1. “The Scene on Arrival in Port-au-Prince” by Ray Rivera | The Lede
It’s not every week that the Western Hemisphere experiences what may be its worst-ever natural disaster, but as we all know, this week it did. Rivera offers a first-hand account of landing at Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport on Thursday. He finds the runway intact, but the terminal in shambles: much like the rest of the capital. Read his report, then follow this link to donate to the Red Cross.

2. “More than 1,400 Canadians missing amid ‘unbearable’ images in Haiti” by Jane Taber | Ottawa Notebook
Of the estimated 6,000 Canadians in Haiti, as of Friday, 1,415 remained unaccounted for in the wake of the devastating earthquake (and thirty-some aftershocks) that struck Port-au-Prince. Taber details the Harper government’s efforts to locate them and direct emergency relief to the devastated city.

3. “Bill Clinton on Haiti’s Future” by Max Fisher | The Atlantic Wire
As the United Nations’ Special Envoy to Haiti, the American ex-president will undoubtedly play a major role in the country’s recovery and rebuilding process. Clinton urges that short-term relief is not enough — what Haiti needs now is a long-term development plan to secure its future.

4. “Stories of Haiti: A reading by Edwidge Danticat” by Matthew Trost | TEDBlog
TEDBlog reposts this stirring lecture from October 2004: Danticat, the celebrated Haitian-American author, reminds her audience of Haiti’s many important contributions to world culture.

5. “Hard Lives in Haiti Just Got Harder” by Jeff Antebi | Utne Reader
Antebi, a photographer who travelled to Haiti twice in 2009, pours his heart into his keyboard: “I can’t watch the news on television or listen to the radio. I can’t look at websites. I’ve been there, and now I picture it in my head after a seven-point earthquake.”

6. “Which Hat Do You Wear?” by Mark Lewis | Slaw
Now for something completely different. As eight NFL teams prepare to battle it out this weekend in the divisional playoffs, the league is gearing up for a fight of its own: in the U.S. Supreme Court. A losing decision in its anti-trust suit, related to an exclusive merchandising deal with Reebok, could have wide-reaching implications for all major sports leagues.

7. “Grit Plan: Let Harper be Harper” by Rick Salutin | rabble.ca
Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament has become a hot topic in Canadian coffee shops, and provoked this week’s decline in his Conservative Party’s popularity. Salutin postulates that for most Canadians, Parliament is like the CBC — they don’t watch it, but want to know it’s still there.

8. “Visual data: The words China censors” by Parker Donham | Contrarian
This week, Google announced that it will reconsider its practices in China, including its censoring of search results, in the wake of cyber attacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Donham shares an eye-catching graphic, created by Information is Beautiful, that presents some of the many terms Chinese citizens have thus far been blocked from searching.

9. “Apple sends cease and desist letter to Gawker over ’scavenger hunt’” by Scott MacDonald | Quill & Quire
Technology blogs have been buzzing for weeks with rumours about the impending release of Apple’s tablet computer (a.k.a. iSlate, iTab, the Jesus tablet). Quill & Quire presents perhaps the most tantalizing rumour yet, a virtual confirmation of said device in the form of a cease-and-desist letter sent from Apple to Gawker.com, which has offered a cash reward to anyone who can prove its existence.

10. “Count Basie Paints a Picture of the Birth of the Blues” by Stephen Worth | Boing Boing
Worth is the director of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. He’s been guest-blogging for Boing Boing all week long, but saved the best for last: a 1968 clip of Count Basie telling stories — and playing beautiful music — about his first encounters with the blues in Kansas City and Harlem.

P.K. Page, an extraordinary poet, prose writer, and painter, one of our most individual talents, died yesterday at home in Victoria, B.C. It is a loss not only for the world of Canadian poetry, over which she loomed large in her unusual way, but for Canada itself.

While I had read poems of hers before, I first encountered the enormity of her contribution in Ottawa in 2003, when Prof. Zailig Pollock, now named Page’s literary executor, spoke to a conference I attended. Pollock’s presentation was about the possibilities of hypertext poetry, and he used his ongoing work on Page as an example. After that day, I began to seek her poems out, and my reading of her has been a universally satisfying experience. (For an artist with such a wide range, she was unbelievably consistent.) The Walrus was fortunate to publish her work a few times over the years, most recently in June 2008, when we featured her poem “Each Mortal Thing,” illustrated by a pair of P.K.’s wonderful drawings.

While her passing is a considerable loss, especially given how productive she was in old age, there is some good news. As Quill & Quire reported yesterday, Pollock will be working with Tim Inkster and his excellent Porcupine’s Quill Press to publish a ten-volume edition of Page’s complete works. Additionally, Pollock and Dalhousie professor Dean Irvine will be preparing a hypermedia archive of her work. Thanks to these efforts, she will live on.

Last June, P.K. published a poem called “Cullen in the Afterlife” in Poetry. On this day after her passing, quoting its closing lines seems to me a very good way of saying goodbye:

So he must start once more. He had begun
how many times? Faint glimmerings and dim
memories of pasts behind the past
recently lived — the animal pasts and vague
vegetable pasts — those climbing vines and fruits;
and mineral pasts (a slower pulse) the shine
of gold and silver and the gray of iron.
The “upward anguish.”
What a rush of wings
above him as he thought the phrase and knew
angels were overhead, and over them
a million suns and moons.

(Drawing by P.K. Page. Click here to read more of her poetry in The Walrus.)

Last week a computerized voice at TD Canada Trust called to inform me that my ATM card’s security had been compromised, and I had to come get a new one; meanwhile, my old card had been deactivated. This irritated me, not least because it was the second such call in three weeks. So I did what any right-thinking modern man does when faced with a petty annoyance. I groused about it on Twitter.

Minutes later my friend J. responded that the same thing had happened to him and his wife twice in two weeks. They’d been told it was a local skimming scam in Toronto’s Beaches — but I hadn’t been out thataway in over a month. I quickly drew two conclusions:

• TDCT’s recent security problems were more widespread than they admitted to their customers.

• Twitter is more interesting than I thought.

Twitter’s long-term strategy is to be “the pulse of the planet.” At first that sounded ridiculous to me — but you know what, maybe it’s half-right. Maybe its fire hose of data can be filtered, collated, and used to draw connections that would have otherwise gone unseen.

Corporations have been quick to realize this. Another online friend of mine recently went to the U.S. with her iPhone, and was charged $300 even though she had turned data roaming off. She called Rogers; they said it was her fault for not turning off 3G. So she complained on Twitter — and Rogers noticed, and contacted her, and refunded the charge in full.

Why? Because companies don’t care if individual customers are upset, but if they tell enough people about it in writing, on a public forum where complaints can easily be retweeted across the Twittersphere — well, that’s different. I still don’t know about pulse of the planet; but Twitter as the world’s complaint department? Now that I can buy.

Here in the First World, we complain about First World problems: inactive ATM cards, excessive data charges. It’s mostly no big deal. But in the developing world, there are real complaints. In particular, endemic corruption. I have long argued that the human leeches (i.e., government leaders) who steal money from their own people are the single biggest problem the Third World faces.

A few years ago, a Very Large Corporation called for ideas on how to use technology to help sub-Saharan Africa; I suggested a corruption-reporting service to name and shame those parasites. The company liked the idea, but it didn’t go forward. (See my latest Maisonneuve column for more about why.)

But now I realize that there’s no need for anybody to implement such a system. It already exists. It’s called Twitter. And in a few years, the developing world will have ubiquitous access to it via both the internet and cell-phone SMS, the medium for which Twitter was originally designed.

The cephalopod of corruption has long festered in the shadows, and held the poor world back with its bloodsucking tentacles. Call me an optimist, but I can easily imagine the monster finally dragged into light by a few Twitter hashtags, some judicious data mining, and the unquenchable human urge to complain. Paging Transparency International. Perhaps your Holy Grail is here.

1. “Wildrose gains momentum: should you care?” by Janyce McGregor | Inside Politics Blog
The Conservative Party’s iron-fisted grip on Alberta’s provincial politics weakened with the defection of two MLAs to the new Wildrose Alliance Party. Will this move have ramifications at the federal level, or is it strictly a provincial issue?

2. “Dying to tell the truth” by Cliff Lonsdale | J-Source
The death of Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang, the first Canadian journalist to be killed in Afghanistan since the start of the Canadian mission, shocked her professional community. Lang died while upholding the best practices of her profession, seeking truth for her readers. The president of the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma reflects on this tragedy.

3. “When authors attack!” by George Murray | Bookninja
An amusing anecdote about the dangers of writing negative book reviews on Amazon.com: (a) the author might be reading them, and (b) she just might report you to the FBI. Seriously.

4. “We Are the New Standard” by John Martz | Drawn!
This video clip, the first in Clement & Co.’s “ongoing documentary series covering people who are taking themselves and their work to a new level,” features artist Eric Nyquist.The L.A. native, who specializes in line drawing, speaks about the creative process and how he formed his style.

5. “Ten Players Who Will Shape Tech Law and Policy in 2010” by Michael Geist | Michael Geist’s Blog
It’s still early, but 2010 is shaping up to be a decisive year for new technology legislation and policies in Parliament (that is, of course, once it comes back from prorogation.) On his personal blog, the Toronto Star’s technology law columnist profiles ten movers and shakers who will undoubtedly influence said decisions.

6. “Deconstructing Social Darwinism — Part 1” and “Part 2” by Eric Michael Johnson | ScienceBlogs
Johnson, an anthropologist by trade, picks apart the reasons why scholars now question the usefulness of social Darwinism as a political theory. He also delves into the history of the term and explains why it could be considered a misnomer.

7. “The Moral and Constitutional Case for Gay Marriage” by Damon W. Root | Hit & Run
On the heels of the New Jersey state legislature’s decision to vote down a proposed gay marriage bill, Root links to Cato Institute chairman Robert A. Levy’s breakdown of the moral and legal arguments in favour of same sex marriage.

8. “Cocktails for Breakfast” by Jeremy J. Parsons | The Mark
For those of us who thought the end of the holiday season might mean the end of conspicuous alcohol consumption, Parsons comes to the rescue to discuss the merits of morning mixology. Mimosas aren’t the only game in town when it comes to getting a good a.m. buzz going.

9. “Significant gender gap in salaries continues at U.S. magazines” by D.B. Scott | Canadian Magazines
Citing the results of a salary survey published in Folio magazine, Scott notes that a significant gender gap still exists in pay rates at American magazines. The bigger the cheque, the wider the chasm.

10. “Lost in 8 minutes” by Mark Medley | The Ampersand
The sixth and last season of Lost premieres early next month. If, like me, you’ve been interested in the show but are unlikely to buy/rent/pirate all of the previous seasons before watching any new episodes, this handy video will catch you up in no time.

I admire how restless Jeff Lemire seems to be. Look at the career trajectory the Toronto cartoonist has charted for himself, look at how urgently he’s laid down every penline and brushstroke — you get the sense that this guy needs to tell stories. In 2007, following a Xeric Foundation grant and a self-published debut, Lemire released Tales From the Farm, a coming-of-age story that finds parallels between hockey, fatherhood, and superheroes. Another two volumes followed in what became his Essex County trilogy, each growing in ambition. Upon their completion (Top Shelf published all three as one massive collection last year), Essex County had become a multi-generational family chronicle that pieced together the lonely lives of kind-hearted brutes, pensive boys, and determined women.

Lemire’s cartooning is expressive without calling attention to itself, pointing instead toward the importance of plot, setting, and character. After Essex County, he created The Nobody, a loose adaptation of The Invisible Man that leavens Wells’s masterpiece of misanthropy with the addition of a sympathetic narrator (a teenaged girl). Vertigo, one of comics’ big-name genre-fiction imprints, released The Nobody, and is also publishing Lemire’s monthly title Sweet Tooth. The series, featuring an antlered boy “hybrid” and his grim survivalist companion, is something of a post-apocalyptic take on the cartoonist’s concerns with small towns and family units, and the allegiances formed and broken within. To discuss his rapidly expanding body of work, Lemire graciously set aside some time to chat on the phone with me.

I thought [Canadian cartoonist] Darwyn Cooke’s introduction in your omnibus collection was pretty smart, in that he aligned you with the tradition of Canadian literature more than he did with Canadian comics: you have an attention to character and to plot that I don’t necessarily expect when I think of comics.

Ten years ago, when people wanted to describe those kinds of things [about comics], they’d call them graphic novels. Now they call everything a graphic novel. I don’t set out to specifically do anything particularly high-minded; I always want to tell the stories that interest me at the moment. The Essex County stuff in particular is a personal story, and it’s a very Canadian story, so I can see why Darwyn’s intro suits it.

Maybe it’s that other Canadian comics don’t seem especially Canadian to me.

I shouldn’t speak for other cartoonists, but I have a feeling that a lot of Canadian cartoonists don’t want their stuff to be [stereotypically] Canadian. I don’t see Chester Brown writing a hockey graphic novel, for instance. But I love hockey, and I play hockey every week, so why not write about it? Maybe it’s just my personality. I’d be lying if I said my big ambition wasn’t to create the great hockey graphic novel.

What kind of challenges are involved with putting hockey to the comics page?

None, really. Hockey is such a visceral, fluid activity — there’s so much movement and action. You can take the structure of a single game, and you have your narrative skeleton. The tension’s all there; the drama is built into any game.

The thing that comes across most strongly in Essex County is its setting. The rural scenes are so authentic — the fields, the driving, going to a gas station to buy comics. You grew up in the real Essex County [in southwestern Ontario]; was that in Windsor or the outlying area?

It was a little town called Woodslee. Windsor was the city nearby. When I started the first book, I was just using the name. [What I called Essex County] is a fictional town that represents a bunch of smaller communities. The writing feels authentic because that really is where I come from. I wrote about my experiences and things that I like.

Another thing I like about Essex County is its attention to Toronto history, in terms of describing Union Station in the early ’50s or going to the Edgewater Hotel to start your TTC route. Do you anticipate returning to Toronto in your future work?

I would imagine. After Sweet Tooth, which is a rural story as well, I wonder how much more I’ll have to say about that setting. By that point, I’ll have been living in the city for twenty years or something. In the same way that my childhood and where I grew up influenced my work as an adult, I’m sure that five or ten years from now I’ll have more perspective on my life in Toronto. I’m working on another book with Top Shelf right now that’s set in eastern Canada and that’s been interesting too. I’ve only been there a few times, but I’m having a really good time researching the history. It’s different writing a story about a place that you don’t know as well, that you didn’t grow up in, or that you haven’t lived in for a significant amount of your life.

The Nobody maintained the small-town setting that you established in Essex County, but you turned away from writing slice-of-life literary fiction with a gigantic canvas to do a pulpy genre story. What was the thought process involved in making that shift?

Essex County was such a big part of my life for so long; it was a three- or four-year process of pretty intensive work. When you’re done something like that, it’s easy to get paralyzed into not being able to do something else. You’re always trying to live up to [the first project], especially if it was successful, which it was. I wanted to dive into something new to get that feeling off my back. At the time I was reading The Invisible Man, just for fun, and I thought, “This is public domain now. It’d be fun to play off what I did in Essex County, the small-town stuff, but put the opposite twist on it.” That’s how it started. In its scope, The Nobody isn’t as ambitious as Essex County. But you’ve got to work up to those books. You can’t sit down and make a sprawling personal epic every day. You’ve got to do other little works that feed into the next big one.

So you’ve gone from the years-long process of making the Essex County trilogy, to doing a slimmer standalone book, The Nobody, and now you’re working on a monthly series, Sweet Tooth. That’s the opposite of the way that things usually go, isn’t it? You started with the big narrative, and now you’re learning how to divvy it up into chunks.

Yeah. When I was doing Essex County, if I wanted a scene to be fifteen pages, I let it be fifteen pages. The Nobody was 144 pages. Before I started, I already knew how much time I had to tell the story. With Sweet Tooth I don’t have that problem because it’s open ended: if I want to take a whole issue to explore one scene with one character, I just do it. If anything, this is the most freedom I’ve had as a storyteller.

Do you have an idea of the shape of Sweet Tooth?

I know the end, for sure. I’ve already written the last issue. I need to know where it’s going because the whole story is a road trip, basically. I don’t see it being one of these things that lasts for fifty, sixty issues; it’s more of a twenty or thirty issue kind of thing. I don’t want to overstay my welcome and make things up that don’t add anything new to the story I want to tell.

I read something you wrote about post-apocalyptic comics that mentions Tim Truman and Richard Corben, who are great, super-pulpy genre influences to have. Are there any monthly comics you’re following now that help you figure out storytelling methods, or do you go back to those guys for inspiration?

I read tons of monthly comics, but I’m not trying to emulate anyone else’s stuff. I’m trying to do a monthly comic that feels different from other monthly comics. I have my high concept to start it off, but I’m trying to do something atmospheric and character-based. I want to maintain my storytelling voice. That’s the only way to stand out. There’s so much stuff coming out every month, and if you can’t offer something truly different, then what’s the point?

(Images courtesy of Jeff Lemire)

Writing is freedom. The freedom to express ideas; the freedom to influence others; the freedom to explore all facets of humanity. Many authors have used this power to delve into one of our greatest unknowns: what life would be like as a member of the opposite gender. Through fiction, male and female writers get to convey what they perceive to be the feelings, emotions, and struggles of, respectively, the fairer and fouler sexes. With that in mind, let’s consider some prime examples of both genders’ attempts to inhabit the minds of the other.

The Hours­ by Michael Cunningham, 1998
Cunningham creates not one but three substantial female characters, each of them deeply effected by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 book Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours follows Ms. Woolf (a fictional portrayal of the author), Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn as they grapple with mental illness, suicide, and sexual identity. Cunningham borrows not only Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style, but also many themes from her life and the plot of Mrs. Dalloway. His Pulitzer Prize–winning novel (which was transformed into an Oscar-winning film) is celebrated for its realistic portrayal of how women confront major problems of human existence.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, 1911
This novella has Wharton examining the social pressures at work on a Victorian husband who is vexed by a difficult choice: stay with his ailing shrew of a wife, or run off with their young, comely housemaid. Ethan longs to make a new life for himself with Mattie, but society imposes his obligation to honour his vows to Zeena. The male protagonist has often been called an analog for Wharton, who was experiencing a similar pressure — juggling a spouse and a lover — at the time of writing. The story ultimately ends in tragedy, as Ethan and Mattie are brutally injured in a sledding accident. Wharton’s marriage fared no better; she divorced in 1913 after suffering a nervous breakdown.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993
Eugenides’ debut novel, told in flashback by a chorus of middle-aged, male narrators, is about five teenaged sisters who all kill themselves. There’s a line near the beginning, when a doctor bandages the youngest sister’s wrists after a failed suicide attempt, that speaks volumes about the pitfalls of writing the opposing gender:

“Chucking her under the chin, he said, ‘What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.’ And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: ‘Obviously, doctor,’ she said, ‘you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’”

Obviously, neither was Eugenides. It’s Sofia Coppola, though, who arguably worked harder to identify with the opposite gender when she wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel. Her script embraces the distinct, first-person plural (male) narration that had allowed Eugenides to stay out of the sisters’ heads.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle, 1996
The Booker Prize–winning master of modern Irish fiction takes a complex and multifaceted look at abusive relationships from the perspective of an alcoholic mother of four. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors examines how such partnerships don’t always fit the victim-victimizer paradigm. Paula Spencer is physically and emotionally abused by her husband Charlo, yet finds herself adoring and despising him at various points throughout the narrative. Doyle goes to great lengths to make Paula more than a simple victim. He takes a more ambiguous stance, vacillating between love and hate, action and inaction. (A 2006 sequel, Paula Spencer, picks up her story ten years after Charlo’s death.)

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969
Winner of the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards, Le Guin’s science fiction classic is told not only from the perspective of the opposite gender, but enters the world of the virtually sexless natives of the planet Winter (a.k.a. “Gethen”). Genly Ai, a human male, is sent to Winter by the Ekumen (an intergalactic UN) to convince its inhabitants to join their interplanetary alliance. He is often confused by what he finds on Winter: the absence of gender; the lack of technological development; the nonexistence of war. On Winter, female characteristics are perceived as negative qualities, and Gethens are always referred to by masculine pronouns. Like the best sci-fi, The Left Hand of Darkness uses its fantastical settings, characters, and environment to delve into real-world issues (sexual politics, gender imbalances, etc.) In that light, Le Guin’s novel can be seen as a pioneering work in the field of feminist science fiction.

She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb, 1992
Lamb missed the major literary awards with his tale of a troubled young woman. But five years after it was first published, the novel won a far more lucrative prize, when it became an early selection to Oprah’s Book Club. She’s Come Undone tracks the life of Dolores Price from age four. Lamb details her sexually violent adolescence (she is raped at thirteen), joyless years as an obese student (she overeats for comfort), and equally tumultuous early adulthood (she endures an abortion, questions of sexual identity, and emotionally abusive relationships). Some readers have complained that the character’s problems are too exaggerated to generate any real sympathy for her (I’ve personally heard Dolores described as “fulfilling every negative female stereotype”); others, however, have identified with and embraced her sorrows.

Sarah by J.T. LeRoy, 2000
Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy is the pen name of Laura Albert, the Brooklyn-born writer who perpetrated the greatest literary hoax of the young twenty-first century. For years, Albert presented LeRoy as a transgendered, abused, former child prostitute and drug addict who took to writing as a therapeutic process. Many readers took J.T.’s fictions as semi-autobiographical. His/her first novel, Sarah, details the travails of twelve-year-old Cherry “Sarah” Vanilla, an aspiring lot lizard who is compelled into cross-dressing, prostitution, and shoplifting by his mother. LeRoy followed Sarah with three more novels, feature articles in major magazines, and an associate producer credit on Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant. Albert concealed LeRoy’s true identity by conducting interviews via phone and email; with the author’s consent, Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Albert’s partner, Geoffrey Knoop, appeared in public as him/her. In 2006, The New York Times and New York magazine revealed the lie, and Albert confessed all to the The Paris Review. The next year, she was convicted of fraud for signing legal documents (film contracts for Sarah) as a fictional character. It’s an open question whether the value of LeRoy’s observations has been voided by the truth of Albert’s identity.

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, 1985
Tyler’s tenth tome tells the story of travel writer Macon Leary. He is dispassionate and depressed, the author of a series of books for reluctant travelers. He knows where to eat Chef Boyardee pasta in Rome and whether there are Taco Bells in Mexico, should his readers ever suffer the misfortunate to visit such places. Macon’s life crumbles after his son is murdered outside of a fast food restaurant; his wife leaves him, and he devolves to become the imperfect bachelor, eating popcorn for breakfast and stomping his laundry clean in the shower. After an injury forces him to move back to his family home, which he shares with his two brothers (also divorced) and their spinster sister, what follows is a quirky comedy set against the backdrop of tragedy. With the help of his dog trainer cum girlfriend Muriel, Macon eventually learns to take charge of himself.

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, 2007
Hill’s sprawling novel (published as Someone Knows My Name in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand) takes its title from a list of 3,000 African-American slaves who fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War, and were then offered free passage to Nova Scotia in return. It is told through the life of Aminata Diallo — a character drawn in three dimensions, as fully realized a protagonist as there has been in Canadian fiction. In a 2009 interview with the CBC’s George Stromboulopoulos, Hill called his novel primarily “a woman’s story.” The author confessed that he found the process of writing from a female point of view “scary,” and joked that he was able to get into the voice “through a whole bunch of cross dressing.” In fact, he imagined Aminata as his child, and gave her the ability to love “even when she’s drawn through hell.” The Book of Negroes was met with near-universal acclaim, and Hill concluded that the process of writing it gave him a better understanding not only of the world, but also of his own daughter.

The third in a weekly series of recommended links from The Walrus Blogroll…

1. “Parliament Prorogued Until March” by Connie Crosby | Slaw
The co-operative law blog picks up one of the sharpest reactions to Stephen Harper’s facepalming of Parliament: University of Toronto political science professor Nelson Wiseman, interviewed by CBC News Now’s Carole MacNeil, shakes with the thunder of an aggrieved taxpayer.

2. “The Short Parliament” by Andrew Coyne | Capital Read
The post heard around the Canadian blogosphere. The national editor of Maclean’s suggests that “those MPs who wish to do the people’s business” should rebuke the Prime Minister’s decision by meeting with “those [MPs] with other loyalties” in absentia.

3. “Regent Park Project” by Adam Bemma | Rabble.ca
An eight-minute audio podcast about the ten-year revitalization plan for Canada’s oldest housing project.

4. “I wish I could spare Nancy from this painful experience” by Ronald Reagan | Letters of Note
On Nov. 5, 1994, the fortieth U.S. president handwrote this open letter to America, which discloses his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease with honesty and eloquence. Three days later, the Republican party took control of the House of Representatives and Senate for the first time in forty years, kicking off an era of partisan posturing.

5. “64 Photos by 64 Photographers” by Jeff Hamada | BOOOOOOOM!
[Insert 64,000 words.]

6. “Matthew Fisher interviewed about Afstan” by Mark from Ottawa | The Torch
The Torch provides an MP3 link to a bone-chilling analysis of Canada’s Afghanistan mission by CanWest’s Middle East and South Asia bureau chief. Also discussed: a hostile Pakistan, which Fisher labels “the world’s scariest problem,” and the Afghan detainee scandal, which he calls “preposterous.”

7. “The Imaginarium of Spin-Doctor Marshall” by Ed Hollett | The Sir Robert Bond Papers
Is a bustling economy driving Newfoundland and Labrador’s rapid population growth? The province’s Minister of Finance thinks so. According to SRBP, though, “the reality is something other than what the provincial government claims and the conventional media dutifully reports.”

8. “The R3-103 Year-End Countdown!” by Craig Norris | CBC Radio 3
Do you want to hear CBC Radio 3’s favourite 103 songs of 2009? Silly question — of course you do. Click through to stream them all.

9. “Should You Drink Raw Milk?” by Sharon Astyk | ScienceBlogs
Astyk, a former academic turned food writer (Depletion and Abundance, A Nation of Farmers), delivers a well-considered essay on the ups and downs of quaffing unprocessed milk.

10. “How to Read a Book a Week in 2010” by Julien Smith | in over your head
“It feels awesome. It gives you an amazing amount of ideas. It helps you think more thoroughly. It’s better than TV and even the internet. It makes you understand the world more. It is a building block towards a habit of completion… whatever, just do it already.” Challenge accepted.

And now our holiday fun is done. The Walrus Blog will resume posting original content next week.

The second in a weekly series of recommended links from The Walrus Blogroll…

1. “2010 Olympics: Picking Team Canada” by James Mirtle | From the Rink
The Globe and Mail’s resident hockey expert scores an early goal with this meticulous analysis of what is about to become the country’s most debated topic: which NHL stars should compete for Vancouver’s goldest medal.

2. “Celebrating Saturnalia” by Ethan Siegel | ScienceBlogs
A theoretical astrophysicist traces the historic origins of the Christmas holiday to the Second Punic War (218–201 B.C.) and the Roman festival of Saturnalia.

3. “Sex and the City is Not a Feminist Boon” by Lauren Bans | The XX Factor
In Tuesday’s Guardian, Naomi Wolf made the case for Carrie Bradshaw as “the first female thinker in pop culture.” On Wednesday’s XX Factor, Bans slashed that argument to silk ribbons: “The [Sex and the City] ladies are so clichéd and one-dimensional hailing them as feminist icons is like arguing that Beavis and Butt-head define manhood in all its robust glory.”

4. “A Jersey Shore primer: what you missed while it was becoming a phenomenon” by Scott Stinson | The Ampersand
Speaking of dubious television programming, The Ampersand surveys the newest sensation in minstrelry: MTV’s Jersey Shore.

5. “Afstan: Typical Canadian reporting—balderflippingdash” by Mark From Ottawa | The Torch
The group blog about our national military fact-checks Canadian Press reporting about Canadian Forces activities in the Afghanistan battle zone: “…no wonder so many Canadians — public, pundits, and politicians — are so ignorant of Afghan realities when this is the sort of stuff that appears in our major media. Fie.”

6. “A heartwarming work of edifying genius” by Morgan Clendaniel | GOOD
A Q&A with Valentino Achak Deng, the real-life “Lost Boy of Sudan” cum visionary educator who inspired Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What, a 2006 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

7. “Interview: B.C.’s ‘Prince of Pot,’ Marc Emery” by Paul McLaughlin | This Magazine
Weeks before reporting to U.S. prison, where he’s now serving a five-year sentence for selling marijuana seeds by mail order across North America, Canada’s premier pot activist gave an interview to one of the country’s premier questioners. Their conversation appeared this week on This.org.

8. “A Very Special Sedaris Christmas” | This American Life
It’s already Boxing Day, but never too late to unpack this radio gem, originally aired in 1997. Click through to hear fifty-six minutes worth of side-splitting holiday comedy.

9. “The responsible communication defence: What’s in it for journalists” by Dean Jobb | J-Source
The author of Media Law for Canadian Journalists explains the Supreme Court of Canada rulings that give reporters and editors “the right to be wrong” — and why that’s a good thing.

10. “Can non-profit journalism make it in Canada?” by Bilbo Poynter | J-Source
The executive director and founder of The Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting poses the question that stymies our masthead’s collective sleep. His answer? “What we need are funders who share our vision, are willing to partner with us long-term, and can see the value in funding independent investigative reporting as a part of their legacy of giving back to Canadians.” Amen, brother.