Brave, chilling journalism from Claire Hoffman in the LA Times Magazine last weekend. She spends a day with Joe Francis, founder of the third-wave feminism challenging Girls Gone Wild video porn empire. The eternal fratboy, Francis’ ability to talk barely 18 year old girls into lifting their shirts for the camera has made him super-rich […] More »
Hands up everyone who has bought a computer, cellphone, iPod or other electronic device in the past year. Pretty cool gadget you’ve got, isn’t it? Now, what happened to the item it replaced? Some of us probably threw the old device out, but others may find a growing pile of old electronics filling junk drawers, […] More »
From The Guardian online: Don’t look now Images I have seen recently include a close up of a suicide bomber exploding in two, an insurgent being shot through the head by an American sniper, full scale firefights between US patrols and insurgents plus endless images of body parts scattered about in the aftermath of the […] More »
I believe somewhere on this blog recently, our own Andrew Potter mocked my uncoolness re: appreciating the music of Bruce Springsteen. I think he doesn’t like saxophones, or moody, highway-based extended metaphors. I can take the mockery. I’ve always known Potter is cooler than me. Except now he has a new blog over at Maclean’s. […] More »
A small raise for civil servants may not seem like a big deal, but when you were elected on a promise of a more open and transparent government, quietly posting news of pay hikes for senior government officials on a departmental website seems a little odd. Such was the case this week in Ottawa, and […] More »
Go now and read Andrew Potter’s latest column in Maclean’s. In it, he outlines some of the basic tenets of the Euston Manifesto, which he calls “a statement of broadly left-liberal principles cooked up last spring by a collection of London-based journalists, activists and academics.” Quick full disclosure– Potter blurbed my book, and I do […] More »
Nothing like a heat wave to angry up the blood. The woman who would be President is displaying some more of that base-cementing political genius she’s developed lately. The New York Times reports on comments Senator Hillary Clinton made about the missiles being lobbed back and forth across the Lebanon/Israel border. She leaves no room […] More »
“Power is essential for survival, but additional power is also needed for doing anything fast and complicated, like eating your neighbour…” From a discussion of: Current Middle East conflict? — No. Iraq/Kuwait, early 90’s? — No. North and South Korea? — No again. The quote is from a Times Literary Supplement review of the book […] More »
Since watching the last forty minutes of last week’s World Cup final, I have to say I am baffled by some of the mainstream media response to Zinedine Zidane’s head butt to Italian defender Marco Materazzi, including the initial — completely one-sided — response of the play by play announcer at the game. We’re supposed […] More »
Perusing Andrew Potter’s blog can be such a fruitful exercise sometimes. This post from yesterday sent me off to the online Asia Times to read about New York Times writer Nicholas Wade’s book Before the Dawn, which, according to the Times “charts the recently compiled genetic evidence for the evolution and history of our species” […] More »