Hetero Republican Affairs are a Gay Conspiracy

From Maisonneuve:

Hetero Republican Affairs are a Gay Conspiracy

by Drew Nelles

The biggest non-Glenn Beck joke in American political circles goes thusly: When a male Democrat has an affair it’s with a woman, and when a Republican has an affair it’s with a man. (It’s homophobic in its own way—why do Republicans deserve ridicule for screwing other men?—but you get the point.) Recently, though, that’s just not true. First there was John Ensign’s deafening silence, and then there was Mark Sanford’s inability to stop those torrents of sappy diarrhoea from dumping out his mouth-hole.

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Who Cares if the Birthers are Right About Obama?

From Maisonneuve:

Who Cares if the Birthers are Right About Obama?

by Drew Nelles

I am a Canadian-born American citizen. I can live and work in the United States, vote in American elections, and even, if I wished to debase myself, run for public office. But can I run for president? That’s less clear.

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Stick to the Union, Even Amid Recession

From Maisonneuve:

Stick to the Union, Even Amid Recession

by Drew Nelles

Of the many clichés to arise during this economic crisis—“golden parachutes,” “too big to fail,” and, worst of all, “recessionista”—one stands out. We are told that unions must automatically stand down during any given dispute, because their members should be grateful to be employed at all. This attitude became part of the North American zeitgeist during the height of the car industry’s woes last year; as a municipal strike in Toronto drags on, it has now gripped Canada’s largest city.

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Iranian Protests Are Not Just an Excuse to Talk About Twitter

From Maisonneuve:

Iranian Protests Are Not Just an Excuse to Talk About Twitter

Twitter is great for a lot of things. For example, I enjoy mocking people who have Twitter accounts. But you know what else Twitter is great for? Providing journalists covering an uprising with an angle that also happens to include an ultra-popular, search-engine-friendly keyword.

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Maisonneuve 2.0

On the redesigned Maisonneuve site:

Cut From the Same Cloth

by Drew Nelles

I didn’t get to the National Magazine Awards afterparty at the Comrade until around 1 a.m., and I briefly stood in line for the men’s room, eavesdropping on Ian Brown, before deciding to leave.  It was a long trek back to my friend’s house in the Annex. As I walked along a certain stretch of Queen, alone and wearing a suit, a young woman with a crutch approached me.

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Bechard Interview

by Drew Nelles

If you’ve grown tired of reading self-referential fiction from lazy, apolitical authors, D.Y. Béchard understands. His 2005 debut novel Vandal Love walked the line between On the Road’s roaming spirit and One Hundred Years of Solitude’s generational mysticism, and in so doing established Béchard as one of the few young writers today willing to look beyond his own life for inspiration. Now, in our latest issue, Maisonneuve presents “Learning to Rage,” Béchard’s thoughtful anti-manifesto on making fiction relevant once more. Currently at work on a short story collection called The Opera of War and a novel called The Tower, Béchard spoke with Maisonneuve about cynicism, hatred, and other fun stuff.

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Singh Interview

by Drew Nelles

Sameer Singh probably knows more about belly dancing than any other journalist-filmmaker out there. In the latest issue of Maisonneuve, he attends an Egyptian belly dancing conference to learn why the country’s religious conservatives want to stamp the art form out. Plus, on Omni television this fall, you can catch his documentary about a longtime friend who happens to be one of Canada’s few male belly dancers. But, as we found out, once you’ve seen nine hundred or so writhing, half-naked bodies, you’ve seen ‘em all.

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I am Don Draper

I guess I’m dabbling in advertising now, albeit for a nonprofit civil-society forum. The special issue of Place Publique I helped coordinate for the 5th Citizen Summit is in the Hour today, though only in the Milton-Parc area, as an advertorial supplement. Montrealers, check it out.

Just happy to be nominated

Maisonneuve landed ten National Magazine Award nominations yesterday. (Technically, we got eleven, although for some reason the final tally doesn’t include the nods for Best Student Writer.) All the nominations are for work that happened before I started at the magazine, and there are about a billion noms in all, but it’s still pretty good. Especially when you look at the other mags in the top ten: the rest are either heavy hitters (the Walrus, L’actualité, Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Report on Business) or lifestyle publications (explore, Chatelaine, Cottage Life, enRoute). Plus, Maisonneuve is the only quarterly in the top ten. Everyone pretends not to care about these things, but, you know, recognition is encouraging.

Maisy’s nominations:

Best Single Issue
Derek Webster and Anna Minzhulina
Issue 29

Best Cover
Anna Minzhulina
Issue 29

Best Student Writer
Chris Watt
“Iraq’s Walking Dead”

Humour
Craig Silverman
“My Life in Dépanneurs”

Investigative Reporting
Bruce Livesey
“Scientology’s Defier”

Investigative Reporting
Chris Watt
“Iraq’s Walking Dead”

Science, Technology & the Environment
Fraser Los
“The Green Gospel”

Sports & Recreation
Michael Carbert
“The Old One-Two”

Photojournalism & Photo Essay
Roger Lemoyne
“Serbia, the Sad South”

Portrait Photography
Roger Lemoyne
“Serbia, the Sad South”

Spot Illustration
Jack Dylan
“The Dep Guy”

Worth a thousand words?

From This Magazine:

Worth a thousand words?

Jillian Tamaki found that literary juries are still learning how to read graphic novels

DREW NELLES

Last year, on October 21, Jillian Tamaki got a phone call from her cousin, the Toronto-based writer-performer Mariko Tamaki. Their muchloved co-creation Skim had made history by becoming the first graphic novel nominated for a Governor General’s Award, in the Children’s Literature (Text) category. Skim, loosely about sexuality, teenage alienation, and Wicca, had already received a torrent of praise and would later make the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books list. Now it was in the running for Canada’s pre-eminent literary prize.

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Piracy and Poverty in Somalia, part II

I’ve received a lot of hits from people googling “piracy poverty Somalia” and stumbling upon this MediaScout entry of mine from November. This was no doubt triggered by the high-profile hostage-taking of an American captain off the coast of Somalia, but the act of typing those three words into a search engine, I think, is heartening: people want to go beyond the war talk and Navy SEAL firefights (and, hopefully, the done-to-death “argh, matey” jokes) to probe the root causes of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. My MediaScout piece is months old now, but some of it is still relevant, especially since piracy isn’t going anywhere – three more ships were hijacked yesterday and today. If you’re interested, here it is:

Piracy and Poverty in Somalia

November 19, 2008

What do you do with a Somali pirate? Well, nobody knows. Following the hijacking of the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star this weekend — the largest ship ever hijacked — and pirates’ seizure of two more ships off the Somali coast in the Gulf of Aden yesterday, modern-day buccaneering is all over the Big Seven. Somali piracy has been occurring for years now, but the numbers are getting too big to ignore: Seven hijackings in twelve days; ninety-two attacks so far this year; fourteen ships and 243 crew still in pirate custody, with the 318,000-ton Sirius Star carrying $100 million in oil cargo. Turning piracy into a numbers game may seem cold, but money is what this issue is all about; Somalia has been without a functioning government for some two decades, and The National (video link) reports that pirates have landed $20 million this year. Piracy means employment for young gangs and income for an embattled country — trickle-down economics on the high seas.

For an issue that the Big Seven seem to think came out of nowhere, there is some surprisingly insightful analysis. Mostly, though, it points out just how daunting the task of fighting piracy is. Striking pirate bases would kill civilians; Canadian naval forces capturing pirates for prosecution would require gathering evidence admissible under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; extra security or taking different shipping routes is expensive. Just today, the Indian navy said it sank a suspected pirate vessel, with the pirates getting away. But as journalist and piracy expert Daniel Sekulich tells The National, the only way to fix Somali piracy is to address the wrenching poverty and crisis of governance underlying it. It may be tough for the Canadian media to wrap their heads around twenty-first-century sea dogs, but this is no joke. “It looks like a deliberate two fingers from some very bright Somalis,” an unnamed analyst tells Reuters of the Star capture. “Anyone who describes them as a bunch of camel herders needs to think again.”

Quidditch on campus

From the Montreal Mirror:

Quidditch on campus

McGill Muggles join in the bizarre international Harry Potter broomsticks-and-balls game craze

by DREW NELLES

“I’m sorry, my friend is too drunk to come over and ask this,” the woman says, “but what’s with the broomsticks?”

Standing in Gert’s, McGill’s unappealing undergraduate bar, four members of the university’s Quidditch team clutch their handmade oak brooms and tell a curious stranger that, yes, they are devotees of a magical sport made up in a children’s book. They get this all the time, even in the sport’s unofficial home of Vermont, where the McGill team travelled last October to compete in the second annual Quidditch World Cup. “We were in the middle of Burlington,” says Karen Kumaki, one of the team’s Chasers, “walking around with Quidditch equipment and Canadian flags, getting honked at.”

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