“It’s the biggest usable cavity in the field right now,� said Graham Sadtler, designer of the kitchen appliance we are admiring. We are at the launch of a new oven on what may be the hottest day of the summer so far in Toronto.

Sadtler, who wears a suit-friendly faux-hawk and tasteful rubber plugs in his earlobes, is explaining the four years of research and work that went into creating this new high-end oven (in the range—ha ha—of $5,000), made by Thermador, the North Carolina outfit who created the first in-wall oven—or, as it was known in the original 1955 literature, “a bilt-in rangeâ€? (sic). Just as “biltâ€? seems a better-designed word, when you think about it, than the boxier, over-vowelled “built,â€? the oven we are looking at says “engineeringâ€? rather than “hearthâ€? or “bread pudding.â€? It looks, in fact, like a cross between a smoky limousine window and a flat-screen TV. (more…)

A self-confessed double agent for Saddam Hussein’s notorious intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, and Israel’s Mossad, has returned to Canada. How he engineered his escape, whether Canada delivered a man into torture, and whether Hussein Ali Sumaida has finally found sanctuary, are all part of a haunting, on-going, and disturbing tale.

Click here to read the Walrus Online Exclusive.

I’m thrilled that my own personal Palme D’or pick - the Roumanian film “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days” by Cristian Mungiu - ended up winning the top prize at Cannes this year. For me it was between this film, and the Coen Brothers’ “No Country For Old Men“, and a lot of the international critics felt the same.

The Coens’ film, a genre-blender of cop chase and western based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, is an ingenious, suspenseful, and beautifully crafted picture about an aging sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones – no stretch there) trying to thwart an unstoppable serial killer, played by Javier Bardem. It’s a more serious and reflective movie than audiences might expect from the hyperironic directors of “Fargo”. Although there’s lots of bloodshed and some pungent comic bits, the movie delivers a serious and keenly elegiac portrait of a riven America in which law and order and wild-west morality have been replaced by drugs, greed and random violence. (more…)

There’s something unseemly and just a little ridiculous about politicians worming their way into pop culture, and something equally unseemly and ridiculous when they attempt to exploit pop culture for political ends. Small wonder, then, that hockey commentators are readjusting their toupees over the decision by Jack Layton, Stéphane Dion, Gilles Duceppe, and their band of twitted MPs to criticize Hockey Canada for selecting Shane Doan as the captain of our World Championship squad. Doan, those of us who follow tempests in sporting teapots will know, was investigated for allegedly calling a Québécois linesman a “fucking Frenchman” during a Phoenix Coyotes game in Montreal against the Canadiens in 2005.

There are several ways in which this criticism is wrongheaded: For one, Doan, a devout Christian, is by all accounts one of the nicest and most respectful players in hockey. And he was cleared by an NHL investigation after testifying that he had said to a teammate only that they should expect biased calls from four French referees in Montreal. (more…)

I am sitting in a panel discussion in a tiered hall at the University of Toronto whose theme is Pico Iyer’s ecstatic tribute to multicultural Toronto in The Global Soul. At one end of the long table, with its microphones, its demoralizingly polite allotment of bottled water, is Pico himself, who interrupted a sojourn to a monastery in Santa Barbara, California, just to come to Toronto, sprite-like and preternaturally young in his pressed grey suit despite his legendary jet-lag. In between is a buttoned-up, Hong Kong born political scientist, vaguely embarrassed for having sported a green tie; a university research chair in film and media who has an off-hand casualness born of familiarity with the avant garde; an afro-Canadian performance artist; and a moderator from Bombay who had reported on the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide for a newspaper in Singapore. The global soul, wounded and encompassing, encapsulated. (more…)