As the 1960s sitcom Get Smart makes its way back into popular culture with the release of the film adaptation starring Steve Carrell, it is amusing to note that the series has also had an unlikely impact on legal discourse. In both Canadian and American legal briefs and court rulings, the idea of the ‘cone of silence’ - which never worked on [...]
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If there is one thing historians understand, it’s that history does really repeat itself exactly. History is the study of the past in all it’s local and unique particularity. Yet still, some forms of human behavior do fall into patterns, and when people make the same mistakes over and over again, it’s worth asking why.
The [...]
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It took me nearly a year to notice this place, despite the fact that it’s located about half a block north of my office. Maybe it’s because I don’t frequently walk north (the GO train lies in the opposite direction); maybe it’s because there’s no glaringly bright signage announcing its presence (if you don’t look [...]
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If you talk to Russians and East Europeans of a certain generation, their faces will light up if you mention Cheburashka. The star of a children’s book and series of short films, Cheburashka is as beloved in the east as Winnie the Pooh and the Muppets are in the west. He looks a bit like [...]
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In an article for Slate, I took a deeper look at the controversy surrounding Fredric Wertham and the postwar anti-comics crackdown. During the course of my article I made reference to Michael Chabon’s much-loved novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (where Wertham figures as a very minor character). Somewhat to my surprise, Chabon took umbrage [...]
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Posted in Media on March 7, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The Big Book of British Smiles.
Laura Rozen calls attention to a curious aspect about the widely-noticed article about Samantha Power (which led to her resignation as an advisor to Barack Obama) that ran in The Scotsman. The article has this quote:
“She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to [...]
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Sarah Boxer’s new book.
Last fall while visiting Boston, I met up with my friend Sarah Boxer, an excellent cultural journalist and cartoonist. Over an appropriately American lunch of hamburgers and coke we chatted a bit about her upcoming book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, an anthology of strong blog writing. The problem with such [...]
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Marshall McLuhan was a bizarre figure: a conservative Catholic who became the hero of the 1960s counterculture and a brilliant analyst of print culture who had trouble writing clear prose. In the Literary Review of Canada, Bob Rodgers writes an essay worth looking up which splendidly captures McLuhan and his times:
McLuhan, a stringy but handsome man at six [...]
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Posted in Canadian politics, Media on January 17, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Two Canadian journalists are currently fighting separate battles for freedom of expression. One, a flamboyant, and over-the-top conservative publisher, is angry that he has been forced to attend a government hearing. The other, an equally flamboyant and over-the-top leftist publisher, would love nothing more than to receive a hearing from the government. In their different [...]
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For the past decade, Médecins Sans Frontières has been releasing a top ten list of the world’s most underreported humanitarian emergencies. They were inspired to do so after a major famine that occured in Sudan in 1998 received almost no coverage in the American media. The list for 2007 is now out, and, [...]
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