Vanity Fair
May 2010
Oh, what a great wallow of trash this is! I'm talking, of course, about VF contributing editor Mark Seal's lengthy article on the supposedly secret life of Eldrick (a.k.a. Tiger) Woods. Timed to Woods's return to the professional golf circuit and, after 40 days and nights in rehab, his rediscovery of family values, it's the literary equivalent of a dumpster dive (you'll feel like taking a shower after your wade-through). Or a Harold Robbins roman à clef - minus the annoying conceits of a roman à clef. Adding visual flair to Seal's prose are Mark Seliger's nude-ish photographs of three of the women who claim to have sated, albeit temporarily, Woods's seeming insatiable appetite for extramarital booty.
Sordid? Uh-huh. Fun? You betcha. Seals' Woods is a horndog doofus, kinda shy, good at only two things (golf being one), whose idea of a smooth pick-up line is, "You look hot" or "You're gorgeous." I mean, shouldn't the fact that Tiger hired Hootie and the Blowfish to play at his 2004 wedding been warning enough to Elin Nordegren that there'd be trouble ahead? It's the little things that make the article. Like the mother of one of Woods' gal pals telling her daughter: "You tell them [Woods' handlers]to fly you first-class! It's Tiger Woods! He can afford to do that!" Or how Woods wasn't averse to having liaisons, usually sans condoms, in his Florida mansion - "but never in the master bedroom."
Maclean's
April 19, 2010
The U.S.A. has always been a fun and funny place. Never more so than now, thanks to the rise of the Tea Party movement and ancillary phenomena like Glenn Buck's 912 Project, the Guardians of the Free Republics and the Hutaree "Christian militia." Maclean's correspondent Nicholas Kohler, however, thinks we shouldn't be too amused. Sure, 25 per cent of Tea Partiers believe that Barack Obama "may be the Antichrist," he writes in the cover story. But they're not all wing nuts; "many . . . are mild-mannered, well-educated [close to 30 per cent have attended university or college] hard-working people." Moreover, as a political scientist at Nashville's Vanderbilt University tells him, they're a reflection of a seeming intense polarization in America's body politic, a polarization "between Democrats and Republicans specifically" that the country hasn't seen since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War (1861-1865).
Another political scientist, from Maine, frets that Tea Partiers won't burn out as so many third-party movements have done, but instead infiltrate the Republican party, thereby dooming it to electoral irrelevance, à la Barry Goldwater in 1964. For instance, more than 30 per cent of Arizona's population is Hispanic, in New Mexico it's almost 50 per cent - are they going to vote for candidates who want to get tough on U.S.-Mexico border issues and non-white immigration?
Azure
May 2010
Detroit has been leaking inhabitants for decades - so many, in fact, that now almost 30 per cent of the land within its municipal boundaries is classified as "vacant." Bad news, yes?
Well, not entirely. As Toronto writer Lloyd Alter points out here, Motor City "was built on high-quality farmland" which means that it has the potential at least to become a hotbed of urban agriculture. Indeed, this spring former financier John Hantz is converting 20 hectares of derelict property in Detroit to farm land - the first stage in a plan to turn 20,000 hectares to agricultural use and thereby help feed Motown's 900,000 residents, almost 25 per cent of whom live below the poverty line.
The Detroit situation is just one example of the rise of big-scale urban agriculture cited in Alter's article. Clearly what's happening in Detroit can't occur in non-rust belt/higher-density urban centres like New York or Toronto. Nevertheless, agriculture can thrive here as well, he argues. After all, "every building has a roof, and every roof can be designed to feed as well as shelter us." More, in fact: Food-producing buildings can also serve as pollution absorbers, biofuel sources, water filters and sites to recycle liquid and solid human waste. Urine, lest we forget, is rich in phosphorous, an essential fertilizer ingredient.