BLOG THIS | blog.thismagazine.ca: November 2008 Archives

Here in Toronto, I'm hiding in my apartment as the temperature hovers just above zero and I'm wondering how it is that I turned out to be such a wimp when I spent my formative years in Winnipeg, the land of cold and snow and over-sized Halloween costumes fitted over snowsuits. It seems to be an annual tradition that each time the clocks change in the fall, Canadians forget how to drive, forget how to deal with a few snowflakes and start spewing off theory after ridiculous theory about the wintertime, most of which revolve around getting sick and not getting sick.

From the sound advice to the old wives' tales, nothing permeates the airwaves more than BS about the flu shot. Here are a list of common excuses for not getting the flu shot, and why they are wrong:

"But I never get sick!"
Well, I've never been abducted by aliens, but that doesn't mean that if there weren't some sort of clinically-proven alien abduction vaccine on the market, I wouldn't be storming the doors. I can't imagine an alien abduction is too pleasant, so much like measles and meningicoccus, I'd err on the side of safety. In case my sardonic for-instance wasn't clear, just because you've never gotten the flu before, doesn't mean that you won't get it this year.

"Last year I got the flu shot and I still got sick."
This one has two possible explanations. Most likely, you are mistaking an upper respiratory infection for the flu. The Ontario Ministry of Health offers a nice chart detailing the difference between the flu and the common cold. Convention has led to many people associating any affliction with a stuffy nose and a sore throat as the flu, when in actuality Influenza is quite serious.

The second possible explanation for your bedriddeness is this: the flu shot does not work instantaneously, and the flu virus does not attack instantaneously, so it's very possible that you could have already had the flu when you got the shot, or gotten it shortly thereafter, in which case the flu shot wouldn't have had a chance to work yet.

"The flu shot gives you the flu."
This is simply not true. The flu shot, like any other vaccine, is meant to introduce a small bit of the virus into your body to help stimulate your immune system and make it easier to fight off the flu, as ABC News explains. Though it's possible to have a bad reaction to the vaccine, more than likely the worst you'll get is a sore arm and a yellow lollipop (the red ones went to those who got their shots early, like they're supposed to).

"I got the flu shot last year."
Good for you! Now, if you will, please go and get it again. Like you and I, the flu virus changes every year and thus each year the vaccine is adapted to the three most common strains for the season.

"I am part of super race of humans that were born immune to petty trivialities such as the flu, the common cold, bad breath and crying."
Well, goody for you and your superior genes, but unfortunately most of us lesser humans (your coworkers, family, grandparents, the little old lady at the mall who collects Salvation Army donations) are not quite as equipped, so you should get the flu shot as well because of something called "herd mentality." As a Slate.com article explains, the more people immunized, the less likely they are to pass the virus on to someone who didn't get the vaccine, thus lowering flu rates all around. However, herd immunity requires a critical mass, so while you may not need it, getting the flu shot is the socially responsible thing to do.

One more reason to get the flu shot: If you live in Ontario, where flu shots are available for free all around, your tax dollars already paid for it.

For fair measure, here three legitimate reasons for not getting the flu shot:
1) You are allergic to any of its components
2) You are an infant (or have an infant-like fear of getting needles, I guess)
3) You are Chuck Norris

As far as flu and cold myths go, chicken soup has actually been shown to help make you feel better. Stock up on some broth and veggies on your way home from the flu clinic, just in case.

More Information:
GetTheFluShot.ca
Health Canada on the flu
Free flu shots linked to fewer deaths, says the CBC
QuackCast podcast disproves various flu myths

And, on one final note, for anyone confused about the difference between herd immunity and herd mentality: herd immunity is the theory that if enough people get vaccinated against the flu, those remaining who did not get the shot will be protected as well. A sort of immunization-by-proxy. Herd mentality is what happens when Americans get so obsessed with getting their kids a Wii for Christmas that they trample a Wal-Mart worker to death at five in the morning.

More entries on: Healthcare

November 25, 2008

ThisAbility #6: Riddle Me This

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 10:32 AM ET | Comments (2)

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Why does the Econo Lodge at 335 Jarvis St. have a push button automatic door with a handicap logo on it, but a single staircase that leads inside? Why does Bar Burrito on Yonge & Sheppard have a step leading into their restaurant, while the restaurant right next door is on level ground? Why does the Quiznos across from College Park have a step outside the front door, when other places on the same strip are fully accessible? Perhaps the biggest riddle of them all, why are Toronto buildings failing where buildings in other cities across Canada succeed? Sure, there are other buildings all over the place that are inaccessible, but Toronto is the only one I've lived in that defies logic and juxtaposes accessible and inaccessible features in the same place, like the automatic door button together with a set of stairs.

After last week's entry, Walking between Worlds, one reader encouraged me to investigate Toronto's real accessibility polices. Was Salad King violating the building code? I decided to find out, and I found the guy responsible for answering any Toronto developer's nagging building code questions. However, in typical bureaucratic fashion, he is slow. So stay tuned next week, when I get to the bottom of the accessibility portion of Toronto's building code.

Aaron is a freelance journalist living in Toronto. His work has appeared in Financial Post Business, Investment Executive Newspaper, and TV Week Magazine, along with Askmen.com. He is a regular contributor to Abilities Magazine and is currently plotting a weekly web comic called GIMP, with artist Jon Duguay, about a handicap school bus driver who wakes up after a crash to find he's the last able-bodied person on earth — and he's being hunted.

More entries on: ThisAbility

November 24, 2008

Book Review: Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 03:46 PM ET | Comments (0)

The economy is on a lot of people's minds as Canadian newspapers warn of recession and the United States deals with its subprime mortgage problem. And so this might be the perfect time to read Margaret Atwood's new book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Consisting of five essays, each presented during this year's Massey Lectures, Atwood provides a discursive overview of the history of debt, lending and borrowing, fairness, and its related concepts.

Their common source, Atwood begins, is in our genes. We are fortunate enough to come equipped with a basic sense of fairness and, when it's violated, the feeling that someone is in debt and must do one thing or another to redeem themselves. By way of illustration, she discusses the capuchin monkeys who, in one experiment, were taught to trade pebbles for cucumber slices. They were perfectly happy with this rate of exchange. But, when one monkey received a grape (a much more desirable commodity) in exchange for a pebble, the rest of them revolted. They even refused to co-operate in future transactions, throwing their pebbles out in fits of rage. They appeared to have an innate sense of what was fair and of how things should be.

From here, she surveys literary and theological discussions of debt. She notes — with special emphasis — that the Lord's Prayer reads "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" and that in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, the word for "debt" and for "sin" are the same. The once-sinful man, Ebenezer Scrooge, is then given a good hearing. This is a man who made his fortune by lending money with high interest rates and who then retained every penny - at the expense of the well-being of others.

In the end Atwood resolves the mystery of debt, saying everything must in the end come from Nature. Everything, Atwood says, is either taken or traded. The goods to be traded must first be taken from somewhere; and the goods taken can only come from Nature. Atwood describes a scenario starring a revamped version of Scrooge, named "Scrooge Nouveau", and set in a world of rapidly depleting resources. It is a world in which its most intelligent inhabitants (that's us, by the way) have consumed goods beyond their needs at costs exceeding their means. We have, that is, purchased large parts of our globe on credit with high interest rates that we must one day face. Atwood's implied imperative throughout the text: we'd be better off if we recognized this now and worked to strike a genuine balance between our only creditor, Nature, and its debtor, us.

More entries on: Book review

November 21, 2008

Another day, another hissy fit

Posted by Melissa Wilson at 01:02 PM ET | Comments (3)

Forget about the drug store commercials that tout pharmacists as friendly neighbourhood fixtures who look out for your family's well being. The Ontario Medical Association is downgrading them to med-school dropouts who can't tell a tummy ache from metastatic stomach cancer.

A new proposal floating around Queen's Park would allow pharmacists to diagnose simple ailments (under strict regulations and training) and prescribe medication without an MD's signature. According to the Toronto Star, the OMA is less than impressed.

The official party line seems to be that the proposal will compromise patient care, but if you're fluent in between-the-linesese, the sub-text is pretty clear: a diagnosing pharmacist will steal away business and damage doctors' bottom line.

On the one hand, I can sympathize. Canada's MDs have spent four years in university, another four in medical school, and then 2-5+ completing residencies, not to mention dropping six figures in tuition fees.

On the other hand, it's no secret that Canadian doctors are overworked, overtired and overly likely to make mistakes in this crap shoot of a system that isn't getting any better, all while over a million Canadians are unable to find a family doctor. If strep throat-diagnosing pharmacists can lighten the load so doctors can focus on more important cases (I wonder how much time is eaten up each year by patients storming clinics and ERs demanding a cure for the flu).

Not only would it save doctors' time, but it can only save time for patients as well. I, myself, get chronic ear infections — I have since I was a little kid — and usually suffer through them without medication because I can never find the time to haul my butt to my family doctor and wait for two hours just to get a prescription. By contrast, there are at least three Shoppers Drug Marts within walking distance to my house.

When is the system going to get its act together and start worrying about what is best for the health care system instead of playing tug-of-war with a couple Amoxicillin billings? How much worse is it going to get before things start looking up?

In other news, some related health care headlines, after the jump.

Cancer patients missing key surgeries: report
Your cold at its most contagious
Rapid treatment best for infants infected with HIV: study
Toronto leading the way in stem cell research

Next week: Why "But I never get sick!" is a bad excuse for not getting a flu shot.

More entries on: Healthcare

November 20, 2008

World Philosophy Day!

Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 02:00 PM ET | Comments (0)

November 20th, 2008, is World Philosophy Day, an annual celebration initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This year, in Palermo, Italy, a set of philosophers will gather for talks under the theme "Rights and Power", and with titles like "Human dignity, civil community and public authority", "From the Mediterranean to the Pacific: new spaces of power and cradles of civilization", and "Sciences and Power". There will also be a symposium, "Psychoanalysis, Rights, Knowledge", in Paris, France. The symposium will consist of conferences and debates on the significance of the "recognition or non-recognition of the 'human being' announced in the Universal Declaration for Human Rights". This is all very esoteric, I know, but it could also be increadibly illuminating. So, if you have the time, share in the celebration and flex your theoretical mind.

More entries on: Events

Run a deficit. Please.

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 11:38 AM ET | Comments (0)

Yesterday was the Speech from the Throne, the strange annual ritual where the government writes a speech and the Governor General has to read it in Parliament. The Conservatives laid out a cautious — NDP leader Jack Layton dismissed it as "very timid" — and cost-cutting agenda, with a focus on the economy. There were also references to banning bulk water exports (yay) and increasing renewable energy (yay) through nuclear power (boo); and more "getting tough" with young offenders (boo).

Much of the news coverage since yesterday has focused on the likelihood of the federal government running a deficit over the next few years. This return to the red, after nearly a decade of federal budget surpluses, is obviously painful for the Tories, who regard balanced budgets as a cardinal duty of government. In fact, they said, this is kind of technically not even a deficit at all, you see, because it's not a "structural" deficit plan, whatever that means.

This attitude, that surplus is the natural order of budgeting and that government deficits are a sort of sin that leaders must confess and repent for, is a relatively new attitude in Ottawa. Obviously, the outrageously overleveraged federal government of the 70s and 80s wasn't desirable; living within your means is a good idea for individuals and governments alike. But this simplistic idea — surplus good, deficit bad, full stop — has hardened into orthodoxy over the last decade, and that's stupid.

Government exists to provide social services for the common good. Given that the world economy is crumbling all around us and taking down everyone from banks to auto companies, there's going to be an acute need for a resilient social safety net in this country, and probably soon. All indicators point to an increase in poverty, unemployment, and insolvency, and it is the job — the duty — of the government to pay for programs that alleviate the effects of these calamities. Run the deficit. Provide services. Don't apologize for doing your job.

More entries on: On the Hill

November 19, 2008

Margaret Wente, the race thinker

Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 05:31 PM ET | Comments (0)

Margaret Wente has now covered race and its discontents in two consecutive issues of The Globe and Mail. Yesterday in her opinion piece, "Testing, testing, bigot 1-2-3", she described an outwardly, and unabashedly, prejudiced aunt - a woman who would often have a nasty thing to say about the black people she called "coloureds". This personal sketch then led itself to a discussion of the implicit racism nearly all people in the modern world betray, at least now and again, and the role it plays in the violence and social dysfunction we can find in some communities. Her piece for today's issue follows yesterday's easily and naturally. "Discrimination eats away at you - and increases your chance of mental illness" consists of an interview she conducted with British psychiatrist, Kwame McKenzie. The title, however, is only a partial summary of the their discussion since McKenzie notes a range of issues. He spoke of the fact that people of different ethnicities and cultures may describe mental illnesses differently and how physicians might work to recognize these ways; and the prevalance of certain illness in some communities. The effects of perceived discrimation (racial or otherwise), McKenzie described as being pronounced and even debilitating with various mood disorder potentially arising.

We need a more flexible health-care system consisting of insightful professionals capable of adjusting their methods to suit the needs of their patients. The one-size-fits-all approach will not work in a country as diverse as ours.

More entries on: Race

Have you taken our reader survey yet? You could win an autographed copy of The Shock Doctrine!

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 05:09 PM ET | Comments (0)

You'd be surprised how close the resemblance is between This Magazine's offices and the set of "The Price is Right." The shag carpeting, the spinning contraptions, the screaming fans — it's quite the work environment. But of course the thing that unites us most are the FABULOUS PRIZES that are available.

If you come on down and take our 2008 readers' survey, you'll be eligible for a draw to win one of several nifty things, such as a copy of The Shock Doctrine autographed by author (and former This Magazine editor) Naomi Klein. Also available is an HSU VT-12 'Ventriloquist' six-channel compact surround sound system, or one of five Cocoa Camino gift baskets filled to the brim with organic, fair-trade chocolate.

Taking the survey should take just a few minutes, and the information you provide is very helpful to us as we work at improving the magazine and the website. Whether you've had a subscription for 40 years or stumbled across the blog last week, we'd like to hear from you. And remember to spay or neuter your pets.

More entries on: THIS matters

November 18, 2008

ThisAbility #5: Walking between worlds

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 12:42 PM ET | Comments (2)

I have a favorite Thai restaurant, here in Toronto, called Salad King. There's nothing I love more than selecting how many chilies I want with my mango chicken, but I can't take anyone I know there — or at least, not unless they can conquer the huge front step outside the front door.

Stairs

But in typical able-bodied fashion, I usually don't even notice. I just park the scooter outside and walk right in. I've caught myself almost inviting those who can't get in to eat with me there without thinking. I wish I could say it's just at Salad King, but at every typically inaccessible place I want to be. I just leave the remnants of my disabled life at the door and walk right in. It's part of the blessing of being able to walk reasonably well, but it's also part of the curse. My more disabled friends (many of whom with an annoyingly stringent social conscience) wag their finger at me and tell me I should boycott inaccessible locations on principle, even if I can get in. I should flex that empathy muscle and think of them stuck outside.

They're right. They're absolutely unequivocally right, but the mango chicken usually wins out. What can I say? I'm a gluttonous, selfish, hedonistic bastard, especially when it comes to food. I always come to the same conclusion: Why punish myself? I do it because I can and if they could, they would too. This is a battle they're best suited to fight on their own. After all, they have the largest most vested interest of anyone, so they can fight it better than I can.

But then the meal ends, goal accomplished and I'm left with that damn self-awareness. I can't just leave it alone. I know I'm straddling the thought process of the average unenlightened able-bodied person on one side: "I'm sorry for your situation, but this just isn't my problem — let someone else do it," and the temperament of the uptight disabled activist on the other: "I won't rest until all the letters are written, all the protests are marched and all the eyes are open." I'm stuck in the middle, too disabled to be on equal footing with the two-legged uprights and not disabled enough to speak on behalf of the disabled community.

The battle within my head is a microcosm of one of the many central keys that prevent the disabled population from mobilizing in great numbers the way other minorities have. Disability is too broad a spectrum and no one can represent the interests of everyone. Many moments go by when I hear, "You think you're disabled? You don't even know what it's like for the rest of us down here. How dare you speak for us?"

The disabled community has always been a better divider than uniter, probably because we're so used to putting our own interests ahead of our brothers and sisters, and we're so used to fighting for our own survival in this world that we put the rest on the back burner.

Maybe next time, I'll just get take-out.

More entries on: ThisAbility

November 17, 2008

Guest Blogger: Fracturing the rainbow alliance

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 10:53 AM ET | Comments (0)

[Editor's Note: from time to time we feature guest bloggers on important issues. Email editor at thismagazine dot ca to enquire about contributing.]

BY CATE SIMPSON

Forty years after the Stonewall riots, Julie Bindel, writing in The Guardian earlier this week, claims that trans men and women haven't earned the right to be recognized by an organization named for the movement they started. She claims that trans people have grown disillusioned with "heterosexual society, and asked to be included in our rainbow alliance." I've got news for her: they were here first.

Stonewall, the UK queer rights organization Bindel criticizes takes its name from riots that broke out late one June night in 1969 outside the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village. That night marked the symbolic beginning of the gay rights movement in America. A year later, the first gay pride marches took place in New York and LA.

Who was there that night in New York, fighting back against police who had beaten and harassed them for years in their place of sanctuary? Mostly transsexuals, transvestites, and sex workers.

This much would be obvious to Ms Bindel if she had so much as flipped through Martin Duberman's Stonewall, or watched the film of same name. The definitive text on the Stonewall Riots, Duberman's book follows several people closely involved in the events of that night, among them Sylvia Rivera, founder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of Ms Bindel's ignorance. "Queer" does not mean "into kinky sex". "Queer" has never meant "into kinky sex". Once used as a slur against gay people, "queer" refers to anybody who is not straight. Because LGBTQII is a mouthful, and because it still doesn't encompass everybody, and because many of us believe that a wildly diverse group of people united behind a cause is not an "unholy alliance" but a force to be reckoned with.

As for Ms Bindel's fear of being "lumped in" with other people's "odd sexual practices", the continued existence of Stonewall and every other gay rights organization stand as testament to the fact that plenty of people think being gay or lesbian is merely an "odd", and distinctly unsavoury, sexual practice.

Gay rights aren't about the right to sleep with men if you're a man and the right to sleep with women if you're a woman. They're about keeping gay teenagers safe from harm; the right to full membership in society regardless of other people's personal opinions of your relationships and sexual practices; they're even about the right not to be likened with devil worshippers by members of your own purported community.

We can't break down the queer community into factions defined by who we sleep with. As Ms Bindel herself points out, gay men couldn't fight Section 28 on their own. This is why workers have trade unions, this is why we have gay-straight alliances, and this is why Stonewall Scotland has broken from Stonewall in England and Wales in including transsexuals.

Last week Proposition 8 passed in California, along with two other state bans on same-sex marriage, and gays still can't call their unions marriage in the UK. We have so far to go. We won't get there by declaring that we have just as much equality as we need and pulling the ladder up behind us. And we certainly won't get there by embracing the bigotry of our oppressors and complaining that there are too many "odd" people on our side.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

More entries on: LGBT

November 14, 2008

Listen to This podcast: Toronto Life's Aqsa Parvez cover story, "Girl, Interrupted"

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 02:38 PM ET | Comments (1)

If the audio player doesn't display, click here to download the mp3 file.

Toronto Life Cover The current issue of Toronto Life magazine features a cover story on the murder of Aqsa Parvez, the Mississauga teen who was killed last year, allegedly by members of her own family, over a dispute about — well, it's tough to say what it was about. Toronto Life's cover calls the murder an "honour killing" because Parvez decided not to wear a hijab, the head covering that some Muslim women wear to observe their religion. As writer Mary Rogan says in her story, there were plenty of other disputes between Aqsa Parvez and her family over all kinds of things, and what truly happened is still frustratingly unclear. But the hijab became the focal point in media reports about the murder last year, because it was an easy-to-grasp symbol that resonated with those Canadians who still feel ambivalent, or outright hostile, to immigrant groups, particularly Muslim immigrants from South Asia.

Last week, a coalition of groups representing women, immigrants, and social service agencies called a press conference in Toronto to formally condemn Toronto Life's story, calling it racist and Islamophobic. There is also a Facebook group that goes into further on the problems that these readers had with the article.

This podcast features excerpts from my interviews with one of the participants in the press conference, Sumayya Kassamali of the group Our Collective Dreams: Muslim Women Speak Out Against Violence, and with Sarah Fulford, Editor of Toronto Life.

More entries on: Listen to This

Saving the environment in Ontario just became illegal

Posted by Melissa Wilson at 10:47 AM ET | Comments (3)

How's that for a sensationalist headline? I couldn't resist.

The Ontario Highway Transport Board has recently ruled that rideshare website Pickup Pal is breaking the law by allowing users to coordinate carpools and offer rides to mutually convenient destinations for a fee.

The Toronto Star reports that the decision was instigated by chartered bus company Trentway-Wagar Inc. who got their panties in a bunch over claimed lost revenue sucked up by rideshare services. They insisted that Pickup Pal was violating the Public Vehicles Act by allowing users to offer up their cars as "public vehicles" without the proper green light.

What's next, the Sheraton waging war against CouchSurfers? Nannies lashing out against babysitters?

During a time when Tim Hortons cups are fodder for intense political debate and parents obsess about the environmental repercussions of disposable diapers, it's more than a little disappointing that the OHTB folded so quickly. I suppose in poor economic times, capitalism and the bottom line trumps community and environmental concerns every time.

I have no doubt that the dollar will recover, but what card will be played next to squash low-budget, community-based organizations like Rideshare.

To salt the wound, the ruling came shortly after legislation to legalize ridesharing in Ontario, for the purpose of reducing emissions and easing congestion, was proposed last month.

Here's hoping it passes.

More entries on: Environment

November 13, 2008

Review: Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 12:52 AM ET | Comments (1)

Thomas L. Friedman, Foreign Affairs columnist of The New York Times, has written a new book called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America. This is Friedman's contribution to the growing literature on environmental issues, and it's an ambitious one.

The first few sections of the text do an admirable job of laying out the problem. The world is getting hot, warming at unexpectedly exponential rates. Some of the consequences will include what he calls "Global Weirding". Not only will the globe become intolerably warm; but even the smallest of atmospheric changes will bring with it strange occurrences and unpredictably bizarre events.

The world is proverbially flat because of the rise of the middle-class in places like India and China. A greater percentage of people in the world are becoming affluent. Crowded, naturally, refers to the incredible population growth around the world and, once again, places like India and China.

In his story, Friedman's primary culprits are what he calls "Dirty Fuels". Coal, oil, and other "fuels from hell", as he puts it. The world is getting hot because of the carbon they emit. The growing wealth of India and China's middle-class, and their accompanying consumption needs, are increasing demand for dirty fuels. And the growing global population is increasing this demand even further. So, not only are things very bad, but they can get much worse if we don't act.

We must, Friedman argues, develop our Energy Technology. Advocating strong state intervention, Friedman says we need a complete re-structuring of our energy system. We need funding for innovation; tax breaks for alternative energy producers; as well as carbon taxes and price floors for oil (if the price gets too low, there will be no real incentive for finding clean alternatives). In one evocative section, Friedman paints a picture of a future Energy Internet of perfect efficiency and synchronization between our energy needs and their supply.

Friedman's one contentious argument is that the leader of this new movement must be America. Speaking, it seems, directly to his American audience, Friedman warns that if they do not re-organize with clean-energy, other countries will. And if those other countries, like China, do so before America, well, they'll develop more efficiently, make more money and become more powerful. I can't help but think: so what? His unabashed Americanism was just a little bit annoying considering the critical condition of the environment.

America should become a participant in the creation of clean-energy. And it should do so, not for a sense of global dominance, but because of the danger we collectively find ourselves in.

More entries on: Environment

November 12, 2008

A second chance to do Canada's portrait gallery right

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 03:34 PM ET | Comments (0)

Portrait

The Tory government's decision to toss out the whole idea of building a permanent home for the Portrait Gallery of Canada — which currently resides in a warehouse in Gatineau and sends touring shows out across the country — is a terrible blow, but it also saves us from something else: the Public-Private Partnership (P3) that would have built it.

Heritage minister James Moore says the decision was driven by escalating costs and the uncertainty of the economy right now. That may be true, but former Liberal Heritage minister Sheila Copps thinks otherwise, and we're inclined to agree. A national portrait gallery should be a common good for all Canadians, owned by the public. It would be really great to build the portrait gallery in Calgary or Edmonton, in my opinion. But not if it's going to be at the cost of outsourcing large chunks of a federal institution to private interests, which is what this plan would have done. With this rotten plan out of the way, we can focus on building the right one.

[image courtesy Banksy]

More entries on: Visual art

November 11, 2008

ThisAbility #4: The Sorry Syndrome

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 11:00 AM ET | Comments (0)

The "Sorry Syndrome" is a phenomenon I know I'll never fully understand. I don't even know whether able-bodied people know what they're doing or if it's just an apologetic, ass covering default they go to in a moment when they don't know what to do. It could be many things... I have my theories, but feel free to weigh-in.

Crash Of course, you can't weigh-in unless you know what I'm talking about, so let me illustrate just one of the many instances:

It happened on the way to class at the Ryerson University Campus in Toronto. I was heading up the main artery of the campus (Gould St.) toward Yonge St. and I was looking straight ahead, not really paying attention...SMASH! Guy on a bike comes down an alley and T-bones my scooter. The dude flips over his handlebars, sails through the air across my lap and lands flat on his back on the other side of me. My mouth was agape, but this guy gets up, dusts himself off, opens his mouth and says, "I'm sorry man, are you okay?"

There it is. Right there. WTF was that? I was fine, but against all rationality, and potential injury, this guy says he's sorry and asks me how I'm doing? Sure it's a stand up move, but he just rammed rubber and aluminum piping at full speed into steel and plastic. When those two forces collide, I know who's getting the best of that exchange, and it's not going to be the bike or the rider. Yet, I'm the delicate flower? The whole thing was my fault.

This word, "Sorry" and its usage as it pertains to people with disabilities wouldn't be so perplexing to me if I didn't hear it every day. If I happen to be behind a group of people on the sidewalk, well back of their personal space, the first thing I hear is "Sorry" as they proceed to get out of the way. Where did this notion that disabled people want to be in front of everything come from? I'm perfectly happy following you. I put my cane down to use both hands and the first thing anyone does is pick it up and say, "Sorry about that."

Sorry for what? I'm sorry you feel you have to say that. I could brush up against you on a dance floor and sorry comes out of your mouth. Do all my actions look like your mistake?

I'm here to announce: it's not your fault. You're devaluing real apologies by doing that. You're afraid. Maybe I might fall, maybe you'll cause it, and maybe you won't, but so what? What's the worst that can happen? Maybe you're averse to physical contact from strangers — I think you need a hug. Maybe you dismiss people with disabilities because you just don't know how to deal, and sorry is your deflection shield. The next time you feel the urge to verbally excrete a "sorry," why not start a conversation? Start with, "Hi, my name is..." I know Canada was once a colony of a country that invented manners and decorum, but the "Sorry Syndrome" is getting so ridiculous I feel like, If I cracked a guy across the jaw for no reason, the first thing he would do is apologize.

[CC-licensed image courtesy Steve Ford Elliott]

More entries on: ThisAbility

November 07, 2008

Classic This: "Pornography: A Feminist View"

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 03:03 PM ET | Comments (0)

[Editor's Note: The following is reprinted from the July/August 1978 issue of This Magazine. To hear writer Myrna Kostash in conversation about this article, download our "Listen to This" podcast #1, available here.]

"Power and Control: A Feminist View of Pornography"

BY MYRNA KOSTASH

This Magazine, Vol. 12, Issue #3, July-August 1978

When Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, was convicted of obscenity charges in the United states, several luminaries of the arts world, including Gore Vidal and Woody Allen, came to his defense. They called him an "American dissident" and compared him to the Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Presumably they meant to draw parallels between Flynt's victimization at the hands of repressive sexual puritanism and the Russians' at the hands of the authoritarian Soviet state. It shall be left to the reader to judge the appropriateness of the comparison, but this much can be said: the pornographer as victim is an equation made from the mentality of the mid-Sixties before the advent of the women's movement. For, thanks to that movement, we are now in a position to understand that obscenity and pornography, far from being an alternative to sexual repression, do in fact trade in the same coin: contempt for women and traffic in our sexuality. Flynt is no dissident; he is a pimp.

The arguments of liberals against suppressing pornography, however, are very often seductive and in some cases even thoughtful. We are familiar now with the attempts of some — as at the Edmonton Public Library and its show of paintings of female nudes — to equate the depiction of the nude body per se with grossness and vulgarity. In this equation no distinction is made between eroticism and pornography, between celebration and degradation, between naturalism and the grotesque. Indeed the assumption is made — and this is as old as the Judaeo-Christian culture — that the nude female body is the same thing as prurience and corruption. Obviously this equation must be protested.

This too should be considered: that the stripping way to sexual taboos is a moment in the liberation from the sexual, emotional, and social control of the male-centred family, the male-controlled marketplace and the male-dominated state. In the taboos around female virginity and chastity, in the double standard of monogamy for women and promiscuity for men, in the systematic devaluation of women's work based on fallacious arguments about our 'biology,' and in the publicization of female masochism in commercial imagery, lies hte patriarchal prohibition against women determining the nature and practice of their own sexuality.

Finally, one must be very cautious about asking the state to move against the production and distribution of pornographic and violent materials. Do we really trust the authorities in our society to confine themselves to censorship of pornography, to not expand that mandate to include censorship of anti-establishment points of view? If we ask for the suppression of Hustler, do we find ourselves deprived again of D.H. Lawrence, of Germaine Greer, Angela Davis and Lina Wertmuller?

But other arguments raised by civil libertarians and free-thinkers are more problematic. The claim, for instance, that repressive morality is 'responsible fort' child abuse, domestic violence, and sexual hang-ups is too simplistic by half. It says nothing about the relationship between repressive morality and the constrains of law, custom, practice and habit, nor about repressive social structures (such as marriage and its feudal economic relations which underlie women's dependency) nor about the intertwining of one's class with one's sexuality. By the same token, the claim that "sexual repressiveness has produced a gun culture of the most alarming proportions in all human history" (this was written in 1971, in the United States) is a rather glib assertion of causality; besides, seven years later, we now have a gun culture and pornography.

The hope that pornography, as 'harmless fantasy,' is a way for the sexually-aroused and frustrated to blow off steam, as it were, the hope that it might embody the individual's right to explore fully his/her sexuality, and the principle that impediments to self-expression muyst be rejected are only superficially libertarian. They are meant to be meaningful to us all but are mostly meaningful to men. What is 'harmless fantasy' to men is very often a humiliation to women as we see over and over again images that mock and injure our femaleness. The male in process of embodying his sexuality, in the full flight of self-expression (or so he thinks), is very often a rapist, a sadis, a person violent in language and arrogant in imagination. At what point, one might ask, do his rights become in fact women's diminution?

A European film-maker says, "we should be able to open up and show all kinds of things because it means you can trust in people to react soundly." That would be very nice. But people do not react irrespective of their cultural baggage. While watching a pornographic film, say, they have with them the consciousness shaped by their sexual socialization, by their values and of feelings about family life and work life and by the lessons imbibed at school, in church, in the media. As long as that cultural baggage is characterized by the myths of male superiority, as long as the social situation of a film is the generalized coercion of women in our society, then pornography can only be a sexist event.

The same thing can be said of many works of art, soo. Traditionally, it has been argued that art is exempt from all considerations of 'permissiveness and 'censorship' because we all believe that 'good' art — the kind that galleries and wealthy people collect — cannot possibly be bad for anyone. After all, aesthetic values are universally veneficient, are they not? Do they not refer only to art itself — no messing about, here, in social and political values? Do we not assume that wokrs of art are or should be part of everyone's cultural experience because they make up a common heritage for us all, irrespective of our maleness or femaleness, our economic privileges or lack of them, our residency int he metropolis or in the hiterlands? In other words, it is usually considered bad form to enquire of an art object just what value system it buttresses, what set of power relationslies behind its execution and presentation, or waht particular group finds its interest reflected in its images.

I am looking at a book, The Nude in Canadian Painting. The text at one point reads: "the figure in Dennis Burton's arresting Niagara Honeymoon #1 The Bedroom is a packaged nude, and a reminder that Pop Art was very much involved with containers.... James Spencer's Margaret, althought superficially similar to the Burton, is in fact quite different.... Spencer uses ready-made subject-matter to raise questions about the relationship between the fundamental nature of the subject...and the object. The ambiguity is deepened by the over-life-size scale" etc..... I look at the pictures. I do not so much see playful commentaries on "packages" and "containers" and thought-provoking "ambiguities" as this: women in panties (black lace!) and garters, naked breasts and flesh, thick, heavy and pendulous with their uselessness, scrunched-up faces as though hurting, the whole arrangement pivotted towards the viewer, presumably male, as though it were an offering, long since deprived of any animation. This is art. It's supposed to be good for me.

I do not mean to sound like a luddite, calling on feminists to trash cinemas and art galleries. I mean to enlarge the discussion around pornography beyond the usual categories of 'civil rights' and 'aesthetics'. i mean to argue that these categories are not the universal perspectives we have accepted them as but are particular. Particular in the sense thtey reflect the way a certain group of people (usually men and formerly aristocratic but now middle-class and of liberal proclivities) see culture and social relations, and not the way others might. Their perspectives are in fact a justification for their privileges as men — for 'pornography is a legitimate human expression' read 'pornography legitimizes my dominance" — and so they are unable to discern in pornography the ideology of male supremacy. It is people outside this dominant group, notably feminists, who discern that.

When, to our Judaeo-Christian inheritance that woman is venal and the gate of perdition, you add the medieval romance that sexuality is separate from spiritual love and the Victorian notion that 'good' women experience sex as a violation, then you arrive at the conclusion that women who assert their sexual needs for their own sake are perverse and deserving of discipline. Their victimization is justified. (And that of unassertive women too. If women are 'naturally submissive and masochistic, then 'naturally' they will enjoy being brutalized. A justification for every occasion).

I don't think it any coincidence that the explosion in imagery of violence against women accompanies the contemporary struggle for women's liberation. It is a means of dealing with 'uppity' women: bind and flog us on record album covers as we march through the streets demanding wages for housework.

Paint us vapid and defenceless as we organize our collective strength in unions, cooperatives and committees.

Snuff us out in films as we get the measure of our female pride and beauty and rage.

Look around. As women press our demands for a fair share of wealth and power, even as we imagine a tough, sweet new order of 'bread and roses,' the defence of male authority becomes ever more bizarre and desperate, as it depicts women in increasingly grotesque ways, usually sexual, as though to reduce us to our despised sexual function again is to blow us away in the wind.

Or, as one man put it, "men need pornography because they are incapable of relating to liberated women."

And women need it like we need a hole in the head.

It teaches us in its pervasiveness, even as we turn away from it, to see ourselves through the dominant male 'I' of our culture. "Men act, women appear," writes the English art critic John Berger. "Women watch themselves being looked at. Thus the woman turns herself into an object" when she views herself in pornographic imagery. Our nudity, our flesh, our posture, are not there as an expression of our own feelings about ourselves but are rather a sign that we have submitted to the wishes of the painter, the photographer, the collector, the audience as to how we shall be displayed. The ways in which we are posed and the expressions given our face are signals not of our own appetites but are rather the means by which is fed the appetite of another. So when we celebrate the humanist vision and the lively individualism of the artist, we should remember that these evolve in contradiction to the sexist reification of the woman-object. And when we celebrate the sexual revolution and its proliferation of sexual images, we should remember: 'The sexual revolution was so much late Sixties bullshit. It was about male liberation, women being shared property instead of private property. and we know which kind of property gets better treatment.'

There is an education of men as well through pornography. It teaches them that their honest, hmane wish to have their sexuality legitimzed, to have it shorn of its ashamed and guilt-ridden associations, will be met by images of themselves as fuck artists 'liberated' from their feelings and their responsibility to another person. In pornography, a person is no more complex than his or her orgasm, and sexual behaviour no more engaging of the person than a job at an assembly-line. Pornography takes the need-to-be-with-another and distorts it into sexual self-service. "it destroys our connectedness," says an American feminist film-maker, "and educates us to be alone."

***

I am at a photography show in Toronto. There are three walls of nudes, women in various postures in a room — the central prop is a dishevelled bed — and all of them are headless. The connecting image from one photograph to another is a ray of light, now thin and bright, now diffuse and shadowy, playing across the women's limbs, their breasts, at their feet, across their buttocks. I come to the last picture. It is of the photographer himself, shot upwards from the level of his feet so that his thighs and chest rear up like the Colossus of Rhodes. He is nude. Except that where his genitals should be is a great glowing ball of light.

Women in rooms, lying on beds or strung languorosly across chairs. No purposeful activity here, no action outside, there, in the world of relationships and projects, just this enclosed intimacy between subject-camera and object-woman. Whatever her reason for being here, it is not her own. Perhaps she doesn't have her own, for women are not in the world, they are in their bodies, in teh inaction of the flesh. Male nudes are rarely depicted, says Jerrold Morris, a Canadian art critic, because "the sexual attributes of the male nude add little t its heroic, formal characteristics." Men, unlike women, are understood to have other things to do than project their sexuality. Men transcend their corporeality; women are their bodies. Women are shown headless, so irrelevant to their being are thgeir consciousness and intelligence. With every succeeding image of their nudity, we come to know the minutiae of their bodies, the pores and hairs and clefts, just so, and privacy and autonomy are banished. Women are not allowed to withhold themselves. Neither may they generate their own activity. There is, remember, that ray of light, the cord that leads back from the female body to the phallus, that instrument of energy, so mysterious and charged with meaning it does not even materialize but radiates in an aura of blinding light, homo triumphans.

The content of eroticism is the power men have over women. The power to enfeeble, enslave, terrorize and, ultimately, to kill: women under pursuit and attack, women in chains and ropes, women abducted and betrayed. Once we have been defined as unconscious and indolent, anything is possible: Hustler magazine makes jokes about Betty Ford's mastectomy; a record album, showing the bikinied crotchof a woman, is called 'Jump On It'; and in Denmark a study of the effects of freely-available pornography shows that all sex crimes (exhibitionism, voyeurism, indecency) have decreased in frequency, except rape.

Sexual violence against women is not about sex, it is about power and control. Our culture's equation of sexuality with dominance-submission obscures this. Obscures the political content of male hostility towards women. Says Susan Brownmiller, feminist author of a book about rape, "if illustrations show the lynching of blacks or the gassing of Jews, then people would understand it as a political issue, but tie a woman up and that's sexy."

In images of erotic arousal, men and women learn well who is allowed to do what to whom. But hte location of that lesson in the irreducibles of 'biology' rather than in the mutations of politics, demobilizes us, even as our rage rises like blood in our throats.

What is to be done?

In the short term, feminists and their supporters should demand that materials depicting the bondage, mutiliation or murder of women for no other purpose than sexual arousal be banned, whether the image is in a porno film or on a billboard.

We should be organized to put forth our political point of view, to offer a counter-education to the existing ideology that will teach the public to discern in pornography its violently anti-woman content and reject it, the same way the public rejects gratuitou s images of the torture of animals, the brutalization of children, and the humiliation of minority groups.

We should offer a definition of pornography that releases the discussion from the liberal trap of 'different strokes for different folks,' that clearly makes the distinction between the erotic connection of equally willing, self-determining partners and the obscene connection of the sexual fascist and his victim.

We need to be clear that the resistance to pornography is not the same as the desire to legislate sexuality but is the need to delegitimize images of male supremacy over women. "What we need now," says the psychologist Bruno Bettleheim, "is a new sexual morality freeing sex from the old anxieties, the old nhibitions, and from the social and sexual superiority of the male." That is, the "anxieties" and "inhibitions" associated with the sexual experience are the inevitable concomitants of the intimidation of women and the split in men of their tender feelings from their desire.

We must begin to situate sexuality in our social relations to see that our sexual unhappiness is related not just to the anxieties of the sex act but also to the deadening relations of the family place the workplace and the marketplace. The content of pornography confirms, not contradicts, those deadening effects for it 'celebrates' the atomization and irresponsibility of hte person in the pretence that what one does as a sexual being has nothing to do with anything else, neither with the sexual partner nor with the society at large. Eroticism, on the other hand, that gentle, laughing, administering embrace of sensual camaraderie is the exact opposite of, is the alternative to, the social tyrannies of passivity and mechanization. Such sexuality has everything to do with the way we see ourselves politically, in the polis, as co-citizens of the aggrieved against those forces that would circumscribe and attenuate our compassion and vigor.

In the future, the couple will be "multifariously depicted," says Vilgot Sjoman, Swedish director of I Am Curious (Yellow), "socially rooted, psychologically distinct, politically distinct. Prurient interest thereupon slinks around the corner — it cannot manage to embrace the total human being." Will be so? Perhaps. Could be so? Definitely. Men and women as equable collaborators in sex as in work and creative effort. But only if we start from where we are, at the pornographic image, say, at the woman black and blue and roped, the man her disciplinarian, this our, men's and women's only marriage, the only coition permitted us, and say we would have it otherwise.

More entries on: From the magazine

The new face of feminism?

Posted by Melissa Wilson at 11:18 AM ET | Comments (4)

With minimum wage raising at a snail's pace as compared to tuition fees (not to mention rent and groceries) and student loan agencies notoriously random with handouts, student across the country submit to myriad wacky plans to keep their cupboards stocked with tomato soup and ramen noodles. I, myself, have been known to dole out balloons and extra ice cream scoops at the pizza joint that I waitress at in hopes that the kids' parents will leave me a hefty tip.

It seems 22-year-old Natalie Dylan (not her real name) of Sacramento, California, is one step ahead of me in that she's auctioning off her virginity in order to pay for grad school.

Already saddled with a degree in Women's Studies (seriously), Dylan is hoping to grab a cool million for her cherry, to be offered up at the Moonlight Bunny Ranch, a legal brothel in Nevada.

Are tuition fees really that high in the U.S.? Where's President-elect Obama on this one?

Dylan is quoted as saying, "We live in a capitalist society. Why shouldn't I be allowed to capitalize on my virginity?"

Of all the comments and criticisms that have been hurled at Dylan, my favourite was someone who referred to the plan as "the ultimate act of feminism." Oddly enough, I heard a friend of mine say something similar in regards to her plans to graduate university, get married, have babies and stay at home and raise them.

Never one to qualify myself a feminist in any way, with This Mag's current cover story, 'The New Face of Porn,' the comment got me thinking: has all the bra-burning and business-suiting of the 1960s been watered down to a laissez-faire feminist culture (Sarah Palin definitely knocked us women down a few pegs) or is the simple act of choice what the first-wavers were lobbying for all along?

Is choosing to auction off one's virtue the epitome of feminism, or the antithesis of it?

A video of Natalie Dylan on CNN, after the jump.

More entries on: Feminism

November 06, 2008

CNN fakes their holograms

Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 09:39 PM ET | Comments (2)

CNN's coverage of the Presidential election included some interesting segments: hologram interviews. You might have seen reporter Jessica Yellin and, later, Will.I.Am in hologram form being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper respectively. If you haven't already, here they are:

Here's the thing though, they weren't actually holograms. From the CBC: "The CNN anchors were not really speaking to three-dimensional projected images, but rather empty space, Kreuzer said. The images were simply added to what viewers saw on their screens at home, in much the same way computer-generated special effects are added to movies.

Kreuzer said the images were tomograms, which are images that are captured from all sides, reconstructed by computers, then displayed on screen.

Holograms, on the other hand, are projected into space."

I think I finally have a proper explanation for Cooper's uncomprehending look following Will.I.Am's short dance.

More entries on: American Politricks

Listen to This podcast: Myrna Kostash on "Pornography: A Feminist View"

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 12:50 PM ET | Comments (0)

If the audio player doesn't display, click here to download the mp3 file.

This Magazine cover, July/August 1978 The November/December issue of This Magazine features a cover story about the collision of feminism and pornography, an idea the magazine has explored before. In the July/August 1978 issue, Myrna Kostash wrote a cover story titled "Pornography: A Feminist View," an essay that strongly criticized the pornography then entering the mainstream as being harmful to women, and to the feminist cause.

I spoke with Myrna in September to discuss how the original article came about, how her views have changed since then, and whether the term "feminist pornography" is a contradiction in terms. Myrna Kostash is an Edmonton-based writer, teacher, and translator, and the author of
Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada and The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir.

Tomorrow we'll be reproducing Myrna's original essay here on the blog in its entirety, so check back then to read it.

This is the first in what we hope will become a semi-regular podcast on the website. As always, I'm happy to hear your feedback. Contact me at editor at thismagazine dot ca.

This podcast is published under a Creative Commons licence. The music you hear is also CC-licensed:

Intro: "Lemmings in Love" by Pornophonique
Outro: "Ender" by WhiteRoom

More entries on: Listen to This

November 05, 2008

Video: Alex Felipe on the toll of Philippine gold mining

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 03:50 PM ET | Comments (0)

In the second of our video series, you'll hear Filipino-Canadian photojournalist Alex Felipe talk about visiting remote indigenous communities in the Philippines, to photograph the effects that gold mining has had on their communities. These photos and more are featured in Alex's photoessay "All that Glitters" which is only in the November/December 2008 issue of This Magazine. The issue will be available online soon, but you can buy it on the newsstand now and subscribers will receive it any minute.

If you missed yesterday's video feature with November/December cover story author Alison Lee, it's available here.

More entries on: Video

November 04, 2008

Guest Blogger: On Being Canadian Today (Impotence)

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 04:17 PM ET | Comments (1)

[Editor's Note: from time to time we'll feature guest bloggers on important issues; In honour of today's big electoral hurrah in the U.S., a reflection on Canadians' feelings of helplessness as the American presidential race comes down to its final hours.]

BY SARAH BARMAK

A couple of weeks ago a friend from Texas who is living and working in Toronto asked me to print out a form he needed to cast his absentee ballot. I may have slightly overreacted.

Outwardly, I simply smiled and asked for the file; inwardly, my heart swelled with unbridled enthusiasm. I rose to the task of switching on my printer and clicking "Print" as if it was the most meaningful act I had done, or could do, for the human race.

Let me explain. I'm a Canadian. That means I'm both a) fascinated by the U.S. presidential race, the outcome of which has serious consequences for both Canada and the rest of the world, and b) utterly powerless to influence it in any way. I'm more impotent than a voter casting a ballot in bluest Manhattan: I can't
vote at all.

Worse, as someone who checks political blogs and election polls daily (I obsessively refresh meticulous pollster Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com as well as Steve Benen's "Political Animal" blog) I'm probably more informed about this particular election than most U.S. voters. Not that it matters. The only thing it has an effect on is how my own productivity has fallen (steeply) and how fed up my friends and family are with getting links to Sarah Palin-related articles and YouTube videos (very).

Some Canadians have been doing what they can to help Barack Obama, the Democratic senator who is the world's choice for U.S. president, by phoning U.S. and dual citizens living in Canada and directing them to request their absentee ballot. Others have even travelled to the states to canvass door-to-door. Others outside the U.S. are dealing with their feelings of impotence in slightly more creative ways. Others are simply thinking positive thoughts, "The Secret" style. Good luck to them.

Me, I'll be spending this evening with a pint, CNN's holographic, person-like shouting heads, and a laptop, checking election data, ready to cheer or cry as necessary.

My Texan friend's form, by the way, failed to print. Apparently the PDF was corrupt. Perhaps I wasn't thinking positive.

Sarah Barmak is a freelance writer living in Toronto.

More entries on: American Presidential Election

Video: Cover-story writer Alison Lee talks "The New Face of Porn"

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 03:19 PM ET | Comments (1)

November/December 2008 Cover We're very excited to share with you the first in what we hope will be a series of This Magazine video features; some of these may stand on their own, while others — like this discussion with Alison Lee, who wrote the cover story in the November/December 2008 issue, "The New Face of Porn" (at right) — will expand on articles and ideas in the magazine, or offer a chance to meet the magazine's contributors behind the scenes.

Alison's cover story will be available on our website at thismagazine.ca soon, but you can buy it now from better bookstores and newsstands, and if you subscribe, it should land in your mailbox very shortly.

I'll post another video tomorrow, and then on Thursday look for a downloadable audio interview in which I talk with Edmonton writer Myrna Kostash about another cover story on pornography she wrote for This Magazine — in 1978.

More entries on: From the magazine

ThisAbility #3: Somewhere Stephen Hawking is drooling (on purpose) right now

Posted by Aaron Broverman at 01:40 PM ET | Comments (1)

brain Now for those of you who are actually paying attention: Last week, I promised that I would talk about a distinctly able-bodied affliction I’ve noticed called the "Sorry Syndrome". Well, I’m going to make like the government and put that disability issue on the back burner in favor of something I arbitrarily deem more important and more worthy of my resources.

At the beginning of our ThisAbility experiment, I told you I would interrupt my regular focus on attitudinal barriers to bring you transformative news that directly affects the disabled community at large. This is one of those times. It comes to us via the non-stop ticking of CBS's 60 Minutes. The story was called Harnessing the Power of the Brain and it focuses on a technological breakthrough worthy of Professor Charles Xavier and his Cerebro device from the pages of X-Men. The story centers on a technological marvel called the Brain-Computer Interface System: it's a skull cap peppered with electrodes that feed directly into a PC, allowing engaged minds trapped within useless bodies to control their world independently using only their thoughts.

This isn't mind control. You can't make your support worker's head explode just by focusing intensely enough, but you can type a word, letter by letter, just by consciously thinking about it. Every time you select a letter with your thoughts, your brain sends a signal to the computer and the word is written before your eyes. Another piece of technology,Braingate, negates the skull cap and implants electrodes directly into the brain. The first group who signed up for the clinical trials, can now pilot a wheelchair from afar using their minds (it's not yet safe enough to sit in the chair while thinking your way around the room). Braingate technology is also being used to develop hyper-realistic prosthetics that can be controlled within the brain, as if they were real limbs.

Of course, this is all great news, giving people who were formerly trapped inside themselves their lives back. Now they can communicate and go back to their old jobs as if they just went on vacation, instead of rehab. People with spinal cord injuries could get back on their feet again faster than Lee Majors ever did in The Six Million Dollar Man. A few more tests in the lab and they can rebuild people: they do have the technology. But who's to say that everybody wants to be rebuilt? Who's to say everyone wants to take the blue pill? Even if you want the "Super Soldier Serum" this neuron-powered technology provides, it has yet to be ascribed a price tag or wide release. When it is, it will most definitely be tough to afford on a disability pension, potentially shutting out those who could get the best use out of it. Maybe that's the problem with stories about futuristic, life saving technology. Shows like 60 Minutes dangle the carrot, only to have it yanked away by bureaucratic red tape when it's finally ready for public usage. It wouldn't be the first piece of medical technology marred by squandered potential.

More entries on: ThisAbility

Utne Reader ♥'s This Magazine

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 11:05 AM ET | Comments (0)

Utne Reader cover November-December 2008 Our friends at the esteemed Utne Reader have excerpted a This Magazine story for their November-December 2008 issue. Peter Tupper's "The Addict's Last Refuge" examined the poorly understood drug ibogaine, which can help suppress addicts' heroin cravings. Despite plenty of anecdotal evidence that ibogaine can achieve results in people who haven't responded to traditional rehab, the drug is in legal limbo in Canada and illegal in the U.S. Remember, you read it here first!

More entries on: THIS matters

November 03, 2008

Tell us what you really think with our 2008 reader survey!

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 02:28 PM ET | Comments (2)

This is just a quick blog post to ask all our lovely blog readers, friends, and frenemies to take a moment to fill out our 2008 This Magazine Reader Survey. It should take just a few minutes, and the information you provide is very helpful to us as we work at improving the magazine and the website. Whether you've had a subscription for 40 years or stumbled across the blog last week, we'd like to hear from you.

And there's something in it for you as well, in the form of fabulous prizes: If you choose to provide your name and email at the end of the survey, you'll be entered in a draw for an autographed copy of former editor Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine; an HSU VT-12 'Ventriloquist' six-channel compact surround sound system; or one of five Cocoa Camino gift baskets filled to the brim with organic, fair-trade chocolate.

More entries on: THIS matters

The New Guy

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 12:50 PM ET | Comments (0)

Graham F. Scott Now that the first issue of This Magazine bearing my name is on newsstands, I thought it was time for a proper introduction. And at the end of my first editorial ("The Trickle-Up crisis", November/December 2008) I promised a short explanation about "who exactly I am and what business I have being here." Here it is.

I've been a reader of This for many years, and a fan. I'm a voracious reader of magazines of all kinds, and This always intrigued and inspired with its mix of investigative journalism, passionate social advocacy, and authoritative opinion. And even after almost 43 years in print, it hasn't lost its youthful style and non-conformist streak, something that the Canadian media landscape badly needs.

The reason I wanted to work for This is because if it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. There are plenty of magazines out there that write about politics, art, and culture, but they specialize very narrowly, or they're captive to political or commercial interests. Most magazines, newspapers, and broadcasters are owned by large multimedia conglomerates who have strong vested interests in pleasing their advertisers, which curtails their freedom to report unpleasant, unpopular, or unprofitable truths. This Magazine is different: as one of the magazine's ad slogans went for many years, "nobody owns us." And that's all too rare in the magazine business today. We're a non-profit charitable foundation that exists to educate readers and the general public, mentor the next generation of Canadian writers, and add to the diversity of voices in Canadian media.

Before arriving in the editor's chair in mid-August, I'd already worked as the magazine's columns editor for a year. Prior to that I'd worked as a freelancer for about two years, writing for magazines and working part-time at two very different publications, as an associate editor at Canadian Business and assistant editor at Precedent, a small independent magazine for young lawyers. Before that, I worked as news editor and then editor in chief of The Varsity, the largest student newspaper in Canada. In other words I know, at the very least, the differences between 'less' and 'fewer,' 'its' and 'it's,' and 'begs the question' and 'poses the question.'

All magazines are collaborative. Our small staff gets to work with the best and brightest writers, illustrators, and photographers in Canada. The magazine relies on a group of dedicated volunteers too, who do everything from stuffing envelopes to judging our annual Great Canadian Literary Hunt (which appears in the November/December 2009 issue). To the thousands of loyal and generous subscribers and donors who keep us financially viable; thank you.

Finally, there wouldn't be a This Magazine without you, the reader. We exist to inform, entertain, and provoke you, and I encourage you to tell us what you like and don't like about the magazine. This is a small shop; I check my own email, and if you call during business hours, chances are good I'll be the one who picks up. So send me a letter, comment on a blog post, pitch us a story — we want to hear from you. This Magazine is your magazine.

Graham F. Scott
editor@thismagazine.ca

More entries on: THIS matters

Previous month: October 2008
Next month: December 2008

Listed in

THIS MAGAZINE. BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL

Please note that all writers hold the copyright for their pieces and it is illegal for any portion of them to be copied or distributed without their expressed permission. So please don't steal.

THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

November 28, 2008

The skinny on flu shots

November 25, 2008

ThisAbility #6: Riddle Me This

November 24, 2008

Book Review: Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

November 21, 2008

Another day, another hissy fit

November 20, 2008

World Philosophy Day!

Run a deficit. Please.

November 19, 2008

Margaret Wente, the race thinker

Have you taken our reader survey yet? You could win an autographed copy of The Shock Doctrine!

November 18, 2008

ThisAbility #5: Walking between worlds

November 17, 2008

Guest Blogger: Fracturing the rainbow alliance

November 14, 2008

Listen to This podcast: Toronto Life's Aqsa Parvez cover story, "Girl, Interrupted"

Saving the environment in Ontario just became illegal

November 13, 2008

Review: Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded

November 12, 2008

A second chance to do Canada's portrait gallery right

November 11, 2008

ThisAbility #4: The Sorry Syndrome

November 07, 2008

Classic This: "Pornography: A Feminist View"

The new face of feminism?

November 06, 2008

CNN fakes their holograms

Listen to This podcast: Myrna Kostash on "Pornography: A Feminist View"

November 05, 2008

Video: Alex Felipe on the toll of Philippine gold mining

November 04, 2008

Guest Blogger: On Being Canadian Today (Impotence)

Video: Cover-story writer Alison Lee talks "The New Face of Porn"

ThisAbility #3: Somewhere Stephen Hawking is drooling (on purpose) right now

Utne Reader ♥'s This Magazine

November 03, 2008

Tell us what you really think with our 2008 reader survey!

The New Guy