This Magazine articles from January 2008

This Magazine archives from January 2008

Show must go on.(LETTERS )(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... I want to thank you for your compassionate reporting in "Crime scenes," about the theatre program at William Head prison in British Columbia (November/December). We live in an adversarial world, and until people stop seeing everything from...

Olympic proportions.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... Though it's no longer "timely," I was pleased to see a story about last August's publicity stunt by the six members of Students for a Free Tibet in the November/December issue of This Magazine ("Students for a Free Tibet take on China"). ...

Puppet love.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... Kudos to Jennifer O'Connor for her article on puppets and politics ("Pulling strings, making trouble," November/ December). In England and Europe, there was a time when puppetry was so subversive that puppeteers were targeted by authorities for...

Fighting back.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2008... Your September/October cover with the caption "The New Apartheid" superimposed on the Israeli flag is more than just "latent anti-Semitism," as you suggest it may be, but encouragement of anti-Semitism. British Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan...

Cuba si?(EDITORIAL)
January 1, 2008... THE COVER OF THIS ISSUE makes me happy. A photograph of the Caribbean is about as close as I will get to a beach this winter, so I will stare longingly at that photo as the snow fails outside. Being raised in temperate Victoria, B.C., I...

A beautiful day in the neighbourhood: Citizens' Committee cleans up in Montreal.(PROFILE)(Citizens' Committee of the Village des Tanneries)
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] MONTREAL'S the Village des Tanneries is a place where the crosswalk guard knows every child's name, where you can shop at Mr. and Mrs. Lee's depanneur on credit at the end of the month, and where people congregate on...

Dollars and sense: quantifying the cost of homelessness.(EASILY MISSED)
January 1, 2008... IN 1993, Paul Martin, then-finance minister, handed Canada's affordable housing strategy over to the real-estate agents. With unwavering faith in the free market, he announced that the federal government would no longer fund new affordable...

A flare for free labour.(WTF?)(Flare magazine and their internship program)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... MAJOR FOR-PROFIT MAGAZINES started adopting the unsavoury practice of using unpaid editorial interns during the recession of the early '90s. The appeal for the magazines was obvious: free labour. Bright-eyed young people were lured by the...

Four ways to greener travel: tips for lightening your environmental load.(LIST)
January 1, 2008... THE ETHICS OF TRAVEL have become more complicated, but planning a green vacation has never been easier. Follow these four tips to ease your effect on the earth--and your conscience. 1. Do your research Find out what makes a vacation green...

Clear cut: revisiting the deforestation dilemma.(WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ... SAVING THE AMAZON?)
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN THE EARLY '90s, research linking the greenhouse effect to destruction of the world's rainforests spurred massive campaigns to save the trees. The destruction of the Amazon--the planet's largest...

Give us a break: more holiday time would make happier, more productive workers.(ARGUMENT)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... THE DAY AFTER his government was re-elected, Premier Dalton McGuinty celebrated by giving everybody the third Monday in February off, making Ontario the third province, after Alberta and Saskatchewan, to grant its citizens a winter long...

Planes, trains and carbon footprints: when travelling, method matters.(GRAPHIC)
January 1, 2008... When it comes to the environment, rail travel is certainly the greener way to travel. And, with higher public investment on the way, it could become better and faster. Let's see what two trips from Montreal to Toronto--one with VIA Rail, the...

Don't send flowers yet despite its recent defeat in Ontario, electoral reform is alive and kicking.(POLITICS)
January 1, 2008... Defenders of this country's current unfair electoral system would like us to think that the defeat of a series of proposals to fix that system corresponds to the death of the Canadian electoral reform movement. They shouldn't plan the funeral...

Time to tame the wild bird: a lesson in lunacy.(ECONOMICS)(Canadian dollar)
January 1, 2008... The latest surge in Canada's high-flying currency has spurred me token hand-wringing in official Ottawa. At one point last fall, our national bird soared to nearly U.S.$1.10. That's up 45 cents, or almost 75 percent, in just five years. ...

Last resorts: Cuba's socialist economy relies on tourism, which was ramped up out of necessity following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., but foreign dollars are creating a new class of Cubans.
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE FADED PHOTOGRAPH AT HAVANA'S Museum of the Revolution shows a group of Americans in 1950s-style bathing suits relaxing on a white-sand beach. The picture illustrates, as the caption beneath informs visitors,...

"I will alert the world to your suffering!" Watch your local comic-book store ... behind the rise of investigative cartooning.(using comics to cover politics)
January 1, 2008... In January 2007, when David Widgington started thinking about a new project for his small-but-scrappy Cumulus Press, he quickly settled on a subject: the alleged wrongdoings of Canadian mining companies at home and abroad. The choice was a...

Paper route: Journalists for Human Rights has a high-minded and worthy goal: send Canadians to Africa to train reporters and editors there. But, as it turns out, it's often the Africans who end up training their Canadian "teachers".
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From the moment I walked through the door--a pale, thin girl in a new dress who had just carried three pieces of luggage up four flights of stairs--it was clear that I wasn't what they'd expected. In fact, my arrival...

See the country, save the planet: five trips that will leave you well travelled and deserving of a pat on the back.
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Travel planning can be a headache, but if you're trying to take a trip that's easy on the planet, you'll quickly find yourself in migraine territory. Even the first step--getting there--suddenly becomes a...

Six stories.(FICTION & POETRY)(Short story)(List)
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A story about small labours Though the man who chooses not to sell the peanuts, but rather to have others sell peanuts for him, is the one who rises to greatness, he is no less, her father is saying, he is no...

Dear Dr. Heung.(Three poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2008... DEAR DR. HEUNG, I've moved again. I have a new dentist. I've got to settle somewhere, right? His name is Dave and his office is at 5th and Burrard and faces northwest to the Rockies, which is what you see while his girl...

Int. Back of Police Car. Night or Notes for a Film in Which an International Pedophile Returns to Canada to Await Trial and Certain Imprisonment.(Three poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2008... INT. BACK OF POLICE CAR. NIGHT or NOTES FOR A FILM IN WHICH AN INTERNATIONAL PEDOPHILE RETURNS TO CANADA TO AWAIT TRIAL AND CERTAIN IMPRISONMENT Close on a man's unshaven face, pressed to a rain-slicked window. Nighttime cars...

Pig Iron.(Three poems)(Poem)
January 1, 2008... PIG IRON No need to call on you. No need to invoke what hunkers in the landfill, no. What makes its mark in this epoch and the next? Dumbbell, engine block. You leave your mark while all things fall about you. Pressmen...

Speaking out: a Muslim poet gets political.(PROFILE)(Sofia Baig)
January 1, 2008... FOR SOFIA BAIG, putting on a Muslim headscarf for the first time was a political statement. She was 13 years old and the Twin Towers had just come crashing down. Raised in a secular suburban Quebec household by a Pakistani father and a...

Street stanzas.(POEMS)(George McWhirter is planning a new book tentatively titled Streets: A Verse Map of Vancouver)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... HAVE YOU WRITTEN A COUPLET about Commercial Drive? A haiku that takes place on East Hastings? Or a ghazal about Granville? Vancouver's first poet laureate, George McWhirter, wants to see it. McWhirter, who was appointed by the city of...

Found in translation.(COMICS)(Andy Brown, founder of Conundrum Press is aiming for the translation Quebec graphic novels to English)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... MONTREAL MAY HAVE a thriving underground comics scene, but for francophone artists, getting recognition in English Canada isn't easy. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Andy Brown, founder of Conundrum Press, is aiming to change that. Last May,...

All you can eat.(PHOTOGRAPHY)(Brief article)
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN HIS MOST RECENT INSTALLATION, Attempt at an Inventory, Toronto artist Dean Baldwin turns gluttony into art. For a full year the self-proclaimed "foodie" photographed almost everything he ate and drank. (Meals...

Soucouyant.(READ THIS)(Brief article)(Book review)
January 1, 2008... Soucouyant By David Chariandy Arsenal Pulp Press "MANGO GRAHAM and mango vere. Mango teen and mango zabicco. And mango starch...." Soucouyant's narrator ponders the irony that his mother, a Trinidadian immigrant struggling with...

We're richer than we think: Canada's lit has arrived--you can bank on it.(BOOKS)(Canadian literature )
January 1, 2008... On a cool, drizzly morning in October, the first of the season that finally hints of autumn, the lobby of the Four Seasons Toronto in Yorkville receives various cab-loads of Canadian publishing apparatchiks. The Scotiabank Giller Prize[TM]...

Quality, meet quantity: TV'S queers are better than ever--now it's time for the numbers to catch up.(TELEVISION)
January 1, 2008... Suburbia went same-sex on the popular ABC series Desperate Housewives this season with the much-hyped move of a gay couple to Wisteria Lane. Teri Hatcher's character, Susan, welcomes the couple and immediately gets off on the wrong foot with...

Stop the presses: the transition from paper to pixels will bring good news.(WEB)
January 1, 2008... September 19, 2007, may one day join November 9, 1989, as a day that marked the end of an era of repression, separation, and misery, and the beginning of one defined by freedom, unity and hope. Okay, it probably won't go down in history...

Bottoms up: the bells may have changed, but they're here to stay.(THEN & NOW)(bell-bottom pants)(Chronology)
January 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 1800 Sailors start donning homemade bell-bottoms, because, the theory goes, they are easy to roll up when swabbing decks or engaging in other messy work. Whatever the reason, the new pants eventually supplant the...