Peter Munk: in conversation

By Kenneth Whyte - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments

Aaron Harris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days may still lie ahead. As the appetite for raw materials skyrockets in China, India and other developing countries, he argues that Canada has a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish itself as the world’s next big financial sector, rivalling the dominance of London and New York.

Q: Let’s talk first about your earliest impressions of Canada as an immigrant boy.

A: That day I arrived, it was a miserable, rainy day in early March ’48. It was like, terra incognita, like going to Mars. I know it sounds moronic.

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Towards lasting power

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 4:33 PM - 53 Comments

The Prime Minister talks to our editor-in-chief.

What I want to do, of course, is really entrench, over time, a Conservative-majority coalition in the country. I probably—the more I’ve thought about it—I should probably stay away from the natural governing party terminology, because I think as soon as a party believes it’s the natural governing party it’s in a great deal of trouble. Since coming to office, we’ve grown steadily. We’ve grown from our base out. We haven’t tried to re-engineer the Conservative movement, we’ve built on it by bringing more people into it. We still have more work to do to be as representative of people as we’d like to be, but all the elements are there in terms of the coalition. I think, obviously, it has to be backed up with an agenda, and the agenda has to be successfully implemented, and the country has to buy into it and be happy with the results. So that’s the big thing we have to do, but I think in the end—given the outcomes of the election—we’re greatly helped not just by our own result but by the relative incoherence of the opposition as an alternative for government.

In conversation: Peter Toohey

By Kate Fillion - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Richard Cannon/Getty Images

Peter Toohey is a professor of classics at the University of Calgary. In Boredom: A Lively History, he argues that boredom is an essential aspect of human experience.

Q: Do you agree with social theorists who say boredom is a symptom of modernity?

A: No. Boredom has a long history, there’s no question of that. There’s a late third-century inscription in the Italian city of Benevento thanking a public official who “rescued the population from endless boredom.” Even earlier, in Pompeii, there’s wall graffiti about boredom. I suspect people have experienced boredom from time immemorial.

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Chester Brown on prostitution, romantic love, and being a john

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 3 Comments

Chester Brown, the Toronto-based graphic novelist best known for his 2003 book, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, will be touring North America in May in support of his latest, Paying For It: a comic-strip memoir about being a john. Painfully candid, the book begins with the collapse of his relationship with long-time girlfriend Sook-Yin Lee, current host of the CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera, then recounts how that split led him to forgo romantic love in favour of paying prostitutes for sex. [SPOILER ALERT] It ends with his discovery of a new kind of monogamy with his “special friend”—a woman he met while she was still a working prostitute and who he continues to pay in exchange for sex.

Q: What do you hope Paying For It accomplishes?

A: Obviously there’s a political undercurrent to the book. I’m trying to make a point. Last fall we had Justice Susan Himel’s ruling basically decriminalizing prostitution. In the wake of that there were all these people saying, ‘Okay, now we have to re-criminalize prostitution and make it illegal for johns to buy sex.’ Stop criminalizing the prostitute, which I agree with, and start criminalizing the john, which of course I don’t agree with. There was Victor Malarek’s book [The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It] a couple of years ago and Benjamin Perrin, who wrote a book [in 2010] called Invisible Chains, with a very similar theme: that johns are evil monsters. I wanted a book from the john’s point of view, since of course, I don’t think of myself as an evil monster and I hope I’m not. So you want a book to explain where you’re coming from, and hopefully people will understand.

Q: One of the things that comes out in one of the appendices in the back of the book is that you hadn’t wanted to call it Paying For It. What would you have preferred?

A: I had a couple of different titles. One I was considering, but not that seriously, was The Sex Life of John Brown. But probably more seriously I was thinking of I Pay For Sex—much more direct or blunt. And for them [his publishers at Drawn & Quarterly], that was too blunt, too direct. Darn, I wish I could remember the title they suggested that I really hated. I think they actually suggested In Defence of Prostitution, which just is so boring.

Q: You suggest in that same passage that it’s a difficult book to market. But in my dealings with Peggy Burns, the associate publisher at Drawn & Quarterly, I would guess that she’s having the opposite problem, which is fighting people off with a stick. Are you surprised by the level of interest in the book?

A: They are concerned about the reaction of bookstores. I guess it’s not so much, “Will journalists be interested in covering the book?” It’s, “Are bookstores going to be willing to carry the book?” The Riel book did very well—there were lots of people willing to buy it as a gift for other people. This is a very different book. It’s much less likely that people will be buying it as a gift. Even just being in a bookstore and asking for it. When we were still considering calling the book, I Pay For Sex, they were saying, “Imagine you’re in a bookstore and you’re having to ask the bookseller for the book, I Pay For Sex.” So, I can see the problems associated with marketing this book.

CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW OF ‘PAYING FOR IT’

Q: But it’s also a bold book. It’s a book that’s fun to cover as a journalist because it’s kind of audacious. You’re left exposed by the book, the way it’s drawn, how graphic it is. How can you open yourself up to this degree?

A: I read an interview with Spalding Gray several years ago where he was questioning—why do people even have secrets? Most of us just take it for granted—we all have secrets. And he was questioning the whole idea of secrecy. And I was like, “Yeah, why do we even have secrets? Why do I care if people know this or that about me?” It is easier to live openly when you’re not married. Not to get too much into the whole “romantic love” thing, but if you’re going to live successfully with another person, there are things you have to keep to yourself. So the guy who lives on his own, I think, is more used to just expressing things openly.

Q: You mention romantic love. The book begins with such a charged tone—when you break up with Sook-Yin Lee—and it propels the rest of the book in many ways. It’s actually quite painful to read.

A: Incidentally, that first scene is entirely black in the book. I tried to draw that scene so many times, I couldn’t get the emotional tone right. I tried just drawing our faces, and that didn’t seem to work. Then I tried drawing our heads shot from the back, and that didn’t seem to work. I went through at least four different drawn versions, redrawing and redrawing that scene. And so finally I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start drawing the next scene.” And the next scene seemed to work right away. And then eventually I was like, “I’m just going to black out that scene. I can’t draw it for whatever reason.”

Q: And the reason I think it propels the rest of the book is, it’s kind of a meditation on romantic love—what it is and what different people want to get out of it. Is that what you wanted to discuss, or is that incidental to the other discussion, about how society should treat prostitution?

A: I think they go together in some way. But I can’t say that I even come to a conclusion about romantic love. In that last chapter, or the last two chapters, I have various people talking about what romantic love is. And then at the end of the book I have myself saying that I do love this woman. But it’s hard for me to even be sure what I mean by that. Obviously I do have deep feelings and I care for her a lot. But how does that relate to what other people mean by the word “love,” because so many people mean so many different things. So, yeah. I guess in the end it is all kind of vague—what does love mean? Personally, I like just living on my own. I would prefer not to be living with anyone, really. Like, as much as I care for my special friend, I don’t want to live with her. The relationship we have works perfectly and I don’t think we’re trying to move it in a conventional relationship direction. It is the way it is. I don’t think she wants to live with me anymore than I want to live with her.

Q: It’s not clear to me from the book whether that relationship goes beyond the physical.

A: Do we share some interests outside the bed? Yes.

Q: Can you talk a bit about how the written appendices at the back of the book came about—where you elaborate on the details of prostitution and why it should be decriminalized? Were they originally part of the conception of the book?
A: I’ve got a notes section at the back of the Riel book, and I’d done this with other works too. I didn’t want to drag down the narrative with too much in the way of theory. Most of the stuff I introduce into the book as “my ideas” was done through dialogue I would have with people. And some things I just thought without actually talking about it with other people. I didn’t want to invent conversations, so it seemed like, instead of inventing conversations, just put those things in the appendices.

Q: Was there any worry that you should acknowledge or anticipate arguments that critics would no doubt marshal against you?

A: Oh definitely. That was a big part of it.

Q: Can you talk a bit about some of the things that didn’t lend themselves to the comic part but that you thought you should deal with?

A: The significant one is probably the issue of human trafficking. None of my friends ever even mentioned the topic, and I didn’t think to talk about it with people. And I didn’t become aware of the subject until 2003, in a CBC story that Shelagh Rogers did on Sounds Like Canada. I might have heard of human trafficking before, but not in relation to prostitution. I never really put together that that might be a problem. So, yeah, putting it in scenes—there wasn’t really a way to do that. But I wanted to address the topic.

Q: In the section of the book when you’re introduced to the protocols of prostitution, which is so interesting, the thing that jumps out is that your experience doesn’t jive with the perceptions many people have of that world—that it’s all about drugs and exploitation. Why the discrepancy between the perception of that world and your experience of it?

A: Well, I was seeing indoor workers as opposed to streetwalkers and from what I hear, drug use is much more prevalent among streetwalkers then it is with girls who are escorting.

Q: In a funny way, is Paying For It a love story in the end?

A: Certainly not a conventional love story. But, yeah, I guess it is. It feels like a love story to me. Even though she has never said the words “I love you.” She has certainly indicated in enough other ways that she does care about me. She wouldn’t think of it as a “romantic” love. I care for her and she cares for me. It is a type of love story.

Q: At this point in your relationship with your “special friend,” is the payment—the transactional part of the relationship—almost like an escape hatch, something that says, ‘this is still fleeting’?

A: I don’t know if it’s an escape hatch, but I think it is something that makes the relationship feel different. In a lot of ways it is like a conventional boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, and even occasionally we argue about stuff. But it never gets into the type of melodramatic arguments that I’ve experienced in my relationships with my girlfriends. Things just don’t get hostile in that way. It feels like a different sort of sexual relationship between a man and a woman. And the only thing I have to attribute that to is the money.

Q: This will no doubt be a controversial book. What do you worry about what could happen—about how others will criticize you? Does it worry you?

A: It only really worries me in what I might call “real life” situations. I’m going to be doing a tour to promote the book, and giving live presentations in front of audiences, and I’m worried about the heckling—if there’s going to be heckling. Because I’ve never experienced it in the past, I have no idea what I would do with hecklers. I guess we’ll see. And maybe it’s not even going to happen.

Justin Bieber says you get raped for a reason, ladies (until he didn't exactly say that)

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:53 AM - 298 Comments

UPDATE (Thursday, 3 p.m. ET). From a bit just published at the AV Club: “Rolling Stone has now come forward to say that, due to an ‘editing error,’ the [Bieber] quote [about rape and abortion] was incomplete, omitting a sentence that could serve to abate the outcry somewhat. Here is Bieber’s full statement on whether abortion is justified in cases of rape, with the revised section in bold: ‘Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.’ Note that it doesn’t exactly change his feelings on the matter—abortion is still definitely not swag—but it does lessen the idea that Bieber thinks rape happens for a reason, which is a pretty big omission on Rolling Stone‘s part, don’t you think?”

•••

From the Dept. of That Interview Went Well:

“I really don’t believe in abortion,” Bieber tells Rolling Stone. “It’s like killing a baby?” (The question mark was put there by the magazine, so I guess we can assume his voice went up at the end like this? Or maybe he was asking for clarification.)

Okay, how about abortion in cases of rape? “Um. Well, I think that’s Continue…

Ian Rankin on his new book 'The Complaints'

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 5:29 PM - 10 Comments

Two years after Ian Rankin retired his curmudgeonly Edinburgh detective John Rebus, the Scottish author is back with a new book, The Complaints, and a new detective, Malcolm Fox, who investigates fellow cops for the Edinburgh police’s complaints department. Rankin recently spoke to Macleans.ca about Rebus’s retirement, getting off the “velvet-lined treadmill” and the best in new Scottish music.

Q: What was the reaction when The Complaints was released?
A: I was waiting for the backlash, especially in the U.K. I was waiting for the critics to go, “Well, it’s OK but it ain’t Rebus” and the readers to say, “We want Rebus, we don’t want this guy.” Neither has happened yet. I did a U.K. tour in September and at almost every event there was someone from a complaints department from a British police force saying, “I’ve read it, I don’t know how you know about all this stuff but you’re spot on.” No one’s noticed any big howlers.

Q: What was the most common question from readers or reporters?
A: “Is Rebus coming back? Have we seen the last of him?” I don’t know. I felt his presence throughout this book. He’s retired but he’s not stopped working.

Q: How did Malcolm Fox come into existence?
A: I read a newspaper article about an internal affairs inquiry and I thought, “I’ve never met someone from the complaints department. I wonder what kind of cops they are.” So I asked a police contact in Edinburgh if he could put me in touch with anybody. As they spoke about the job and the kind of cop you have to be or become, I could actually visualize Malcolm Fox as a very different type of cop from Rebus with a different philosophy. He has to be a team player—above reproach. He can’t do the short cuts; he’s got to be slow and methodical. He’s the antithesis of Rebus.

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How e-mail rots your brain

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 2:02 PM - 36 Comments

John Freeman, 34, is the American editor of the eminent British literary magazine Granta, a job he took on in May after 10 years as a book critic, regularly writing for 200 English-language publications around the world, including Canada (which he calls “the only matriarchal literary society”). In other words: a literati’s literati. Yet his own first book is not a novel, but The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox (Simon and Schuster), an impressive piece of literary nonfiction that blends history, sober judgment and controlled rage. Freeman spoke with Brian Bethune about what e-mail is doing to our work productivity, spare time, attention spans, eyesight, brain function and relationships:

Q: The e-mail stats are truly mind-boggling: 650 million messages every 10 minutes, 37 trillion a year in total, and each one of us office drudges getting 200 or more a day. It’s endless.
A: It’s out of control. I was getting two or three hundred a day in my job as president of the National Book Critics Circle. I thought this is just me because I’m in touch with a thousand book critics, but when I saw that figure I thought this isn’t just my problem. And if everyone has this problem it’s going to make us all incredibly tetchy and angry and more prone to talk rather than listen.

Q: And to misunderstand each other?
A: Yeah. That’s the big problem. Continue…

Businessman Peter Pocklington on the politics of envy, legal battles, and why trading Gretzky was the right thing to do

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Pocklington has had enough ups and downs for several lives. The former Edmonton Oilers owner was once among the country’s most successful businessmen, and ran against Brian Mulroney for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives. But to most Canadians he’ll always be the guy who dealt away Wayne Gretzky. A new book, I’d Trade Him Again: On Gretzky, Politics, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Deal (H.B. Fenn), offers Pocklington’s take on his controversial career. Today, the 67-year-old awaits trial in California on charges of concealing assets in his US$19.6-million 2008 bankruptcy—sparked by a series of lawsuits over failed health-product and golf ventures.

Q: This book’s stated purpose is to show the other side of Peter Pocklington. Do you think you’ve been unfairly portrayed over the years?

A: [Laughs.] Well, I guess if I had read the press that most had written about me, I would have hated me too.

Q: What do you think is behind that?

A: I have no idea, nor do I care. I suppose most of it is associated with the politics of envy in North America. Continue…

The Interview: Richard Dawkins

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 153 Comments

British author Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion sold over one million copies and touched off an international debate about the existence of a higher power. Critics denounced him as “Christainophobic” and a “secularist bigot.” In Turkey, the book was banned as “an attack on holy values,” and its publisher was put on trial. Now the evolutionary biologist—the world’s most prominent atheist—has set his sights on creationists and advocates of “intelligent design.” His new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, was just released.

Q: Your new book is subtitled The Evidence for Evolution. Why do you think society needs a primer 150 years after Charles Darwin first laid it out in The Origin of Species?

A: It is a very, very important idea. It is the explanation for all of life—a stunningly simple, yet powerful explanation. If you think about it, before Darwin, we hadn’t the foggiest idea of how we came into being. Now we do. It’s still such an exciting idea that it is well worth everybody understanding it.

Q: You compare creationists to Holocaust deniers—history deniers is the term you’ve coined. Isn’t that a little over the top?

A: No. They are both very similar—both are denying what is a perfectly manifest fact. In the case of Holocaust deniers it’s more recent history, but in both cases the evidence— in favour of the Holocaust and evolution—is simply overwhelming. That doesn’t mean they are morally or politically equivalent. But they are equivalent in denying history. Continue…

Maclean’s Interview: Theodore Roszak

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

In 1969, historian Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture coined the term that defined a generation. His new book, The Making of an Elder Culture, explores the potential social sea change resulting from a geronto­cracy in which most of Western society is over the age of 50.

Q: You make the provocative claim that baby boomers have a second chance to reshape history due to their demographic clout, even that their place in history could hinge more on their second act as “elders” than their first act as radicals.

A: Yes, the people leading the way toward a gerontocracy are the same people who were raising hell on the college campuses of the ’60s. This is a very special population because they had a special historical experience that acquainted them with the willingness to make big changes. These people are going to be older for a longer period of time than they were ever young and have much more political and financial clout than younger people.

Q: How will this shift in social consciousness begin to shake out?

A: Well, once again the demographic weight is going to force people to think differently, even if they start off with a very negative attitude—which is generally the attitude we have toward aging. But you’re going to have to put up with the fact that we now have a lot of 70-year-olds and 80-year-olds who are not like your grandparents or great-grandparents. They go on working, they’re professionals, they are active. These are not just parasites leaning on the rest of the society. I talk about experience being of great economic value, but we’ve never given it enough weight in our economic thought. And I speak as a historian—this is an unprecedented state of affairs, and so it’s new to people, they’ve never had to think about the demographics of their society in this way. Continue…

Maclean's Interview: Ruth Reichl

By Kate Fillion - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 1 Comment

Ruth Reichl, former restaurant critic for the New York Times and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine for the past 10 years, was raised in a household where food was frequently inedible. Her mother, already familiar to readers of Reichl’s three bestselling memoirs as a larger-than-life serial food poisoner, had no culinary talent. But, as the author recently discovered, her mom was more influential than she had realized.

Q: Your new book, Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along The Way, evolved from a speech you gave that opened, “My mother was a great example of everything I didn’t want to be.” Was it frightening to say that in front of an audience of women?

A: I wrote the speech in a burst of inspiration, then put it away and didn’t think about it. But when I got up in front of 1,500 people—I was one of the last speakers at this event, everyone else was saying, “I want to thank my wonderful mother”—I looked down at the page and thought, “Oh my God, this is not the sort of speech you are supposed to give.”

When I said, “I wake up every morning grateful that I’m not my mother,” there was this audible gasp. But it was too late to change anything, so I just went on. When I ended there was this stunned silence, but I noticed that Diane von Furstenberg, who was sitting next to me, was crying, and Christiane Amanpour came up and said I’d made her think about her mother. Then later, I started getting emails from tons of people I didn’t know, saying, “That was my mother you were talking about.”

Q: Why do you think that feeling of not wanting to be like your mother resonates with so many women?

A: For people of my generation, we all saw that our mothers had very restricted lives. These women were capable and smart, but they literally had nothing to do and were very unhappy. They were handicapped by the fact that women, in the 1950s, essentially weren’t allowed to work. After World War II, all the women who’d been running the factories and really enjoying what they were doing were told to go home and let the boys have the jobs. So they went off to twiddle their thumbs and be miserable. I’m very grateful that my parents didn’t bring me up thinking that some man was going to take care of me. I always knew I’d have to support myself.

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A tale of two Iraq wars

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 4:43 PM - 1 Comment

Along with Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Robert Gates, Richard Haass is one of only a handful of people to have been at the highest rungs of the U.S. government for both Iraq wars. Haass was a special advisor to George H. W. Bush when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, and served as the director of policy planning in the State Department when the younger Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. In his new book, War of Necessity, War of Choice, Haass argues that, despite their similarities, the two wars are marked by one crucial difference: whereas the first military operation in Iraq was borne of obligation, the second war was elective. Haass left the State Department in 2003 to become the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Q: Is there a moral distinction to be made between wars of necessity and wars of choice?

A: No. Wars of choice can be moral. For example, many people would argue that what the West did in Bosnia and Kosovo was truly moral even though it was a war of choice. And I expect there would be those who would go so far as to say that when the world chose not to intervene in Rwanda was immoral.

Wars of choice are just that—they’re choices. Usually, the interests involved are less than vital and there are other policy options. To me, though, it’s not a question of morality. When I call something a “war of choice,” it’s simply a description. It’s not a value judgment.

Q: Along with Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda, you’ve also said Vietnam was a war of choice. Do modern wars tend to be wars of choice?

A: There’s nothing particularly modern about discretionary wars. I haven’t done a thorough study, but I would bet that most wars in history are wars of choice.

But after 9/11, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was a war of necessity. If North Korea attacked South Korea tomorrow, that would obviously be a war of necessity.

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Maclean's Interview: Br. Gaston Deschamps

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

In February, Quebec’s Trappist monks left their monastery in Oka, Que., just outside of Montreal, where they had been based for 127 years. Long associated with the Oka cheese they once produced, the order made the move to a comparatively smaller monastery about 120 km northeast of the city, largely because modern life, and its associated noise, had encroached on them. Gaston Deschamps, 86, joined the order in 1941, and has left the monastery only a few times in his life, for medical treatment. The most recent move, he knows, will be his last.

Q: Your headphones are to help you hear?

A: Yes. I’m sorry about the headphones. I’m as deaf as a jug.

Q: Not to worry. Why did you become a monk?

A: My three older brothers were monks as well. I was hit early by my calling, you might say. I was nine when I first went to the monastery. I wanted so badly to be part of it, to the point of dressing like my brother and gluing potato peels to my head to imitate the monks’ curls. They had to turn me away at the door. I had it in the blood.

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Maclean's Interview: Neil Strauss

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 3 Comments

Neil Strauss is a former music critic for the New York Times and bestselling author. In his new book, Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, Strauss describes how he grew up believing that America was the greatest country on earth until he lost faith in the Bush government and began to fear another terrorist attack. He set out to learn how to shoot a gun and hunt for food. Along the way, he met wacko survivalists and a New York billionaire, who urged him to get out of the U.S. Strauss went so far as to acquire a second passport.

Q: Your book is, in a strange way, like a self-help book, “How to Survive the Apocalypse.” About halfway through, you make the statement, “It’s a strange time to be an American,” and I thought that’s it—that’s the whole nut of the book, right?

A: Yes, that’s a great question because that’s what the entire book came out of, people being born in the ’70s and ’80s, who grew up with a silver spoon in their mouths. America was the lone superpower. All the problems of the world seemed to happen to other people. It seemed like the future was this bright, shiny, optimistic place where anything was possible.

Then, starting with 9/11, all of a sudden everything we thought couldn’t happen to us, happened to us. We had an act of war occur on American soil which hadn’t happened since Pearl Harbor. We had this constitution, which is kind of a holy relic, which makes us the best, freest country in the world, all of a sudden open to interpretation, and these things could change in the name of national security.

Q: And then there was hurricane Katrina.

A: Right. I think that was the real turning point. Katrina wasn’t like 9/11. They knew a disaster was going to strike and even then with advance notice they still couldn’t help anyone. You never think you’re going to see bodies floating in the street, ignored in America. That’s when I realized . . .

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Why teens are "crazy" and the need for a short leash

By Kate Fillion - Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 1:29 AM - 14 Comments

Q: What’s going on with teens that makes them act, as you put it in your new book, “crazy”?

A: Neurologically, their brains are going through an explosion of growth, getting ready for the great leap into adulthood. But there’s neurologic fallout from the renovation process: emotional processing speed gets slowed down, they’re less able to read adult emotional cues. Second, the world is telling them to be crazy, do things that are self-destructive. Cultural prompts, in the form of song lyrics or scenes in movies or video clips, are telling them drugs, sex and certain forms of violence are cool, adult and harmless. Thanks to the efficiency of electronics, we pound them with these suggestions to a degree we’ve never pounded on another generation of teens. A third issue is that, as parents, we don’t really respond very well. Responding to these contemporary problems with rules from past generations just doesn’t work.

Q: What kinds of parental responses are disastrous?

A: The biggie is to use fear. A lot of us were raised by parents who’d hit, yell, threaten and punish. That’s a lot of our training, but it doesn’t work today. We also can’t police a kid’s world the way our parents could. The mission statement used to be, “How do you control the kid?” We can’t afford that anymore, because of the changes in the culture. Now it’s, “How do I teach my kid to control herself?” It means talking to your kid with respect, asking good questions, helping her form a set of values, because you’re not going to be there when she needs those values to negotiate her culture.

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Maclean’s Interview: Michael Ignatieff

By Kenneth Whyte - Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 47 Comments

Q: You had a long and successful career as an academic and a public intellectual, you’ve written many books, and you’ve won awards for them. What part of that life do you remember most fondly?

A: Being in the classroom. I come from a long line of teachers: my grandfather was a teacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher—it must be in the genes.

Q: What’s good about teaching?

A: Well, some of it’s being a ham, some of it’s the show. Some of it’s being put under pressure by extremely able, smart young people at Harvard, who just don’t let you take the easy road, and you were testing yourself against people from 85 countries, including lots of Canadians, who were terrific.

Q: You were out of Canada a long time. At some point, in the ’90s, I think, you were invited back, and you said that “you can’t go home again,” and you said another time that the only thing you missed about Canada was Algonquin Park. You seemed distant from the country, emotionally and intellectually. So what changed?

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Maclean's Interview: Stephen Harper

By Ken Whyte - Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 146 Comments

Q: Over the last couple of months, through the formation of the coalition and proroguing of Parliament, what was the experience like for you? What did you learn from all of that?

A: Well, you know, in a sense it hasn’t changed the government’s plans. The plan was to pursue a budget as early as we could, early in January, and that’s what we’re going to do. I can say it’s been an interesting time—obviously there’s been a change in the opposition leadership as a consequence and so, you know, my great hope is it will lead us to some greater knowledge of what it is the opposition’s actually seeking in terms of public policy. We obviously have significant economic challenges in the country, we’re consulting widely on what should be in the budget, and what may be interesting out of all this is if we actually get some idea from the opposition what their economic priorities are.

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Maclean’s Interview: Malcolm Gladwell

By Kate Fillion - Friday, November 21, 2008 at 3:40 PM - 6 Comments

Q: Your main argument in your new book, Outliers, is that there’s no such thing as a self-made man; super-achievers are successful because of their circumstances, their families and their appetite for hard work. Isn’t that what most people believe anyway, that success is learned and earned?

A: We pay lip service to ecological factors, but don’t appreciate just how enormously significant outside forces—the generation we’re born into, or the particular cultural legacies we inherit—are in determining success. If we’re so convinced of the importance of these kinds of variables, then why do people jump up and down every time there’s an attempt to even the playing field? Why does affirmative action remain incredibly controversial? Continue…