By the time Friday rolled around last week there was a veritable anthology of jokes to which “David Gilmour” was the punch line. The paper-bag jowls and complacent half-smile of his face pasted on News Feeds and blogs like an advert for a public flogging. Everywhere that CanLit went, so too went the name David […] More »
I’m 22-years-old. I graduated from university in June. I am a girl. And, well, I think Margaret Wente’s Globe and Mail article on “sexual economics” is nuts. Beyond anything else, I’m not really sure what it’s trying to teach me. Is it that young women like me are giving away sex like smiles because we’re […] More »
Kay Kritzwiser, a feature writer assigned to the Globe and Mail’s weekend supplement, The Globe Magazine, had never heard of Marshall McLuhan when, on a mid-November morning in 1963, her edior, Colin McCullough, asked her to write a profile of him. She visited the Globe’s library and took away a Who’s Who entry and a […] More »
On October 7, 2001, U.S. and U.K. forces began an invasion of Afghanistan aimed at capturing or killing the perpetrators of 9/11, believed to be sheltered there by the Taliban. Canadian forces soon joined the fray as part of the International Security Assistance Force, beginning The Forces’ longest and most controversial military engagement in history. […] More »
After the sheer surprise of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots had dissipated, Canadian commentators tried to figure out what it all meant. Most beat their usual political drums—months later we’re blaming the pinko anarchists, capitalist pigs, and beer companies for making their products so darn tasty and portable. But this being 2011, many who broke windows […] More »
Though you might reasonably condemn the modern internet for a variety of reasons—ruining attention spans, turning all public discourse into a shouting match, or insulting your sexual prowess with badly punctuated mass emails—one thing the medium could always reasonably claim was its potential for spreading truth. Decentralized and egalitarian, the web seemed to herald the […] More »
Last spring, Dockers launched its stupefying ad campaign based around the core message of “Wear The Pants.” (In a move that nicely reinforced the tone-deaf idiocy of the campaign, it premiered on International Women’s Day, March 8. Classy.) The whole series, which is still running in a slightly diluted form, rests on the premise that there […] More »
Irving Howe (the New York socialist) once wrote “Blessed New York Times! What would radical journalism in America do without it?” The newspaper was, to be sure, a tool of the bourgeois but a tool that reported the news with unequalled comprehensiveness. Read it and, ideology aside, you became the possessor of a full range […] More »
When Google, citing concerns over security and censorship, pulled their operations out of China in March this year, they were widely praised for taking a stand for democracy. But Google’s move wasn’t the first time a Western entity had taken the moral high road in regard to China. In fact, almost 200 years ago, the […] More »
John Duncan, who wrote about the Canadian military’s Afghan misadventures for the March-April issue of This, contributed an op-ed to Wednesday’s Globe and Mail on the much-touted Afghan surge. Ominously titled “The insurgents will be back,” Duncan’s editorial argues that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan will simply sidestep any such troop movement, wait it out, and […] More »
The Globe and Mail‘s story on Nazim Gillani’s testimony to a parliamentary committee investigating the Guergis/Jaffer fiasco contains all sorts of fun tidbits. Rahim Jaffer, Noted Businessman Who Is Smart, says he wouldn’t touch Nazim Gillani with a bargepole: “We realized very quickly after a few meetings with him that our firms were very divergent, that […] More »