signifies a turning tide inside the Sunni Islamic kingdom.

The girl, from a conservative town in Qassim province, was reportedly married to her father’s cousin last September—in exchange for a dowry of 85,000 riyals ($23,373), which was paid to her father. But the case became a cause célèbre early this year when the girl’s mother asked for the marriage to be annulled, on the grounds that her daughter had been raped. But soon afterwards, the court petition was withdrawn. “I agree to the marriage,” the young girl was quoted by local newspapers as saying. “This is in filial respect to my father and obedience to his wish.”

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From the bottom up

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

By Andrew Tolson

When Valérie Mac-Seing, a young Montreal lawyer, removed the paper cups and plastic utensils from her office kitchen a few years ago, some of the law firm’s older partners branded her a “green terrorist.” But Mac-Seing and her conspirators, the 25 other young lawyers who had answered her call to form a green committee at the Montreal office of Stikeman Elliott LLP, forged on—brushing off some surprisingly vehement resistance. When Mac-Seing put cloth towels in the kitchen, some of her co-workers started using more paper towels in protest. She also faced some backlash for ridding the kitchen of plastic utensils. But now, four years later, there has been a dramatic shift. Today, Stikeman boasts of its status as Canada’s first national law firm to go carbon neutral. Needless to say, the paper cups have seen their last days.

At the start of the green revolution, the focus was on major energy reductions. Executives hired environmental consultants to advise them on how planet-friendly practices could save them—and even make them—cash. But further change will take some different thinking, says Jeremy Osborn, founder of Good Energy, whose company helps organizations engage their workers in sustainable thinking. And it will come from those who know the business best. Employee engagement is “the last frontier of social responsibility,” he insists. You have to “let innovation bubble up.” But it’s not just that good ideas come from below; increasingly, employees are demanding a chance to share them. In a Monster.ca poll of 3,660 workers in 2007, 78 per cent said they would quit their current jobs to work at a company that was “more environmentally friendly.” That sounds a tad high. But the new generation of twentysomethings entering the workforce has grown up tuned in to pro-environment messages—and they’ve bought into them. A number of executives interviewed by Maclean’s mentioned that young recruits are now asking about green policies during job interviews.

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These ain’t yer grandad’s bagpipes

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

TF Eliz/ Chad Sengstock

When it came time for John Walsh—a two-time world bagpipe champion—to pick out his first competition tune, he simply leaned on tradition. Almost half a century ago, the then-13-year-old from Yorkshire settled for a “dyed in the wool” military number: the kind of crusty, no-nonsense ballad sure to tickle the judges’ fancy. Then, clad in regulation kilt, hose and ghillie brogues, he did his best on competition day to play it with nary a bad note. This spring, the 2010 bagpipe competition circuit will kick off; but by the (ear-splitting) sounds of it, things will be different this year.

The House of Edgar Shotts & Dykehead Pipe Band, a 15-time world champion, has been writing its own songs for competition. Finlay Macdonald, instructor at Scotland’s stately National Piping Centre, has drawn crowds with his jazz-funk rendition of Bulgarian Red. “It’s not the old standards that I grew up with,” affirms Walsh, who handcrafts bagpipes in Antigonish, N.S, where he now lives. “Bagpipes are finding their way into all sorts of places they’ve never been before.”

Yes, bagpipes are back, albeit somewhat changed. The revival started in Scotland, where traditional bands began spicing things up—abandoning what one British writer recently described as a culture whose “only index of musical value is absolute fidelity to a pre-existing canon of traditional tunes, memorialized and ossified over the centuries.” Bagpipes have since appeared on some unlikely and far-flung stages. In the past few years, bands like the White Stripes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have used them in performance. Aspiring pipers have wooed audiences on YouTube with a cutting-edge canon of carols, including AC/DC’s Thunderstruck. And once-little-known pipers have drawn international acclaim—like Pittsburgh’s Nick Hudson who, in 2009, was touted as the U.S.’s “only graduating bagpipe major” when he graduated from Carnegie Mellon.

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The return of Hitler

By Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 7:10 AM - 165 Comments

Imagno/Getty Images

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler took his own life with a simultaneous bite into a cyanide pill and gunshot to the temple. The day before, he dictated his will from the dank confines of the Führerbunker, a concrete shelter buried some eight metres below the old Reich Chancellery, as Soviet forces encircled Berlin. What exactly happened next is still fiercely contested, but by most accounts, the bodies of Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, were carried upstairs to the garden by SS devotees, doused in gasoline, and burned to pieces—then buried, then later unearthed, and then buried again in an unknown location, or perhaps just scattered to the wind.

Almost 65 years later to the day, the man and the totalitarian regime he established continue to fascinate us. In just the last few years, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler’s poorly written, 700-page magnum opus, “turgid, verbose, shapeless,” to borrow from Winston Churchill, has earned bestseller status in some unlikely markets: India, Turkey and the Palestinian territories. His paintings are fetching record-setting prices, and trade in anything the Third Reich leader touched, or might have touched, is thriving. In some cases, the fascination is trivial, even absurd, such as the “Nazi chic” clothing that has been popular in Asia: T-shirts with Hitler portraits and swastikas. In others, though, it is more pernicious: the 65 years that have passed since Hitler’s death have not dulled the allure of the Führer, or his ideology, for the now-burgeoning extreme right.

Take the lead-up to last Sunday’s national elections in Hungary, which saw the far-right Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Movement for a Better Hungary) rake in 16.7 per cent of the national vote. In just a few years, Jobbik has grown from almost nothing, winning over a disenchanted electorate with its stark anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric. Party officials have been careful to dismiss any direct links to Nazism; anti-Semitism is masked in attacks on Israeli investors and hatred of the Roma is justified with talk of “gypsy crime.” But members of Jobbik’s paramilitary wing, the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard), have not been so cautious. Neither have its supporters, who gathered by the Danube River last week to lash out at “Jewish pigs” and to unite in a common cry against foreigners on Hungarian soil: “They should leave!” Jobbik’s leaders, now at the helm of the opposition, are ready to take their country forward—away from all that “commotion over the Holocaust.”

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Ottawa has little help in store for stranded Canadian travellers

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 6:49 PM - 23 Comments

A news release from Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT), to which Maclean’s was granted advanced access, suggests Canadians stranded in Europe by the volcanic ash cloud shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for government help. While DFAIT vows it is “working flat-out to assist Canadians in this situation,” so far, the department’s response has been modest.

DFAIT recommends, “that travelers work with their airline or travel agent to discuss alternative travel arrangements.” In addition, it advises Canadians to consult the department’s website to learn more about available consular services. (As of 5 p.m on Tuesday evening, the site warned Canadians to expect furthers delays, and asked they continue to checking back for “regular updates.”)

So far, about 500 Canadians have made contact with embassies and high commissions in Europe to ask for help, and over 240 calls have been fielded by DFAIT’s operations centre in Ottawa. “It’s really not a lot,” a DFAIT official told Maclean’s on Tuesday. “It seems a lot of people are managing this on their own.”

They may have little choice in the matter. DFAIT’s response thus far has been limited. It has “extended consular hours” at its European embassies. It is also “providing local information, facilitating with transfer of funds, assisting with communications, [and] helping to ensure that Canadians have access to medical care or assistance when required.” But there is no sign that an evacuation plan is being considered.

“Does the government have any contingency plan whatsoever to assist these Canadians in difficult times, or are they just supposed to, as it were, fend for themselves?” Liberal MP Dan McTeague wondered during Tuesday’s Question Period. The government response’s, delivered by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, was that “Canadian officials are closely monitoring the ash cloud.”

Some speculated that the Canadian government might be moved to act after it was announced that Britain was using Navy ships to evacuate its stranded soldiers and civilians. European travel has been at a standstill since Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted last Wednesday, spewing clouds of ash and chunks of ice the size of houses—and leaving an estimated 750,000 stranded across Europe.

However Cannon offered little more than condolences on Tuesday. “Clearly we sympathize with all the travelers who have been inconvenienced by this volcanic eruption,” he said. “As you know, it is a natural phenomenon that nobody could have been predicted.”

Wash like a man

By Katie Engelhart - Monday, April 12, 2010 at 12:38 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Liz Sullivan

Gillette made its first razor in 1902—a year after its founder, inventor King Camp Gillette, was awarded a patent for the world’s first disposable blade. More than a century later, Gillette is ramping up for the launch of one of its newest creations: the Fusion ProGlide (with, count ’em, five ultra-thin blades), developed at its innovation centre, where experts assess over 20,000 shaves a year. “We have more Ph.D.s than MIT and most of the Ivy League schools put together working on this product,” boasts Derek Baker, a Gillette spokesperson.

That might sound a tad excessive, until you consider the stakes involved in the now-flourishing men’s grooming industry. Packaged Facts, a U.S. market research firm, valued the industry at US$19.7 billion in 2009, and estimates it will grow to US$28 billion by 2014. Last year, in Canada alone, the men’s care industry pulled in $1.6 billion in total sales, according to the firm Datamonitor. And it’s not just the razor blades and deodorant sticks of yesteryear that are selling. Instead, traditionally female brands like Dove and Nivea are entering the men’s ring, pushing products like just-for-men sensitive skin body bars and thermal scrubs. “It’s a beautiful time to be a man—or at least to market to men,” opines Advertising Age, “as personal care marketers rev up for what looks to be the biggest array of product launches for men in nearly a decade, and maybe ever.”

Once upon a time, personal care goods were gender-neutral—generic, modest-smelling products that were marketed to families. But lately, there’s been what marketers call a “genderization.” And there’s no place where that’s more apparent than the toiletry aisle. It’s toiletries—body wash, hair care and skin care—that is the fastest growing product category for men. “Men are increasingly demanding products that are specifically targeted at them [instead of] borrowing from their spouse,” says a Datamonitor report.

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Don’t fall down the rabbit hole

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 12:10 PM - 8 Comments

Debra Brash/ Victoria Times Colonist

As many as 2,000 rabbits scamper freely on the University of Victoria campus. But students shouldn’t get too attached. After a relocation plan failed last month, UVic is looking at other options to deal with its burgeoning bunny population. And with mating season fast approaching, officials are considering a solution they once hoped to keep off the table: a cull.

Sure they’re cute, but Richard Piskor, UVic’s director of occupational health, safety and environment, says rabbits also bring trouble. “The sheer volume of feces on the fields is remarkable,” he says. “So the potential for [human] infection is there.” Burrowing is another problem. Piskor said a staff member was injured while walking across a field pitted with rabbit holes; he ended up in the hospital with broken teeth. Then there’s the damage to trees, which are being debarked, and to the rabbits themselves. Piskor says an average of three a day are run over by cars.

All this inspired a pilot project to create “rabbit-free zones” on campus. Last December, UVic hired a wildlife contractor to capture and sterilize 150 rabbits, and find the animals new homes in the community. But after 51 rabbits were sterilized, UVic learned that individuals are not permitted by Ministry of Environment regulations to keep feral rabbits. The project was called off.

So on to Plan B. First, Piskor will launch a general awareness campaign about pet abandonment; the majority of UVic’s bunnies, he notes, are not of species native to Canada, which suggests they descended from rabbits bred as house pets. Others have more explicit ideas. “I eat UVic Rabbits” is the name of one Facebook group. “Too many rabbits? Buy more bullets,” suggests a letter writer to the Times Colonist. A tad severe, but Piskor says a variation of the latter option—albeit a humane cull—“remains a possibility.”

A ban on the bluefin tuna fishery?

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Kevin Frayer/ AP

Is tuna the new ivory? Here’s one thing about the bluefin: it’s a migratory species that swims the world, from the Western Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Here’s another: a bluefin tuna, which can weigh hundreds of pounds, often sells for more than $100,000 a pop. It’s no surprise, then, that when you pull 175 countries together to consider the commercial fate of this aquatic jackpot, things get messy.

The mood at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which kicked off last weekend in Doha, Qatar, has indeed been sour. The crux of it all is a proposal, introduced by Monaco, to ban global trade of the Atlantic bluefin tuna—which many environmentalists say is on the fast path to extinction. On one side are the 40 nations that have already agreed to support a ban. On the other is Japan, which claims the bluefin as a culinary staple and economic essential—and which consumes about 75 per cent of the worldwide catch. Japan favours fishing quotas instead of an all-out trade ban. “It is very much up in the air. There’s a lot of jockeying,” says Patrick Van Klaveren, who represents Monaco at CITES.

Most countries are still uncommitted, like the U.S, which will likely back Monaco, and Canada, rumoured to oppose the ban for commercial reasons. But Van Klaveren warns: “Japan’s lobbying is formidable.” Already, he says, Japan has been bullying developing nations, “along the lines of ‘your turn will come.’ ” Japanese officials have dismissed environmental claims and pledged to ignore any ban that comes into effect. In the meantime, tuna flesh has irrevocably been politicized, in much the way that ivory has: so much so that Doha delegates are too busy to think of much else—like the open proposal to allow a major sale of stockpiled ivory goods.

Fashion gets real

By Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 7:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photographs by: Alberto Pellaschiar/AP (Left); Chris Moore/Catwalking/Getty (Middle); Seth Wenig/AP (Right)

When fashion designer Vera Wang was asked last month about her Fall 2010 collection, she was tight-lipped: “Well, my clothes are extremely wearable.” Amidst the high-heeled hustle of New York Fashion Week, the once-verboten w-word had been dropped without a flinch. “Wearable—it’s almost a dirty word in fashion,” designer Stella McCartney said last year. But these past months’ runway shows in Milan, London, New York and Paris drew a slew of formerly forbidden descriptors—words like “comfy,” “normal,” “commercial,” and “accessible.” This syntactic shift underlies a more fundamental financial change in the post-recession fashion world: designers are suddenly having to pay attention to what sells.

Wearable clothing is in. In Milan, Jil Sander’s tailored jackets stood in stark contrast to the mountainous ’80s-inspired shoulder pads of 2008. In New York, Marc Jacobs lowered his hemlines and Derek Lam opted for “honest” fabrics like cotton and merino wool. “Unquestionably, there are designers who are subscribing to a new kind of minimalism,” FashionTelevision’s Jeanne Beker told Maclean’s. Part of that, she says, stems from the “fears about conspicuous consumerism” that typically follow periods of downturn. But it is also a response to a more basic fiscal need—to tone down the artful and the abstract and make clothes that someone might actually buy. “You need to show clothes that are real friends to women,” urged designer Diane von Furstenberg, who heads the Council of Fashion Designers of America, last year.

In 2009, Christian Lacroix’s design house became one of high fashion’s first recession casualties. In May of that year, news that the house had launched insolvency proceedings was met with distress. But the reality was, Lacroix’s fashion house never turned a profit in its 23-year history. Back in the day—when it was assumed that runways were for art, not retail goods—you could get by with that kind of financial naïveté. But an abrupt decline in spending has sent an equally abrupt reminder to designers: that they are salespeople and manufacturers as much as artistes.

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Stop eating meat: the recipes

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 at 11:04 AM - 4 Comments

You read our piece, “Save the Planet: Eat Less Meat.” So now you know: today, a war on meat is underway—a war waged not by doctors or animal rights activists, but by environmentalists who are primarily preoccupied with the health of our planet.

And now you’re looking around. Maybe the idea of eschewing meat for one day each week tickled your fancy. Maybe you want to go further, branching into the realm of the flexitarian. Or, maybe you’re just veggie-curious—still mulling over the ideas behind the moderate meat movements.

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To help you out, Maclean’s has cast far and wide for delicious and nutritious meat-free recipes. Some of these suggestions come from the cooks and nutritionists you read about in our piece. Others are personal favourites. But each of the recipes describes a simple-to-make, protein-rich, main course meal that we think could make converts out of even the most tofuphobic.

BEANS:

When you think vegetarian and beans, you probably think burger. And for good reason! Veggie burgers are cheap and cheerful ways to get full—whether you use lentils, chickpeas, or spicy black beans.

But there’s plenty of other ways to make beans a dinner table staple. One of my favourite legumes is the chickpea. And one of my favourite things to do with chickpeas is turn them into a casserole. This Eggplant, Tomato and Chickpea Casserole comes from Martha Rose Shulman, the New York Times’s fabulous, mostly-vegetarian food writer. With a hint of cinnamon for some Middle Eastern flair, this makes a cozy-warm casserole that, most conveniently, keeps for days in the fridge without spoiling.

My second favourite thing to do with a chickpea? Toss on the curry powder! This Sweet Potato Curry comes from Canadian chef Anna Olsen. As a plus, this one is made with yogurt, for extra protein. (Hint: Microwave the sweet potato cubes for just a few minutes to soften before continuing on with the instructions.)

Not beaned out yet? Get creative. Jamie Oliver uses beans in his mexican wraps. Dawn Jackson Blatner (Remember her? She helped coin the term flexitarian) stuffs molasses beans and greens inside of sweet potatoes. And the folks at Planet Forward have come up with a mean lentil-based sloppy joe.

QUINOA

What!?

I’ll hold your hand on this one. For starters, it’s pronounced key-nwa. And while it looks a lot like a grain, it’s actually a chenopod, like beets and spinach. Quinoa is a staple dish in many regions of South America. (The Incas apparently called in the “mother of all grains.”) Today, it remains popular because, unlike rice and wheat, quinoa is a complete protein. In other words, it contains all the essential amino acids that humans need.

That said, it’s a bit of an acquired taste. So here’s what I recommend if you haven’t had it before: drench it in peanut sauce! It’s a baby step into the quinoa world. And hey, what doesn’t taste good with peanut butter? Here is a simple Peanut Sauce Vegetable Stir Fry with Tofu. When I make this, I forget the tofu entirely.

Once you’re used to it, try this Quinoa, Butternut Squash and Pumpkin Seed Salad. The maple syrup in the sauce gives it a light, sweet taste. And the raisins and pumpkin seeds mixed in give it lots of texture. I even throw feta in when I’ve got some on hand. (Hint: microwave the squash for a few minutes before sautéing.)

Quinoa is also great as a risotto. Try this Quinoa Risotto with Arugula and Parmesan (from, of all places, the Mayo Clinic’s website).

SOY BEANS:

It seems everyone has a love-hate relationships with soybeans. While there are hoards of soy-crazed vegetarians out there, there are also a lot of people who see the soybean as a nutritional anti-Christ. I’ll let you decide for yourself. (Hey, I’m a journalist, not a doctor). In any event, here are some good ones:

Edamame

Plain soy beans (or, edamame) can be used almost everywhere. Here, they are mixed with chickpeas to make a more protein-rich hummus. Here, they are combined with corn and tomatoes to make a satisfying salad:

Tofu

When you process soy beans, you get tofu. (Don’t make that face!)

I know: only the very resilient enjoy the taste of plain tofu. But the rest of us can still take advantage of tofu’s great ability to soak up whatever spices it’s cooked with. Typically, you find tofu in a stir fry. I like this Spinach, Tofu and Sesame Stir-Fry because it’s got lots of green stuff in it and the sesame seeds add a nice crunch. Recently, I stumbled on this Baked Tofu with Tahini recipe, which really shook up everything I thought a new about the stuff.

Tempeh

This is what you get when you ferment soybeans. It sounds frightening, but really—when cooked the right way—tempeh has a rich, nutty taste that many find preferable to tofu.

Once you get used to it, marinated tofu works well in a sandwich. Here’s tempeh pretending to be bacon in a “TLT” with avocado. Here’s tempeh pretending to be beef in a Tempeh Bourgignon. And here’s Tempeh doing more pretending in a Jamaican Jerk Tempeh dish.

GRAINS:

There’s a whole wide world of grains that are here to help keep your meat-free plates interesting. One of my go-to grains has always been barley. This chilled Barley Salad with Tomato and Corn has just enough Parmesan to give it a meaty, savoury flavour. And I love the tahini-herb sauce coating this Bulgur Lentil Pilaf. (Although I must admit that this one is unabashedly ‘healthy’ tasting.) But remember that you don’t have to stick with the tomato and parsley toppings that are recommended; it’s easy to throw any veg on top of a big bowl of saucy grains.

If you’re feeling a bit lazy – this Creole Vegetable Jambalaya from Emeril Lagasse, which features eggplant and yellow squash, is just about the easiest thing to throw together. Just put it all in a big pot and simmer!

NOODLES

You already know how to cook pasta, but you have tried soba noodles? These Japanese noodles are made from buckwheat – which, despite the name, is not related to wheat at all.  Health nuts like it because it has a lot of essential amino acids and is also high in protein. Soba noodles are great in Thai-inspired dishes like this Buckwheat Noodle Salad, made with mango and peanuts. Or, Japanese-inspired dishes, like these spicy soba noodles tossed with soy sauce and shiitake mushrooms.  But they can also be prepared just like traditional pasta. Here, these garlicky soba noodles are covered with Parmesan cheese.

EGGS, NUTS

Sometimes meatless eating is easy. We eat a lot of egg and nuts anyway. So why not stretch them out into a full meal?

Eggs

Martha Stewart has a really fun Family-Style Rolled Omelet with Spinach and Cheddar. (I didn’t even know that Omelets could be rolled this way. But hey, that’s why she’s Martha Stewart.) When low on time, it’s also easy to whip up a simple breakfast burrito around supper time.

Nuts

Making nuts the star of the meal takes a bit more creativity. This Salad of Wild Rice, Charred Sweet Corn, Spiced Pecans, Avocado and Feta—from Paul McCartney’s Meat Free Mondays website—has enough components in it to fill anyone up. And there’s nothing like a whack of peanut butter to make a stew feel substantial. This West African Groundnut Stew is from the Moosewood Restaurant, one of the historic birthplaces of fine vegetarian dining.

Killer Apps that save lives

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Dr. Phillip Yoon loves—nay, needs—his iPhone. Yoon, district chief of emergency medicine for Halifax’s Capital District Health Authority, refers to his phone as his “peripheral brain.” “It’s part of my body now,” he trills. “If I lost it, that would be trouble.” Yoon’s love affair should be a familiar one to his colleagues. The smartphone—and in particular, the iPhone—has left the realm of electronic plaything, and become an almost required medical tool. According to Manhattan Research, a health care consulting firm, the percentage of U.S. physicians using smartphones stands around 64 per cent and is projected to hit 81 per cent by 2012. In Canada, the trend is the same. Smartphone use in hospitals “is almost ubiquitous,” says Dr. Dante Morra of Toronto’s University Health Network.

Today, doctors with a few dollars to spare and a smidgen of electronic know-how can download applications at the iTunes store that can transform their iPhones into drug-dose calculators, fetal monitors, or remote receivers for patient records. Yoon could purchase the Anatomical Diagrams app for 3-D illustrations of the human body. He could use Medical Spanish so he can advise Spanish-speaking patients—or check Medscape to review alternatives to the lab test he wants to order.

Rural docs are especially quick to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. In India, the iPhone is being used to mount a campaign against a retinal disease that afflicts premature babies. The effort takes place mostly at remote outposts, where lab assistants use iPhones to take pictures of preemies’ eyes. They then send the pictures to pediatric eye surgeons in Bangalore for diagnosis. Some press reports refer to India’s “EyePhone.”

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Evolution favours shorter and heavier women—like it or not

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 72 Comments

Photograph by Hans Neleman/ Getty

What might our granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter look like? Shorter and stouter, says a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If current trends continue, its authors predict, then by 2409 descendants of the women in the study will have evolved to be one kilogram heavier and two centimetres shorter than their 2010 foremothers.

For years, some scientists heralded the end of human evolution. The post-industrial homo sapiens, they argued, was free of the kinds of “survival-of-the-fittest” pressures that could drive large-scale genetic change. In 2008, Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, gave a much-hyped lecture entitled “Human Evolution is Over.” “Not so,” says Stephen Stearns, co-author of this latest study, professor of evolutionary biology at Yale University, and founding editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. “The basic take-home is that humans continue to evolve,” Stearns told Maclean’s.

“One [could express] the result as: women are going to get shorter and fatter,” he explains. But he prefers a different bent: “There is natural selection against women being slender.” Stearns’s work shows that plumper, shorter women tend to bear more children—who carry on those same traits. His analysis drew on data from the Framingham Heart Study: a survey, begun in 1948, that collected medical information from 5,209 subjects, and monitored them and their offspring for 60 years.

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The Battle for Okinawa

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Shizuo Kambayashi/ Associated Press

It’s tradition to celebrate 50 years of marriage with gold. But in January, the golden anniversary of the U.S.-Japan military nuptials—the landmark 1960 Treaty of Mutual Co-operation and Security that united the two nations in holy (armed) matrimony—was celebrated not with precious metals or affectionate toasts, but with mounting tension and a growing unease about the future of the U.S.-Japan security alliance.

It’s all come to a head in Okinawa, a southern Japanese prefecture made up of dozens of tiny islands. Ever since the area fell to the Allies in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, the U.S. military has used the islands as a stronghold in the Pacific. Today, about half of the almost 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan are concentrated here, in an area that represents just one per cent of Japan’s land mass. It is also here that the pugnacious new Japanese PM is making his first stand: threatening, with broad Japanese support behind him, to boot the Americans off the island.

Calls for the U.S. to reduce its military footprint in Japan have been building. In 2006, the U.S. answered those calls head-on: signing a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) deal with Tokyo that would relocate some 8,000 troops to Guam by 2014 and move the bustling Futenma air base to a less populated part of Okinawa. For a while, the situation calmed. But last September, Japan held a general election—and the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled the country for 54 of the last 55 years, lost. Now, Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, who ran in part on a platform of distancing Japan from the U.S., is at the helm. And while his wife steals headlines with bizarre claims that her “soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Hatoyama has been working more quietly to erode Japan’s relationship with the U.S.

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Holland’s anti-Islamic crusader

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 23 Comments

Photograph by Empics Entertainment/Keystone

There was never any doubt that Geert Wilders could talk the talk; this most disagreeable Dutchman, head of Holland’s far-right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party (PVV), is famous for mouthing off—mostly against Muslims. (He is famous for equating the Quran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and for claiming that “Islam is the cause of all our problems.”) The question has always been: could he walk the walk? Well, he’s walking. And there’s new concern that he could walk his way to the prime minister’s office.

During the Netherlands’ local elections last week, the PVV made major gains—carrying the city of Almere and placing second in The Hague. In no time, critics and supporters alike were painting those local victories as a sign of what is to come when the country holds national elections in June. Said Wilders, in a victory speech on Wednesday: “Today Almere and The Hague, tomorrow the Netherlands. We are going to take the Netherlands back from the leftist elite that coddles criminals and supports Islamization.”

His plan to “conquer the entire country” is ambitious—but Wilders’s pledges to “ban the Quran,” unleash “urban commandos” on city streets, and uphold “Judeo-Christian values” are selling well in a country torn apart over immigration policy. A new poll projects that, in June, the PVV will nab more seats than any other party.

Marc Chavannes, a Dutch journalist and professor, laments that his country “is certainly not showing its best face.” Elsewhere, the broader repercussions of a win for Wilders are being sized up. Some express their concerns obliquely: a column in the U.K.’s Telegraph wondered if “Geert Wilders [is] the new William of Orange,” the 17th-century Dutch prince who took the British crown—sweeping in, at the invitation of Protestants, to prevent a Catholic dynasty from ruling the land. Others feel no need to mute their disquiet: shortly after Wilders’s municipal victories were announced, Germany’s Die Tageszeitung newspaper featured a front page photo of Geert Wilders smiling broadly—with a taped-on Hitler moustache.

They want to be, under the sea

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by George Ruhe/Associated Press

For as long as the U.S. Navy has had submarines, women have been banned from serving on them. Now, it looks like one of the last great bastions of U.S. military discrimination will fall. Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote a letter to Congress, detailing his intention to phase in women’s submarine service.

Though women have been serving on navy warships since 1993—they make up 15 per cent of navy personnel—the navy’s 71 in-service submarines have always been off limits. Many have defended that gentlemen-only code. Some voiced concern that because of the notoriously close quarters, women would arouse underwater sexual tensions. Others made economic arguments, claiming it would be too expensive to retrofit subs with co-ed facilities. Elaine Donnelly served on a 1992 presidential commission on the issue. She has explained: “The passages are such that it would be impossible to pass without touching.” Donnelly also cited poor air quality aboard subs, which she says could pose a risk to the embryos of pregnant women.

Today, those views are being pushed aside by some loud voices—like that of Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who thinks “women ought to have full career choices for a range of careers in the navy and that includes serving on submarines.” Indeed, the submarine issue has become part of a broader reassessment of women’s combat roles. “I think it’s time,” said Gen. George Casey last month, “that we take a look at what women are actually doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then we look at our policies.”

Assuming that Congress does not object, vessels will soon be modified to include separate women’s quarters. It is expected to be about a year before the first female reports for submarine duty.

Ahoy, matey!

Surfing the Web on the open road

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment

What do you get when you put a network guy and a race-car driver together? You get Internet in the car. So goes the well-worn joke around the San Francisco-based office of Autonet Mobile, the brainchild of Sterling Pratz, a pro race-car driver, and Doug Moeller, a wireless whiz. In 2005, Pratz and Moeller came together with a shared vision—a world in which any person in any vehicle can have access to the Internet. Five years later and they’re well on their way, holding partnerships with Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Volkswagen and GM.

Autonet brings the Web to cars via what it calls its “TRU technology” routers. The routers, which can plug into a cigarette lighter, transform a vehicle into a WiFi hotspot, just like the one you might find at a coffee shop. The company says its system has an advantage over laptop wireless cards because it can automatically shift between broadband towers when signals are weak, so service is never lost. Though only available in the U.S., Autonet hopes to expand into Canada by year’s end.

The market of connection-coveting clients is growing fast. Autonet fields daily calls from busy mothers, school bus manufacturers and ambulance responders. Kids can work on their laptops while riding the bus, and ambulance workers “can transmit things like EKG readouts to cardiologists,” says Christine Williams, a company spokesperson. (Driving and surfing the Web at the same time, however, is most definitely not recommended.)

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