I’m a fan of the AMC series Mad Men, which premiered its third season last night. The show has always occupied an awkward cultural space, both fetishizing and pathologizing its subjects: meticulously styled and artfully shot, it depicts a glossy, nostalgic vision of the early 1960s in America, but continually undermines that nostalgia, exposing the […] More »

The Obunga Youth Group sits on the edge of the biggest slums in Kisumu, the main city in the Nyanza Province of Western Kenya, and the epicentre of post-election violence. This week they held a forum and how to move beyond that horrific episode. With 12,000 people living on less than $1 a day, the […] More »

12,000 people showed up at the Telus Convention Centre in Calgary on Sunday night to see a concert by Punjabi singer Gurdas Maan. According to the Calgary Herald, about 10 of those concertgoers were wearing Kirpans, the ceremonial dagger worn by some observant Sikhs. When security guards at the venue refused those people entry, citing […] More »

When I first saw the original two-minute teaser trailer, above, for District 9, the new science-fiction movie coming out in August, it was a few months ago and the huge, out-of-control advertising campaign promoting it hadn’t yet blanketed every bus-stop and billboard in the country. Though the subsequent advertising has dulled my interest a bit, […] More »

For at-risk youths, Pathways to Education may be a one-way ticket out of poverty. The program can be described as an “early intervention” initiative: it identifies demographically disadvantaged students and, from grade 9 onwards, guides them towards high school completion and post-secondary education through a combination of tutoring, mentoring, and scholarships. Unlike tuition freezes or […] More »

Ever the  moral hinterland, the U.S. state of Texas has recently been in the news for an exceptionally despicable practice: charging victims of sexual violence up-front payments for their own rape kits, which pack a financial wallop of up to $1800. No one has conducted an official poll on the matter, but I’m fairly confident […] More »

Margaret Wente has now covered race and its discontents in two consecutive issues of The Globe and Mail. Yesterday in her opinion piece, “Testing, testing, bigot 1-2-3”, she described an outwardly, and unabashedly, prejudiced aunt – a woman who would often have a nasty thing to say about the black people she called “coloureds”. This […] More »