Apple’s China factory conditions need perspective

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Staff members work on the production line at the Foxconn complex in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. (Kin Cheung/AP Photo)

The New York Times tried to stir things up over the weekend with a lengthy investigation into the working conditions at Apple’s manufacturing plants in China. The story detailed all the gruesome details at supplier companies such as Foxconn: unsafe working environments, unfair overtime, overcrowding in dormitories, violations of employments codes and so on.

It’s a damning story, intended to appeal to peoples’ consciences when it comes to the electronics they buy. It is, after all, hard to feel warm and fuzzy about your new iPad when you think of the human cost that went into making it.

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Troubling news on attention-deficit medication for young people

By John Geddes - Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:22 AM - 0 Comments

hitthatswitch/Flickr

Just a few days ago the issue of psychiatric drugs being prescribed to kids having trouble concentrating in class arose in a private conversation I had with friends of high school-aged children. This morning the sorts of troubling questions we talked about were on the front on my morning Ottawa Citizen and an opinion piece prominently featured in the Sunday New York Times.

The Citizen’s story, by health reporter Sharon Kirkey, reported on a Canadian Journal of Psychiatry study that showed a dramatic increase in the prescribing of the latest generation of antipsychotic drugs to kids in Manitoba, a trend the researchers suspect is happening across the country. Most troubling is the finding that doctors are resorting to drugs to treat conditions for which they are not even approved by Health Canada. The scale is disturbing:

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The apparatus

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 7 Comments

The New York Times magazine convenes a panel of contributors, including Michael Ignatieff, to discuss the ramifications of 9/11.

The most obvious consequence of 9/11 to me has been the creation of a new national security state, to rival the one created at the start of the Cold War. It is an archipelago beneath democratic scrutiny, and it has done liberal democracies real damage: rendition, torture, detention without trial, Guantánamo, military tribunals. Its justification is that it has prevented an attack on the homeland. But this is a strange kind of justification: the absence of apocalypse is held to justify a permanent state of emergency, extending indefinitely into the future…

The concern I have about the whole world opened up after 9/11 is this archipelago, not just of drones, but of communication intercepts, Internet monitoring, which preserves our security at the price of … what? We don’t even know. I’m relatively trusting, far from paranoid, but we do have a new institutional problem:  to subject special forces, cybercommand, the boys with the drones, to some form of democratic oversight and control, if we are to stay what we say we are.

Opening weekend: Horrible Bosses, Page One, Conan, Cave

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, July 8, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

(from left) Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day and Jamie Foxx in 'Horrible Bosses'

Horrible Bosses requires some getting used to. After the first few scenes, you come to accept that nothing onscreen will be believable. Not one plot twist, not one joke, not one line of dialogue. You settle into the fact that you’re watching a farce. There are quite a few laughs, some clever bits of dialogue, and some fine acting. But despite the highly credible performances, the jokes all sound written. Sure, they made me laugh, but it was the kind of laughter that got dragged out of me, with some resistance. The movie is less than the sum of its gags. Which is too bad, because I wanted to like it more. The three male leads—Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day—are all good actors you’re happy to spend time with. The ensemble has a Hangover vibe, without the charisma of a Bradley Cooper. All three men are character actors, each playing a different breed of the Likable Loser. They’re the Three Stooges 2.0, a trio of emasculated idiots who spend the movie trying to grow a pair. These three buddies who have all have bosses from hell—a corporate psychopath (Kevin Spacey) who takes sadistic pleasure in treating his top employee like a slave, a coked-out sleazeball (Colin Farrell) who’s driving his father’s firm into the ground, and a foul-mouthed dentist (Jennifer Aniston) who’s sexually harassing her male hygienist. Commiserating, the three drinking buddies conspire to murder their respective tormenters. They use GPS to locate a rough bar where they hope to recruit a hit man. Instead they get a “a murder consultant” played by Jamie Foxx. He suggests they kill each others’ employers, as in Strangers on a Train, and a plot is born. Continue…

Conan and the Grey Lady fight for their lives

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, July 8, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 6 Comments

Filmswelike

“Inside” is a word cherished by the media. It holds the promise of being taken behind the velvet curtain and ushered into a secret world—a celebrity life, a political campaign or a war. Now two compelling backstage documentaries take us inside the media itself: Page One: Inside the New York Times explores the embattled newsroom of America’s most august newspaper, while Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop tracks an angst-ridden comedy tour by a defrocked talk show host. Both are tales of old school underdogs struggling to reinvent themselves in a media landscape where they’ve become an endangered species.

Page One is the more complex and ambitious picture. Director Andrew Rossi spent 14 months shooting in the newsroom of the Grey Lady (whose walls are now lipstick red), “embedded” at the paper’s media desk. The result is a kind of meta-documentary: it tells the story of the Times fighting to survive the social media revolution through the prism of the paper’s own coverage of it. The narrative covers an epic sweep of events, from dire predictions in 2009 that the Times could go bankrupt to its unholy alliance with WikiLeaks and the dawn of the iPad—two game-changing events that promised to render old media obsolete, yet ended up creating rich new opportunities for the newspaper.

A documentary is only as good as its characters, and Page One enlivens its heavy agenda with a diverting ensemble of personalities, led by pugnacious Times media columnist David Carr—a former crack addict whose own survival is as miraculous as that of the paper itself. The film, in fact, originated when director Andrew Rossi interviewed Carr for a documentary he planned to do on Internet entrepreneurs. “The lightbulb went off in my head,” Rossi told Maclean’s. “I said to David, ‘What about doing a movie about you, looking over your shoulder as you report on disruptions in the media landscape?’ He said, ‘You’ll have to speak to my bosses’—assuming that would lead to a big fat no.” But after months of discussions, Bill Keller, then editor of the Times, gave Rossi unprecedented access.

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Hashtag history

By Erica Alini - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 1:41 PM - 5 Comments

Via the New York Times style section, Jack Layton officially takes his place in Twitter history.

Hashtags, words or phrases preceded by the # symbol, have been popularized on Twitter as a way for users to organize and search messages. So, for instance, people tweeting about Representative Anthony D. Weiner might add the hashtag #Weinergate to their messages, and those curious about the latest developments in the scandal could simply search for #Weinergate. Or Justin Bieber fans might use #Bieber to find fellow Beliebers. But already, hashtags have transcended the 140-characters-or-less microblogging platform, and have become a new cultural shorthand, finding their way into chat windows, e-mail and face-to-face conversations.

This year on Super Bowl Sunday, Audi broadcast a new commercial featuring a hashtag, #ProgressIs, that flashed on the screen and urged viewers to complete the “Progress Is” prompt on Twitter for the chance to win a prize. Then, in Canada’s English-language federal election debate in April, Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democratic Party, set the Canadian Twitterverse aflame when he attacked Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s crime policies, calling them “a hashtag fail.”

Newsmakers: June 2-9, 2011

By Nicholas Kohler and Cathy Gulli - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Ken McKay/TalkbackThames/Rex Features/CP

Happy birthday, Mr. President

Turning 80 usually warrants a birthday party. But Cuban President Raúl Castro was hardly celebrated at all. It seems his advanced age is an uncomfortable reminder to many Cubans that their country’s leaders are old—and old-guard. With no young successors in place (the next in line for the job are 79 and 80), Cubans worry that economic reforms now under way will be jeopardized if either Castro or his brother Fidel, 84, take ill. Still, Castro was positively spry on his birthday, asking female reporters: “How do I look, ladies, how do I look at 80? How many old men of 60 are there who aren’t in my shape?”

Mother Fox

Three decades after losing her son Terry to cancer, Betty Fox is fighting to stay alive. The Fox family, in the spotlight ever since Terry’s Marathon of Hope across Canada in 1980, released a statement that the matriarch is “seriously ill,” but stressed she does not have cancer. Though details are scarce, she reportedly spent time at a hospice in Chilliwack, B.C. Her last major public appearance was carrying the Olympic flag during the opening ceremonies in Vancouver last year.

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Stalking the wild fashion of New York

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 6 Comments

First Thought Films

For institutions so wedded to fact, newspapers are rooted in fantasy, in the enduring romance of the obsessed reporter who finds his stories in the street and lives for the chase. And in all of journalism it would be hard to find a nobler paragon of that myth than New York Times veteran Bill Cunningham. He’s the original street fashion photographer, the inspiration for hip imitators like The Sartorialist. For decades, he has been riding a bicycle through Manhattan, capturing fashion in the wild for his weekly column in the paper’s Sunday Styles section, “On the Street.” Snapping pedestrians, often unawares, he tracks fashion trends with a keen eye, crafting what amounts to an ongoing collage of cultural anthropology. At night, he changes out of his eccentric uniform—the blue smock worn by Paris sanitation workers—puts on a suit, and heads out to photograph charity soirees for his social column, “Evening Hours.”

Now 82, and still working round the clock, Cunningham is a legend at the Times. A stubborn holdout in the digital age, he still spools 35-mm film into his camera. He has no phone, no computer, and spent 60 years living in an artist’s apartment in Carnegie Hall with a shared bathroom down the corridor. Notoriously shy, he shuns the limelight. But he has finally allowed the lens to be turned on himself, and the result is an enthralling documentary: Bill Cunningham New York.

Director Richard Press took a decade to make the film, but spent the first eight years just trying to persuade his subject to co-operate. As a freelance graphic designer, he met Cunningham at the Times while designing one of his columns. Press then teamed up with producer Philip Gefter, who spent 15 years as picture editor at the Times, and they proposed a film. “He just laughed,” Press told Maclean’s. “He thought it was the most ridiculous thing imaginable. Bill is profoundly modest. He doesn’t think he’d be of any interest to anybody. Even his work, though he takes it very seriously, he doesn’t see it as significant. He sees himself as a reporter.”

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Canadians first to pay for New York Times' free news

By Jesse Brown - Friday, March 18, 2011 at 1:34 PM - 13 Comments

When the U.S. media rolls out new services on the Internet, they often hit Canada last. Not this time.

The New York Times‘ confusing new paywall went live in Canada yesterday, 11 days before the rest of the world will get it.  It seems we’re to be their guinea pigs.  How cool to finally be ahead of the curve!  If you missed the baffling details of their new subscription scheme, here’s how it breaks down:

• You get 20 free articles a month
• Once you go over, you hit the paywall.  Pay or go home (or, y’know, go to any other online newspaper).
• Payment is $15 for 4 weeks of web and smartphone app access
• or $20 for web plus tablet app access
• or $35 for everything (shouldn’t that be $25?)
• or pay nothing, if you get to the NYT article you want through Google news or through a link on Facebook or Twitter.

Yes, that last part is for real; the Times doesn’t want to lock itself out of the benefits of social media link-sharing, so they’ve purposefully left a side-door open that allows readers to get to any article for free, just so long as they’re referred to it from Google, or from some goof’s Twitter account. (In an unrelated matter, I’d like to announce my new Twitter feed, @ShewShorkShimes.)

So who’s going to pay for this? And why will readers pay now when they ignored the Times‘ last two failed attempts to throw up a paywall?

I hate to dump on the Gray Lady (ew!), and I generally feel that the Times understands the Internet better than most papers. Their interactive features are incredible!  But this just makes no sense.

A free follow from @ShewShorkShimes to the first commenter who can explain to me what the Times is thinking here.

Go home

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 15 Comments

Ian Austen profiles Michael Ignatieff for the New York Times.

Like many of the ancestors in his mother’s family who went abroad, Mr. Ignatieff concluded that he would never be fully a part of life in either of his adopted homes in London and Cambridge, Mass. “I know quite a bit about expatriation,” he said. “You always hit a glass ceiling.”

In Britain, that realization came when he was told that he would not be given a television project because he was Canadian. In the United States, it was more a matter of gradual alienation. Mr. Ignatieff said he found the debates in the last decade about stem cell research, abortion and public health care almost baffling. “What are they arguing about?” he recalled thinking. “I don’t want to overstate this, as I love American politics. But you do come up that it’s not your home.”

Mahmoud Karzai being investigated for racketeering, extortion and tax evasion

By Julia Belluz - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Bogdan Cristel/Reuters

Mahmoud Karzai says he’s trying to build a better Afghanistan. But the U.S. begs to differ, and the older brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is under investigation by a grand jury over allegations that he built his business empire in Afghanistan on racketeering, extortion and tax evasion. Reports also claim that as a dual Afghan-American citizen, Mahmoud Karzai may face charges in the U.S. for allegedly violating federal laws prohibiting bribing officials in other countries.

Karzai is arguably Afghanistan’s most powerful businessman: he has major interests in the country’s only cement factory, its largest private bank, an ambitious real estate development, its only Toyota distributorship and several coal mines. But his success has significant U.S. roots. He was one of many extended Karzai family members who left war-torn Kandahar for the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. A waiter-turned-restaurateur, he ran a handful of restaurants in San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore up until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A new world of opportunity opened up for Karzai following the 2001 U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban, and he moved quickly to stake his claim in Afghanistan’s postwar economy. As George W. Bush’s administration began to dole out aid, Karzai cozied up to conservative Republicans and won $6 million from the United States Agency for International Development to set up a new Afghan Chamber of Commerce. From there, he capitalized on friendships with U.S. officials and international executives to build his empire.

The recent string of charges against Karzai only adds to the murky world of his business dealings. He’s the third-largest shareholder in Kabul Bank, which nearly collapsed in September when off-the-books loans to the Afghan elite came to light. He allegedly bribed the Afghan Ministry of Mines to secure his stake in the cement factory, and angered the Afghan army when he developed a residential real estate project on land the army claims to own. Karzai’s problems could prove to be a liability for his older brother. According to the New York Times, sources close to the president say he finds his brother’s business dealings politically embarrassing.

Mahmoud denies that he owes his success to his brother’s political influence. But he’s one of dozens of Karzai family members who have benefited from taking government jobs, pursuing business endeavours or working as contractors to the U.S. government since Hamid became a dominant political figure in 2001. But according to Mahmoud, Afghanistan needs the Karzai family: “It’s very difficult to get qualified people to work here,” he told the Times. “We can’t build this country unless there are people willing to take the risk.”

Karzai has denied any wrongdoing in the latest allegations against him, and says the U.S. is trying to undermine attempts to build the Afghan state. Karzai maintains his family is working hard to lead Afghanistan in the right economic direction. “The government of Afghanistan needs to provide its people with the means to help rebuild their country, because the government can’t do it alone,” he told Radio Free Europe in 2009. “And that is my struggle.”

Grocery shopping with New York Times food writer Mark Bittman

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments

RELATED: Read ‘Wait, is that Mark Bittman in aisle two?‘ from Maclean’s October 18 issue.

Seven Days: A week in a life of Stephen Harper

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 2 Comments

Adrian Wyld/ CP

A week in the life of Stephen Harper
Within four heady days the Prime Minister had accepted embattled junior minister Helena Guergis’s resignation; welcomed Nickelback singer Chad Kroeger to 24 Sussex Dr.; caught the band’s Ottawa concert with son Ben; then jetted down to Washington for a nuclear summit with Obama. Such is politics—being, to quote Nickelback, a Leader of Men. By week’s end, will the PM be a political Rockstar, or will he have Something unsavoury—a foot, an apology?—in [his] Mouth?

Good news

A new chapter
The online book juggernaut Amazon was granted approval this week to open a distribution centre in Canada. Canadian booksellers decried the move, arguing that allowing the foreign-owned retailer threatens to undercut Canada’s cultural industry. But Amazon says it will invest $20 million in Canada, including $1.5 million on cultural events and awards, and promote more Canadian books internationally. More importantly, the move stands to benefit both Canadian publishers and Canadian consumers with better prices and more options. A little competition is nothing to fear.

Northern tiger
In the Bank of Canada’s latest quarterly business survey there was plenty of cause for optimism. Canadian executives say they plan to hire more workers, boost investment and raise prices to meet growing demand for their goods in the next year. Meanwhile, the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcies reports that bankruptcies fell in January for the fourth straight month, while the country’s trade surplus widened in February to its highest level since the beginning of the recession. This all comes on top of solid GDP growth. No doubt about it—Canada’s roaring recovery is here to stay.

Bottoms up
Workers at a Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen went back to work this week after a five-day strike over company plans to cut back their free beer rations from three bottles a day to one, which must be consumed at lunch in the company cafeteria. Workers agreed to sit down with management and come up with a temporary solution to the dispute. No matter how this brouhaha is resolved, the new drinking policy  may not be such a bad idea. A recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health found that having one or two drinks a day can reduce the risk of heart disease in young adults.

The family guy
What started as a golf tournament—all but consumed by the prodigal return of the adulterous Tiger Woods—ended with the triumph of devoted family man Phil Mickelson, who won his third green jacket at the Masters. While Woods had been away from golf dealing with a sex scandal fallout, Mickelson faced his share of distractions too. Both his wife and mother were diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago, and he dedicated his victory to them and his family. Mickelson’s win provided a welcome narrative shift and a nice break from talk about Tiger, who was back to his old habits on the course, yelling and flipping clubs in anger, even pouting over his fourth place finish. Sometimes, nice guys do finish first.

The Bad news

Alberta grit?
Dave Taylor, the former Alberta Liberal leadership contender, has quit the party to sit as an independent, saying he’s “lost confidence” in his one-time rival David Swann’s “abilities as a leader” and calling the party “invisible” and “irrelevant.” If the Alberta Liberals ever had a chance to grow the party, now would be it: Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Alliance seems poised to cut the Progressive Conservative vote under Ed Stelmach’s moribund premiership, leaving an in for the Grits. Well, don’t count on it. Long encumbered by backbiting, this is yet another instance of bad Alberta Liberal party politics. That’s bad for democracy in a province that, with 40 years of Tory rule, has become a one-party state.

All news fit to bleep
Since the New York Times began broadcasting video of its morning news meeting across the Internet, some of its highest-ranking editors have been seen to utter inaccuracies. On just the feed’s second day, executive editor Bill Keller said that Britain had thrown “the head of Mossad,” Israel’s intelligence service, out of the country “in retribution for the Israelis having assassinated a Hamas militant in Dubai.” But the Brits hadn’t accused Israel of the hit, and the Times hadn’t confirmed whether the diplomat they’d ejected was the Israeli London spy chief. “This is why I went into print rather than TV,” Keller wrote to his paper’s ombudsman, explaining today’s accelerated news delivery: “The deadline is always.”

Simmering down
Protests against Thailand’s coalition government turned violent last weekend, killing 21 and threatening to send the country spiralling into crisis. In Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, 83 people were killed during an anti-government uprising that saw the president flee the capital. The incidents leave dark stains on two countries with histories of political instability. But there are signs the worst may be over. In Thailand, the head of the army ruled out using further force to stop protesters. Kyrgyzstan’s president said he would resign if his safety and his family’s safety could be guaranteed. Cooler heads must prevail.

Fat food
This week, KFC introduced the Double Down sandwich, a savoury creation consisting of two deep-fried chicken fillets rather than a bun, and with bacon, cheese and sauce as filling. All told, it contains an alarming 1,380 mg of salt (more than half the recommended daily allowance). Then again, if you’re the type who’d eat this beast, you probably don’t care too much about your health anyway.

I don’t see any 'vicious' betrayal

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 2 Comments

Last week my editor mused that, in light of the recent death of J.D. Salinger, I might want to write about the “vicious” betrayal of Salinger’s privacy by Joyce Maynard. Maynard was Salinger’s live-in girlfriend for some months in 1972-73 when she was 18 years old and he was 53 (commonly known as an “abusive” relationship unless you are really important like Pierre Trudeau or Salinger, in which case the young woman is the exploiter). That’s how I came to dip into what George Steiner referred to as “the Salinger Industry,” which, incidentally, doesn’t need any stimulus money to keep going, even though he published only one novel and some short stories and then went dead quiet for the last 45 years of his life.

I stuck to a few primary sources: Salinger’s own work, his daughter’s autobiography Dream Catcher, and Maynard’s memoir At Home in the World, which she published in 1998. That’s the book that caused all hell to break loose, because in it she forfeited silence to write about her time with this pathologically private man.

I can’t imagine why anyone was upset with Maynard. I found her account of weirdo life in Cornish, N.H., with Salinger, veggies, and the great search for her simillimum to repair her vaginismus (look them up; I had to) absolutely riveting.

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Sport as metaphor

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 5, 2010 at 4:06 PM - 18 Comments

Stephen Harper talks to Sports Illustrated. Hockey is a fast, aggressive, tough sport and that’s an important part of the Canadian psychology and history. It’s sometimes forgotten because Canadians are thought of as peace-loving and fair-minded and pleasant — which I think we are — but that’s not inconsistent with tough and aggressive and ambitious, which is also part of the national character.

Michael Ignatieff writes for the New York Times. If you’re not trying to demonstrate raw power or announce your arrival on the global stage, however, hosting the Games presents a challenge. We Canadians are immensely proud of our country, but we try to be soft-spoken about it, so we aren’t looking for the Vancouver Games to be a grandiose exercise in self-promotion. Instead, we want to demonstrate that we’re a people the world can count on.

Populism, tea parties, constitutions, climate change

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 6:49 AM - 109 Comments

Does the U.S. face a period of indiscriminate populism in its political life? New York Times columnist David Brooks thinks so:

Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

…The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

When I got to end of the column I said to myself, “Okay, so Brooks thinks the financial crisis has created a general crisis in social authority.” But look closely: Brooks doesn’t actually mention the financial crisis or the recession at all. He provides a prediction without a shred of diagnosis. He doesn’t, technically, get beyond mentioning a “sour mood” in pinpointing the reasons for populist reaction.

I don’t know that his story holds up. Is opposition to abortion stronger in the United States now than it was in, say, 1982? There are a lot of evangelical Tea Partiers, but what appears to make the Tea Partiers different from the old Moral Majority is precisely the lack of shared religious premises. The premise is, “Get off our backs.” The movement is an instinctual, angry resistance to political engineering by centralized, distant authority, whether it’s the engineering of communities, individuals, or small businesses.

To a first approximation it looks libertarian. It’s actually subsidiarist: it’s against big central authority because it is big and central, not because it’s authority. Procedurally, a lot of libertarians are practical subsidiarists on the grounds that this is the best way of broadly guaranteeing liberty. Small local authorities have natural limits to their power (they can’t become totalitarian), they can be shamed by comparison to immediate neighbours, and they are easier to vote against with one’s feet. But subsidiarism should not be confused with libertarianism or classical liberalism. They are, to some degree, orthogonal quantities.

And in some ways they are inherently in tension with one another. In the U.S. context (and in ours), some federal interventions, Roe v. Wade being an obvious example, are designed to protect the individual from her community. The essential comic heart of all American politics, beating loudly in the breasts of every Tea Partier, is that the U.S. Constitution is the big, centralized, dumb, unconditional, non-local authority to end all such authorities—a personal guarantee, to every living soul from sea to sea, of liberal republican government whether he likes it or not. The Constitution is often considered to have the stamp of divinity upon it, and is spoken of that way even by people who may not literally believe such a thing; and every party cites the Constitution (leaning on its spirit or its letter, as the occasion requires) against every other, just as opposition parties in monarchies used to argue that the king needed “rescuing” from his evil advisors.

(Don’t snicker too loudly, by the way: Canada shall end up that way before too long. We have already seen our Charter of Rights dissociated from the modest, limited intentions of its framers, some of whom are still alive, and cited against them. The document is acquiring a nimbus of divinity before our eyes.)

Anyway, what was I talking about? Right, David Brooks. He raises the interesting possibility, though tacitly, that the economic train wreck of 2008-09 may have helped promote or dignify climate-change doubt. Politicians and policymakers, listening carefully to the best advice of a consensus of accredited experts and considering the implications, led us headlong into a bramble of bad mortgages and crazy debt-commoditization instruments over the objections of a few commonsensical skeptics. But don’t worry: when it comes to the climate, those same educated people are really really sure they’re right!

There are all kinds of reasons laymen should beware of making a connection like this, but some certainly are. To the degree that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is a product of “hard science”, that science does not deserve to be compared to macroeconomics, where first principles are still poorly confirmed and subject to wide disagreement. “Hard science” is, in general, the most successful intellectual project in the history of the species. On the other hand, there’s hard and then there’s hard. AGW actually involves a chain of propositions ranging on the “hardness” scale from stainless steel to porridge, it can only be as strong at most as the weakest of those propositions, and any practical policy recommendation concerning AGW inherently involves another layer of goopy softness. There is also the problem that the “hard science” reaches us largely through summaries and reports concocted, and perhaps distorted (consciously or otherwise), by the politicians and policymakers at the front line of the process.

The science-media-politics network (I sound like a Tea Partier calling it that, I guess) deserves trust: it has helped bring us out of a world of hookworm, typhoid, and killer smogs. It also had us eating trans-fatty margarine instead of butter in the name of health for 20 years, waiting in terror for a North American heterosexually-transmitted AIDS epidemic that never turned up, and gulping Vioxx like candy. In other words, what we have is a good old-fashioned Hegelian dialectic: we forget very easily how much “expert” scientific knowledge invisibly enhances every hour of our lives, and yet “experts” working at the margins of established knowledge do sometimes grow overconfident and execute pratfalls. This, I guess, brings us only as far as where Andrew Coyne already started out.

"The American court got it miserably wrong"

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 20 Comments

The New York Times upholds the quaint notion that the protection of law should be extended even to the innocent, in this case a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar.

No one saw Barack in the balloon?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 72 Comments

On the day America went Balloon Boy crazy, I chanced to be on the radio, appearing live coast to coast on The Hugh Hewitt Show. And, as the Balloon Boy was the hot breaking news, Hugh asked me about it. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, “except it’s one of those peculiar and potentially tragic and instantly horrifying combination of circumstances.” If I sound a bit vague, well, that’s the idea. I’d gotten the gist of what was happening a couple of minutes before I went on air, but these days I’m wary: almost any “human interest” story turns out to be interesting for an entirely different set of reasons from the initial ones—the shocking “hate crime” the victim turns out to have perpetrated on himself, etc. So simply out of a sense of self-preservation, when I’m told that a six-year-old boy is sailing through the skies in a balloon, I try to suppress the urge to demand mandatory pilot’s licences for kindergartners or making helium a prohibited substance.

So Hugh moved on to Afghanistan and the economy and other peripheral matters, and a couple of minutes later broke in with the news that the boy had been found safe and well. He wasn’t in the balloon at all. “Thank God,” I said, still wary, “but you know, there are a lot of law enforcement people, there have been a lot of people who have been sitting around at airports waiting to scramble into planes, and at the end of the day, this kid is likely to have cost authorities some significant six-figure sum.” Continue…

Who called Ignatieff our "Sexiest Cerebral Man"?

By John Geddes - Monday, February 2, 2009 at 3:53 PM - 50 Comments

A New York Times profile of Michael Ignatieff, published this past Sunday, declares that “Maclean’s magazine once named him Canada’s ‘Sexiest Cerebral Man.’”

It’s an amusing phrase, and nobody minds being cited in the Times. If only we could confidently claim to having coined it.
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Behold the ridiculousness of this existence

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 10:19 PM - 24 Comments

For some months now, the Prime Minister’s Office has been conducting periodic briefings for reporters—usually bureau chiefs, but generally one representative from each of the major media outlets. John, Paul and I have regularly attended (except when we don’t get the note). The topics discussed typically range from the Prime Minister’s itinerary to upcoming government action to the PMO’s spin on whatever happens to be making news at the moment.

There is only one rule at these briefings: the government official conducting the briefing must not be identified by name.

Everyone in the room agrees to this. And, in the myriad reports that follow, any information gleaned subsequently cited to a “senior government source” or some such.

This is now widely accepted practice. But, er, why? Continue…

Playtime's over

By selley - Monday, November 17, 2008 at 5:52 PM - 0 Comments

The New York Times is axing Play, its really excellent sports quarterly, which I gushed about not long ago—suggesting, in fact, that its fun, smart, beautifully written coverage was a model of where modern sports journalism might want to take itself. Shows how much I know. I’ll let the Times explain its decision (rather poorly, if you ask me):

First published in February 2006, Play won numerous accolades for intelligent, in-depth reporting and vivid photography, and this year it was a finalist for the prestigious prize in general excellence at the National Magazine Awards.

…

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times Company, confirmed the closure.

[Editor] Mr. [Mark] Bryant said that the magazine “was more or less breaking even,” but only because of a special Olympic issue published in August, in which all the ads were bought by the Nielsen Company.

They do know there are more Olympics coming up, right? Like, at fairly regular intervals? Ah, well.

Yeah, what he said

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Sleep much? Montreal’s Wolf Parade climb Mount Zoomer

How did I miss this? Local heroes Wolf Parade, my favourite of the wolf monickered bands, got the New York Times treatment in late June. Boy, did they ever. Wolf Parade “harnesses perky pop drive to existential reflections,” writes the Times’ John Pareles. I’m still not sure that that means exactly, but it’s great to see the band get major ink for their newest album, “At Mount Zoomer”.

Following up on 2005′s “Apologies To The Queen Mary” is a colossal task in itself; to do so with a record like “Zoomer”, which like “Queen Mary” is a gorgeous distillation of synth- and guitar-riddled pop best listened to end to end, is downright freakish.

Or, as the Times puts it, “In Wolf Parade’s music it takes constant, frenetic construction to hold potential catastrophe at bay.”

Right-o. You can further hold all potential catastrophe at bay by buying the damn thing here.

The Rosie DiManno Show is back for another season

By selley - Monday, May 12, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on Afghan corruption, Afghan weddings and US Marines; Scott Taylor on Canadian counter-insurgency training; Rex Murphy on Clinton Inc.; Lysiane Gagnon on immigration; Chantal Hébert on Stephen Harper and Quebec; David Olive on the New York Times.

Welcome to the James Travuniverse
Up is down. Wrong is right. Julie Couillard matters. The Prime Minister must not undertake home improvements, on pain of electoral disaster.

Despite what you may have heard or very reasonably concluded on your own, the Toronto Star‘s James Travers argues that Julie Couillard’s relationship with Maxime Bernier is very important. Why? Buckle up, Canada. It’s because Harper only appoints Cabinet ministers for reasons of optics and strategy, not competence—in Bernier’s case, “to put a pretty face on the unpopular Afghanistan mission while getting under Bloc Québécois skin.” Thus, it doesn’t matter that a past romance with a woman who once dated a Hells Angel is unimportant to the foreign minister’s job; it matters that it compromises the optical and strategic reasons Harper installed Bernier in the first place. Got that? Us neither. Luckily, none of it matters.

If Harper risks political suicide by following the Auditor-General’s advice by ordering repairs on 24 Sussex Drive, Sun Media’s Greg Weston suggests (apparently in earnest) that he move into Rideau Hall and kick the Governor General down the driveway to Rideau Gate. Continue…

Home-away-from-home news

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 2:11 PM - 0 Comments

No wonder Luiza’s been so quiet.