The New Yorker
Sept. 12, 2011
Originally devoted to amusing, anonymously written trifles, The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section becomes a full-blown, big-name literary barrage in the magazine’s After 9/11 number, beginning with a summing-up homily by editor-in-chief David Remnick and including related contributions by such luminaries as Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Ian Frazier, Colum McCann and Lorrie Moore. “We do not necessarily need anniversaries when there are things we cannot forget,” McCann writes, but the memorials are irresistible.
In the magazine’s centrepiece essay, staff writer George Packer complains that the true tragedy of the 9/11 attacks is that they changed nothing. “For all the talk of national unity and a new sense of purpose, the terror attacks did nothing to bring together the country,” he writes. Instead, Packer argues, they helped ensure the “malignant persistence” of divisive forces dragging the country inexorably down. “Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country,” he writes. Tellingly, the word Obama does not once appear in Packer’s long, implacably negative lament for his nation.
Literary Review of Canada
September 2011
Apart from large, solid blocks of grey type – a rarefied pleasure in the digital age – you never know what you’re going to get in the Literary Review of Canada. This month’s surprise is a fascinating essay by veteran Canadian journalist Andrew Horvat, a long-time resident of Japan, who contributes one of the most trenchant and insightful analyses of Japanese nuclear policy to appear in English since last spring’s disaster at Fukushima. “Japanese nuclear energy policy is everything that the country’s efficient export industries are not,” he writes, painting a picture of cronyism, complacency and expediency, “where monopolies are shielded from responsibility for bad risks and where safety concerns are addressed by public relations departments.” His thesis: The meltdown might never have happened – and in any case, Japan would have a far more reliable source of power today – if Japanese decision-makers had listened to the country’s own scientists and built Canadian-designed CANDU reactors rather than U.S.-designed light-water reactors.
Elsewhere in the issue, Trent University professor Christopher Dummitt uses a review of Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s to urge Canadian liberals to take the 1960s seriously – and to defend the social advances that originated then against current right-wing attempts to stamp them out. “For conservatives, the 1960s matter,” he writes. They understand the significance of the social upheaval that occurred, while Canadian liberals take for granted the “transformation in values that has made Canada a more tolerant, progressive and, frankly, interesting place.” Such advances can always be rolled back, he writes. “Conservative realize this. Will the rest of us realize it before it is too late?”
The Walrus
October 2011
If urbanites know nothing else about life on the farm, decades of earnest journalism has assured them it is intolerably harsh, unprofitable and doomed – a view exhaustively upheld in The Farms are Not All Right, the cover story in this month’s Walrus. Writer Chris Turner adumbrates the perpetual crisis with dozens of ominous factoids about soaring prices, diminishing returns, the stalling green revolution, encroaching urbanization, plummeting water tables and political paralysis. But strangely, the very different Alberta farms he visits in search of the human dimension of the farm crisis appear to be thriving – both the big agri-business spreads and the smaller, greener operations. In part, this is because of the record-high prices urban consumers around the world are now paying for food. Net farm income in Canada has risen from $284-million in 2006 to more than $2.5-billion in 2010, Turner reports. Surely that’s the kind of crisis enterprising farmers can use.
