This Magazine articles from January 1997

This Magazine archives from January 1997

Storm at the coast.
January 1, 1997... WHEN THE COAST Halifax's free alternative biweekly newspaper - picked up a new syndicated column last January, its staff didn't expect the decision to make waves. "Savage Love," by Seattle-based writer Dan Savage, is a gay advice column dealing...

Absent minded: let's scrap tenure. It's the greatest threat there is to academic freedom.
January 1, 1997... In the past few years, the highly public cases of two professors at the University of Toronto, Herbert Richardson and Robert O'Driscoll - as well as the far nastier case of Valery Fabrikant at Montreal's Concordia University - have raised anew...

Science fair: when it comes to covering complex evolution and birth-order theories, the media get an "F".
January 1, 1997... If you've read Born To Rebel, Frank J. Sulloway's massive study on the role of birth order in shaping human behaviour (and, ultimately, history), I'm impressed. If you've at least read about or heard of the book, and its theories that children...

Right to poverty: fear and loathing at a Fraser Institute right-to-work conference.
January 1, 1997... A summer conference, sponsored by the Fraser Institute, was billed as an educational forum on "Right-to-Work Laws: The Key to Job Creation." But even though the gathering was held at a downtown Toronto hotel, I felt as if I'd stumbled into a...

Crash: crumpled metal. Broken glass. It's the demolition derby - and the sound of post-industrial capitalism.
January 1, 1997... Nine cars are lined up neatly on a patch of dirt a bit smaller than a football field, penned in by reinforced cement barriers and old telephone poles. In these cars are nine men and women tugging on the straps of their crash helmets, revving...

Body of work: Gerald Hannon takes an honest look at human need and his much-publicized career as a prostitute.
January 1, 1997... I am one of those strangely modern people whose life has become a story. It is a tale told, mostly, by the idiot box. And what it signifies about the erosion of academic freedom in this country, and the ease with which a moral panic can be...

Snake oil: feeling over-taxed? Has the right got a deal for you!
January 1, 1997... We have it on the highest authority that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (though thoroughly objectionable regardless), but take it from me, a tax cut is never just a tax cut. Its proper study requires the mind of a polymath. The mastery of...

Canlit for dummies: how to be a literary big shot - or just sound like one.
January 1, 1997... Although I've been around the CanLit scene in one sense or another for most of my adult life (first as a student, then as a writer, reviewer, and editor), nothing could have prepared me for the shock of becoming - with the publication last year...

here's your money.
January 1, 1997... He was secretly afraid to be alone in a room with a dog. He believed that horses and dogs could speak but chose not to. Men's talk of firearms always struck him as smutty and he wore his own gun far back, so as not to see it. In...

No man is an island.
January 1, 1997... Up until last fall, Prince Edward Island was the last province in Canada never to have elected even a single New Democrat candidate to the provincial legislature. That changed on November 18, 1996, when the voters of the West Prince riding...