The Walrus Magazine http://.walrusmagazine.com/ Fearless. Witty. Thoughtful. Canadian. en-us web@walrusmagazine.com 2011-03-14T10:40:00+00:00 daily 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 On newsstands now: our April 2011 issue http://www.walrusmagazine.com/archives/2011.04/ April 2011

ATIF RAFAY explores the meaning of freedom from within his prison cell; Michael Posner profiles Stephen Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright; Alison Motluk investigates the government’s determined exit from the production of medical isotopes; Alex Hutchinson ponders what will happen when computers become smarter than people; new fiction by David Bezmozgis; and more...

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]]> 1986@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2011-03-14T10:41+00:00 The Life Raft by Jeet Heer http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.03-radio-the-life-raft/ Canada Reads is an essential way for publishers to sell books — but at what cost to literature?

Riffing

LAST FALL, desperate Canadian novelists flooded email accounts, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages with a single-minded, plaintive plea: please vote for our books on Canada Reads. A popular show broadcast each February on CBC Radio, Canada Reads usually involves a jury of five advocates, each championing the book they think deserves national attention. Episode after episode, volumes are voted off, in the style of the reality TV show Survivor. To mark the 2011 season, the program’s tenth, the producers decided to do a twist on this format, adding an American Idol–inspired audience participation system to the Survivor template. Votes from listeners created a short list of forty books, which was winnowed down to ten by another round of literary electioneering. From among those ten, the jury chose the five worthy of their advocacy....

From the March 2011 magazine

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]]> 1971@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2011-02-09T16:57+00:00 Editor's Note by John Macfarlane http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.03-editors-note-editors-note/ “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad”

Riffing

THE SOLILOQUY Paddy Chayefsky wrote for the character Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network still resonates today:

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad... Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do... We know things are bad — worse than bad; they’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house... and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad!... I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’”...

From the March 2011 magazine

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]]> 1974@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2011-02-09T16:45+00:00 Riffing by Daniel Baird http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.03-art-riffing/ Jazz inspired Michael Snow, the most influential Canadian artist of all time, to explore the unexplored

Riffing

THE IVY-COVERED brick house Michael Snow shares with his wife of twenty-eight years, the writer and curator Peggy Gale, is a far cry from the bohemian Manhattan loft where he spent much of the ’60s. Situated in an affluent Toronto neighbourhood, from the outside it looks nondescript, but on the inside it’s every inch an artist’s home. One wall of the living room is packed floor to ceiling with books, artists’ catalogues, and hundreds of vinyl recordings; on another wall hangs a big abstract painting by Snow’s contemporary, Ron Martin, as well as one of Snow’s famous Walking Woman pieces, the profile of a woman rendered in stuffed cloth, bulging out from its frame; and in the middle of the room stands a shining black grand piano....

From the March 2011 magazine

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]]> 1964@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2011-02-09T16:44+00:00 The Archivist by Paul Wilson http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.03-memoir-the-archivist/ How I found Steig Larsson’s inner sanctum

The Archivist

I WAS LATE coming to Stieg Larsson and his wildly popular Millennium Trilogy. Last spring, when I started reading the first volume, some 20 million people had already beaten me to it. By August, when I finished the third, that figure had almost doubled. Numbers that big — phenomenal even beside such recent literary juggernauts as Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code — almost always result from word of mouth. But the buzz over Larsson’s books began even before they were published...

From the March 2011 magazine

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]]> 1962@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2011-02-03T16:44+00:00 The New Solitudes by Erna Paris http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.03-politics-the-new-solitudes/ Canada was once defined by the schism between English and French. Today, our divide is increasingly ideological. Can it be bridged?

The New Solitudes

IT WAS NOVEMBER 26, 2009, and I happened to be in Ottawa with a few hours to spare; so, on a citizen’s whim, I decided to drop in on Question Period in Canada’s House of Commons. I was a small girl the first time I sat in the historic visitors’ gallery that looms over the rows of members’ seats on both sides of the political divide. My father was determined that his children witness what he thought were essential places and events, and the House was high on his parental to-do list. I was properly impressed by the sight of grown-ups debating across the parliamentary aisle, waving sheaves of papers at one another and occasionally jabbing the air with their index fingers. I was too young to understand what they were talking about, but Dad’s lesson sank in, and I’ve been attending Question Period intermittently ever since....

From the March 2011 magazine

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]]> 1961@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2011-02-03T13:55+00:00 The Long Goodbye by Katherine Ashenburg http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.03-society-the-long-goodbye/ When the end of life comes later in life, the consequences are often unexpected — and often painful

The Long Goodbye

EARLY MAY, 2010. Henry*, eighty-six, sits in his hot pink living room, dressed in his usual, immaculate checked shirt and tie. Piles of books cover almost every surface, and the art on the walls ranges from a fragile thirteenth-century Persian bowl to a nail “painting” by the late David Partridge. A charcoal portrait of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein broods over the dining table, across from a pine cupboard full of Greek and Roman bowls and other ancient ceramics...

From the March 2011 magazine

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]]> 1963@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2011-02-01T20:11+00:00 The Lost Canadians by Grant Stoddard http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-history-the-lost-canadians They should be living in Manitoba, but due to a map-maker’s error they’re living in Minnesota. The Americans of Angle Township

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]]> 1948@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Madam Premier by Lisa Gregoire http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-politics-madam-premier How Eva Aariak is reinventing the politics of the North

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]]> 1949@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 The Morgentaler Effect by Wayne Sumner http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-society-the-morgentaler-effect What the champion of reproductive rights has to teach the right-to-die movement

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]]> 1950@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 The Return of Gold Fever by Roger Lemoyne http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-photo-essay-the-return-of-gold-fever One of Canada’s pre-eminent photojournalists explores one of man’s oldest obsessions in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon

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]]> 1951@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Meet You at the Door by Lawrence Hill http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-fiction-meet-you-at-the-door There was no dodging the voice of the dead

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]]> 1952@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Letters by The Walrus Readers http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-letters-letters Chasing the Dragon; Badda Byng; House of Cards; Inveterate; Rye Wit; Tusk, Tusk

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]]> 1941@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Editor's Note by John Macfarlane http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-editors-note-editors-note The plight of Canadian cities

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]]> 1942@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Mary, Queen of Hearts by Katie Addleman http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-profile-mary-queen-of-hearts Mary Pickford’s number one fan shows Canadians America’s Sweetheart

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]]> 1943@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 The Healing by Patrick McDonagh http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-frontier-the-healing Quebec Cree revive traditional medicine to cure a modern disease

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]]> 1944@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Howdy, Neighbour by The Walrus Staff http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-recovered-howdy-neighbour Three prime ministers reckon with Dubya

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]]> 1945@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 For Prophet by Matt Mossman http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-essay-for-prophet What Canada could learn from Islamic finance

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]]> 1946@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 The Assassination of the Canadian Kid by Justin Robertson http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-profile-the-assassination-of-the-canadian-kid Remembering a little-known hero of Australian independence

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]]> 1947@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Uncivilizing Influences by Jeremy Keehn http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-games-uncivilizing-influences What makes a video game “addictive”?

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]]> 1953@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Memento Mirmy by Marcello Di Cintio http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-visual-art-memento-mirmy The boneyard aesthetic of Vancouver’s Mirmy Winn

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]]> 1954@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Craving Corrie by Danielle Groen http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-television-craving-corrie Coronation Street — the quintessentially British soap opera that turns fifty this year — attracts 1.3 million Canadian viewers a night. Why?

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]]> 1955@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Civil and Civic by Jonathan Bennett http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-poetry-civil-and-civic Poetry from our January/February 2011 issue

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]]> 1956@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Careful What You Pray For by Jason Sherman; drawn by David Parkins http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-the-walrus-presents-careful-what-you-pray-for The Walrus Presents...

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]]> 1957@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00 Desktop Wallpaper: On Press by Ross MacDonald http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.01-online-exclusive-desktop-wallpaper-on-press Download exclusive artwork from the making of the current cover

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]]> 1959@http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ 2010-12-06T09:00+00:00