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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My friend and fellow blogger Jeet has suggested that Barack Obama should ”wave goodbye” to his economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee - but not, mind you, because Goolsbee has done anything wrong. In the recent controversy involving Canada, NAFTA and the Obama campaign, Jeet even believes that ”Goolsbee was the innocent party.” Why, then, does Jeet think Goolsbee should go? In a word, “because of his policies.” What [...]
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Christopher Hitchens, perhaps cleaning himself for a trip to Mecca. Photo from Vanity Fair.
Despite his long history of unpredictable political and personal turns, Christopher Hitchens has completely shocked me with his recent decision to accept Mohammed as a prophet, a totally unexpected development coming so soon after his anti-theist polemic God Is Not Great.
The swaggering [...]
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Hatoyama Kunio, Japan’s Justice Minister, gave an interview in the magazine Weekly Asahi last October that has been reprinted on Japan Focus, (a peer reviewed electronic journal and webzine on Japan), and reported recently in the Japan Times. The interview has some fascinating nuggets, but none so interesting as Hatoyama’s explanation for why Japan should continue to uphold the death penalty [...]
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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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I will get back to more substantial posting soon, but in the meantime, there’s a new unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise out. Slate has the highlights. Author Andrew Morton rejects the gay rumours:
Page 68: Remember the sex-on-a-train scene in Risky Business? Morton alleges that “while Tom and Rebecca [De Mornay] were nervous before playing the [...]
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Finding good prose in the blogging world is as difficult as locating a splinter from the true cross or the crate housing the arc of the covenant. So I’m grateful to Scott McLemee, essayist and polymath, for calling attention to Phil Nugent’s wry, culturally informed, and nonchalantly modulated tribute to Evel Knievel. Anyone who has memories of [...]
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Posted in Media, Personalities, tagged Conrad Black on December 3, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Badgered by a BBC reporter about his legal trouble Conrad Black, convicted felon and Peer of the Realm, replied with a startling argument: “The conventional media wisdom in the U.K. is a kind of false bourgeois piety and priggishness that assumes that whatever American prosecutors say is true.”
To many ears it’ll surely seem odd to [...]
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The recent death of Norman Mailer called to mind an article I once wrote about bellicose writers. I started off talking about Stanley Crouch’s quarrel with Dale Peck and Ernest Hemingway fight with Max Eastman. That led to my take on Mailer:
When Norman Mailer grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, he idolized Hemingway. In due [...]
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Wayne Pacelle, reading cockfighting magazines, in 2004 (Photo: Washington Post).
Wayne Pacelle may be the single most effective advocate for animals in North America. Since becomming head of the Humane Society of the United States in 2004, he has turned that organization into one of the most powerful animal protection organizations in existence. Pacelle avoids the [...]
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