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Letters: October 12, 2009
10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
Letters: ‘No Country for Sick Men’
9/26/2009 12:00:00 AM
The New Jazz Singers
9/25/2009 12:00:00 AM
Once upon a time, the emblematic jazz singer was an African-American woman, serenading a smoke-filled room. Think Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Today, a talented crop of cosmopolitan young singers are creating a new breed of jazz vocalist: the globalized chanteuse. They come from multicultural backgrounds, live all over the world, and are infusing the traditional American sound with new energy. Take today's rising star, 26-year-old Sophie Milman. Born in Russia, she fled with her family to Israel at the age of 7, then settled in Canada at 16. Now she sells out the Blue Note jazz club in Tokyo. Her roots and her reach are global. In looks and language, she couldn't be further from the pioneers who came more than a half century before.
‘The Case For Killing Granny’
9/19/2009 12:00:00 AM
Canada Grows Up
9/15/2009 12:00:00 AM
Anti-Americanism has been Canada's defining intellectual ailment for generations. Not the fire-breathing hatred felt in some parts of the world, or even the elitist sneer directed westward from across the Atlantic; it was always a more neighborly, eye-rolling disapproval that reached its zenith under George W. Bush. In 2003, Canada rejected American entreaties to join in the invasion of Iraq, and the Canadian press bristled with shrill attacks on the neocon agenda. Meanwhile, Canadian activists spread conspiracy theories about supposed U.S. plots to steal fresh water and undermine Canada's public-health system. At a climate-change conference in Montreal, then-prime minister Paul Martin personally called out the United States for thwarting the "global conscience" by rejecting Kyoto. The worst arguably came in January 2004, when a prominent Toronto Star op-ed columnist ticked off the various ways in which the U.S. president resembled Adolf Hitler.
No Country for Sick Men
9/12/2009 12:00:00 AM
"Us Canadians, we're kind of understated by nature," Marcus Davies told me in his soft-spoken way. "We don't go around chanting 'We're No. 1!' But you know, there are two areas where we feel superior to the U.S.: hockey and health care."