Studies say: real friends matter, and the rich pollute
By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 0 Comments
Our semi-regular roundup of findings from the world of academia
British Columbia: Being richer doesn’t always mean eating better. A new study out of the University of British Columbia found those living in Vancouver’s wealthiest neighbourhoods have the least accessibility to healthy, fresh food. As incomes rise, so does the average distance to food stores—which is the opposite of the situation in some U.S. cities, where many low-income areas are considered “food deserts.”
Alberta: Jimmy Kimmel recently pressed his audience to delete people from Facebook and focus on flesh-and-blood friends. The late-night TV host may be on to something. A University of Alberta study found that people with strong, real-world social lives are less stressed and better able to raise their kids, even when mired in financial hardship.
Manitoba: Even though the province has some of the highest obesity rates in the country, a recent University of Manitoba study found that obese people don’t significantly weigh down the provincial health system until they display “the very highest” body mass indexes. Even then, hospital visits and the taking of prescription drugs only increase by about 15 per cent. As the lead author put it, rising obesity is going to be “a bit of a burden, but it’s not going to be an avalanche.”
Ontario: Accused of insatiable greed and unjust political influence, the one per cent is also charged with over-contributing to global warming. A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that the richest one per cent of households are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions three times higher than the national average, and six times higher than the poorest 10 per cent.
Quebec: A researcher at McGill University found a correlation between children’s ability to fib and the harshness with which they’re disciplined at school. When two groups of three- and four-year-olds from the same neighbourhood were compared, those in the more punitive atmosphere showed they could lie more convincingly.
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Late-night is for frat boys only
By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 1:00 AM - 11 Comments
Women are a big part of the audience, so why don’t hosts like Jay Leno hire any as writers?
Jay Leno is back on The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien is gone, and fans are arguing over which version of the show is better. But no matter how often the host changes, one thing never seems to change: Leno currently has no women on his writing staff—when Sarah Palin performed a stand-up routine for him, her jokes were written by men—and neither did O’Brien during his Tonight Show tenure. In late-night comedy, shows can go years without a woman in the writers’ room, and things have gotten worse in recent years: David Letterman’s first head writer was a woman (Merrill Markoe), but he didn’t have any female writers last year. Markoe told Maclean’s that when she started in the business, “everyone made fun of ‘tokenism.’ Every show had its token one to two women.” In today’s late-night world, she’s starting to “look back at tokenism fondly as a time of enlightenment.”
Why don’t late-night shows hire women to write for them? The simplest reason is that most of the writers who apply for the job are men: “When I started the show with Dave in the early ’80s, very few women submitted work,” Markoe says. But even today, when there are more female stand-up comics and other women who Markoe describes as “very familiar with the general sensibility” of late-night comedy, things haven’t been any better. “Women are equal watchers of those shows,” fumes Melissa Silverstein, blogger and founder of womenandhollywood.com, “yet are somehow not thought of as capable of contributing behind the scenes.”
If hosts do hire a woman, it’s often because they knew her already. Craig Ferguson, who hosts The Late Late Show, has one female staff writer: his sister Lynn, a respected comedian in her own right. Markoe was romantically involved with Letterman at one point, and when Jimmy Kimmel broke up with Sarah Silverman, tabloids reported that he was dating his writer Molly McNearney. Without a prior relationship, it can take a long time for a woman to win the trust of the people who do the hiring; Jill Goodwin, who got a job last month as Letterman’s first female writer in years, was an assistant on the show for almost a decade. “People hire people they’re comfortable with,” says Silverstein, and in practice, it seems like hosts aren’t comfortable with women they haven’t met repeatedly.
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Did you hear the one about Obama?
By John Intini - Monday, June 22, 2009 at 4:10 PM - 96 Comments
No? That’s because comics are giving the new Prez an easy ride.
Soon after Barack Obama’s victory last November, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel stopped by Legends, a barbershop in L.A. He was there for a trim but also to test out, “on behalf of the comedy community,” what type of jokes about the new President the almost all-black staff and clientele considered offensive. Cracks about Obama being a bad dancer are fine, they said. So are jabs at his big ears. But, Kimmel was told, Mrs. O’s “butt” is off-limits.The skit was a joke (a pretty good one, actually), but it illustrated a real concern among some comedians and late-night scribes heading into the Obama era. Sure, comics would be able to count on Vice-President Joe Biden to regularly stuff his foot in his mouth, but Obama, unlike most of the commanders-in-chief who preceded him, wasn’t a walking punchline. Most of the late-night hosts have publicly complained about how little the President gives them to work with. Comedian Chris Rock compared Obama to the untouchable Brad Pitt. “Ooh, you’re young and virile and you’ve got a beautiful wife and kids,” Rock told CNN. “You know, what do you say?”
