This Magazine articles from July 2003

This Magazine archives from July 2003

The state of hate. (Under The Hood).
July 1, 2003... SINCE HUMANS BEGAN WALKING ON TWO LEGS THEY HAVE BEEN DIVIDING themselves into ethnic groups and fighting each other. While many ethnic conflicts date back to ancient times, recent machinations by superpowers and colonial forces have often...

Post-soviet. (Salvo).(the problems with Canada's National Post newspaper)
July 1, 2003... EVERY TIME THE NATIONAL POSTUNDERGOES a major management or editorial shake-up, the typical reaction on the political left is one of barely restrained glee. Another shiver of schadenfreude rippled through the left in May when founding editor...

Prairie firebrand. (Red-Handed).(anti-native mail campaign of Jim Pankiw, Saskatchewan Member of Parliament)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... JIM PANKIW IS AT IT AGAIN. THE INDEPENDENT MP, who once described Chretien's Liberals as "modern day Klansmen," is now mailing furious anti-native screeds to his Saskatoon-Humboldt constituents asking "who the real racists are." Pankiw is...

Hopelessly de-voted. (Chart).(how democracy in Canada has been diluted)
July 1, 2003... WHEN ONTARIO'S CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCED IN MARCH they would bypass the legislature to present their latest budget, finance minister Janet Ecker called it "an opportunity to communicate directly [with the public]?' Critics deemed it...

Get press play. (How-To).
July 1, 2003... LAST DECEMBER, TOOKER GOMBERG WALKED into Ralph Klein's constituency office, a former bank, and locked himself in the vault to protest Alberta's stance on Kyoto). When Klein's staff revealed they didn't have the vault's combination on hand,...

AOL copyfight. (Sign Of The Times).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... IN THE LATEST CHAPTER OF "GIANT CONGLOMERATES Screw the Little Guy," writers, artists and photographers have banded together to protest AOL Time Warner's work-for-hire contract. With these contracts, the company can publish a story in one...

Northern log-jam. (Up Next).
July 1, 2003... ON A BRIEF BIT OF LAND OUTSIDE KENORA, Ontario, a crisis is brewing. For seven months now, Grassy Narrows First Nation members and their supporters have been blocking a logging road to one of the last areas of healthy forest on their...

Auto motives. (In The House).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... SHORTLY AFTER THE 1973 OIL EMBARGO, THE U.S. passed legislation requiring manufacturers to make more fuel-efficient cars or face fines. Although Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) rules aren't perfect, the legislation increased fuel...

True confessions. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2003... I just read "Confessions of a Playa Hata" (Mar/Apr) and it was outstanding. I think Clive Thompson has the basis for a great book because the topic has so many dimensions that could be explored. Like the fact that while elites criticize...

Love story. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2003... Love the magazine and I loved the fiction excerpt, "John" but I am having a hard time tracking down information on where to get the book. If you have a phone number, or info on where to buy books by Tamara Faith Berger, I would really...

Awards a go-go. (Letters).(This Magazine wins some prizes)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... This Magazine took four honourable mentions at this year's National Magazine Awards. Joelene C. Heathcote was nominated in the One-of-a-Kind category for "Boys in Pieces," (May/June 2002); Gordon Laird was nominated for landscape photography...

High on finance: are you an economist? Addicted to useless mathematical models and destructive policy advice? You're not alone. Jim Stanford offers a new 12-step program for recovering economists everywhere. Subversion by the numbers. (Economics).
July 1, 2003... GOOD EVENING. MY NAME IS JIM. I AM AN economist. It has been 17 days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." I know it's wrong that my profession hogs so much attention. I know it's wrong to pretend you can forecast complex...

Novel reproach: how publisher pressure to produce big, important books is leading to lousy first fiction. (Culture).
July 1, 2003... EVERY TIME I BRING UP THE IDEA OF WRITING a short story collection, my agent roles his eyes. "Come on Hal," he says. "I mean really. What they're waiting for is another novel." In the age of the big story, the little story is inevitably a...

Speak no evil: last winter David Ahenakew shocked the nation with his anti-Semitic comments. But some who know Ahenakew say he never made a secret of his intolerant views. The question is, how did he get away with it for so long?
July 1, 2003... THE COMMENTS WERE SHOCKING. AFTER ADDRESSING a conference on native health issues in Saskatoon last December, David Ahenakew, the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told a reporter that Jews are a "disease" that Hider was...

Grrls! Grrls! Grrls! The Suicidegirls claim to be purveyors of "empowered erotica," but are they really changing the sex trade, or just acting out the same old morality play?
July 1, 2003... FOR ABOUT TWO WEEKS I HAVE BEEN DRIVEN MAD BY A website. For admittedly shallow reasons, I'm made wildly resentful by a bunch of hot punk and goth chicks (all of whom are just my girlfriend's cup of tea) who believe that sexual revolution means...

In the distance: in Israel and its occupied territories, the global village has collapsed into a shell-shocked singularity that can do little more than watch itself as the world watches it.
July 1, 2003... WE WERE, I FIGURED, LESS THAN 10 KILOMETRES from the strewn bodies littered on the beachfront cement, each one alive, dead or somewhere in between, punctured and tipped open by screws, nails, nuts and bolts. In one horrific flash those simple...

Reality love bites: the Bachelor, Mr. Personality and other reality-dating hits are terrifying illustrations of our obsession with "true" love--and the extent to which relationships are now treated as disposable commodities.
July 1, 2003... POOR HAYLEY, YOU'VE GOT TO FEEL SORRY FOR HER. She thought it would be every woman's fantasy, but it has turned into a nightmare. Hayley Arp, a perky 26-year-old career woman from Atlanta, is the latest bachelorette searching for true love...

The weight of a child: winners of This Magazine's prize for creative non-fiction.(Short Story)
July 1, 2003... WE'RE SITTING SIDE BY EACH, ERIN AND I, on stackable chairs joined in a row in a poorly-lit waiting room at the Women's Clinic. There are two other people in the room with us, both men, hunched forward in their seats, elbows resting on their...

Burning the cattle at both ends. (Fiction).(Short Story)
July 1, 2003... ME AND LIAM JR. IN RUBBER BOOTS in the office off the milking room, with the old green filing cabinet, breeding charts on the wall and lists on the wall of Liam Sr.'s highest producers for milk-fat percentage and just plain quantity of milk,...

First person. (Interview).(interview with writer Adam Lewis Schroeder)(Interview)
July 1, 2003... WHEN I WAS IN VANCOUVER RECENTLY, I heard Adam Lewis Schroeder read. It was something else. I had never before seen someone perform their work with such speed and energy and such vigorous gestures, and when he was done he was absolutely done,...

Keanu Reeves is, undeniably, a terrible actor.(Theater Review)
July 1, 2003... Keanu Reeves is, undeniably, a terrible actor. So how is it that this performer with limited skills gets to star in hot movies such as The Matrix, and this summer's The Matrix Reloaded?. The answer is that he's hardly given any lines and when...

The Repository Of Strange Dreams.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2003... Depending on your constitution, the phrase "I had the strangest dream last night" could start an intriguing conversation or cause paroxysms of boredom. Regardless of how you feel about the issue it's worth the trip to THE REPOSITORY OF STRANGE...

Universal Recipients.(Book Review)
July 1, 2003... While it's set in a whirlwind of international locales--Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Vancouver and Montreal--Dana Bath's third book, UNIVERSAL RECIPIENTS (Arsenal Pulp Press), isn't travel literature. The far-flung settings of these short...

Don't you sometimes miss melancholy? You're so busy trying to get to work on time.(review of Canadian band The Organ)
July 1, 2003... DON'T YOU SOMETIMES MISS MELANCHOLY? YOU'RE SO BUSY trying to get to work on time, read the daily news and do your laundry that you've got no time to sit and think and feel blue like you used to. THE ORGAN will help. Music writers across...

Hate campaign: Jon Krosnick has a surefire way to increase voter turnout. (Free Thinker).(Interview)
July 1, 2003... LOVE 'EM OR HATE 'EM, NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS WORK. JON KROSNICK, a researcher with the Ohio State University departments of psychology and political science, argues that negative campaign ads--far from turning people off politics-can actually...