This Magazine articles from January 1996

This Magazine archives from January 1996

Dragnet: a computer-crimes bust and an ambiguous law threaten workers' rights.
January 1, 1996... Early last year, Jesse Hirsh - like thousands of other Canadians - started playing around on the Internet. He borrowed Net account passwords from two University of Toronto students, figured out how it all worked and started spreading his...

Rebels with a magazine (The Next City).
January 1, 1996... Last year, a group of Canada's new young right got together to complain about their dire straits - that they get no respect for their ideas, have no voice, and are generally disempowered. Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne cut to the chase...

Young and the unionless.
January 1, 1996... "I didn't come here to talk about unions." When Sue Carter, an educational program development officer with the Canadian Labour Congress, organized some sessions on youth and unions for last winter's United Nations International Youth Forum...

May the party flounder on: the NDP chooses a leader.
January 1, 1996... Put them together and what do you get? She who is last shall be first. May the party flounder on. The bizarre part - others have so used the word - is what Svend Robinson did. Leading on the first ballot and certain he couldn't win, he...

Anarchy at Kanehsatake: ... why a band council and the government haven't put an end to rising community violence.
January 1, 1996... WHENEVER I want to find out what's going on back home at Kanehsatake, I call my older sister, Linda Cree. She's been my lifeline to our family and community ever since I left home more than 20 years ago. The last few years, we've been...

Pump up the volume: ... the underground world of karaoke ... an unlikely spirit of rebellion.
January 1, 1996... I'M sitting in the Eton House, one of the beer parlours that populate the east-end working-class neighbourhood of Riverdale in Toronto. There is a couple on stage singing a duet: Elton John and Kiki Dee's late-seventies hit "Don't Go Breaking...

Much ado about nothing: hustling after media attention is turning poetry into sound-bites.
January 1, 1996... I'm sitting on an uncomfortable stool in a Toronto bar, nursing a pint of overpriced microbrewery swill and wishing I had a bottle of Bud. The lighting's bad; the jazz and the sound system suck. I'm at a "Spoken Word Night" - the catch-all...

Call of the wild: owning a tiger or a kinkajou is the new and dangerous status symbol.
January 1, 1996... THE Woods & Waters auction held in Delphos, Ohio is not your average cattle sale. The cowboy-hat crowd gathering in the heart of the Midwestern rain belt is selling "exotics" - animals usually encountered in zoos, not in barns. On this day,...

Shadow maker: the life of Gwendolyn MacEwen.
January 1, 1996... IT'S an unfortunate irony that in the wake of Rosemary Sullivan's superb book (and winner of this year's Governor General's award for non-fiction) Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, an extraordinary amount of ink is being spilled...

Apocalypse now: as the year 2000 approaches, politicians and business leaders are getting ready for the end of the world. Things have never looked better.
January 1, 1996... This all started when I accidentally got lost in the business section of my local bookstore. I had been searching for an obscure book of poetry and didn't notice where I was walking until I looked up and found myself in an aisle crammed with...