Can we all agree that there’s probably no good decision that comes from having any opinion about Mike Duffy? The now-Senator, once-newsperson has managed to blacken the reputation of the Upper House of the Canadian parliament, something that happens more or less once a decade. Duffy and a handful of other senators have found themselves under fire for abusing housing allowances, and costing the Canadian taxpayer a pretty penny. The NDP, who have always thought the Senate should be abolished, unveiled their rolluptheredcarpet.ca campaign, and Maclean’s magazine is calling for abolition. Just one problem: the constitution makes this difficult to impossible.

At best, the Senate could be neutered with seven provinces amounting to half or more of the country’s population. At worst, abolition would almost certainly require the unanimous assent of the provinces. Since either option would also require the Canadian Parliament to chime in, it would require the Senate to essentially vote to either have itself gelded or euthanized.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a “real New York City ‘GHETTO’”—you know, the kind from Spike Lee movies and all your favourite rap albums—consider booking your trip with a registered tour group.

In an article on Sunday, the New York Post reported that a company called Real Bronx Tours was offering visitors the chance to experience the colourful flavours of an impoverished New York outer borough. According to the Post, on one recent tour a guide brought tourists to St. Mary’s Park, where she warned them about pickpockets and rhapsodized about the violence of the seventies. She mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled on a Parisian boulevard, playfully asking a couple from Paris, “Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” She pointed out a group waiting for people waiting for food at a church pantry: “As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people—including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers—waited for handouts from the church pantry.”

In Time’s higher education supplement, Annabel Symington recently wrote about politicians who shock their respective nations by getting caught plagiarizing their PhD theses. Earlier this year, Germany’s education and research minister resigned after her thesis, “Person and Conscience: Studies on the Conditions, Need and Requirements of Today’s Consciences,” was discovered to be choc-a-block with uncited passages of other people’s work. Pakistan’s President Zardari may have invented the university he went to.

According to a new study, these fakers may just be happier than the rest of us honest folk. The journal Motivation and Emotion recently published work by Amanda C. Gingerich from Indiana’s Butler University and Chad S. Dodson from the University of Virginia, suggesting that happy people plagiarize and sad people don’t.

As news of the allegations against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford rolls and roils its way across the globe, a contingent of skeptics have cast doubt upon the story of his alleged crack smoking by claiming the video purporting to show it could have been doctored or faked. Most prominently, Ford’s Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday cited the well-known faked “eagle picking up a baby” video as an example of how, these days, you just never know if something is real.

Whether or not the allegations are true is something I can’t know. Whether a video of Ford behaving as has been described can be faked, however, is something I do have an answer for: it absolutely, positively cannot be.

Though cyberwar and cybercrime may seem like a recent development, it's been a major concern for governments around the world since the early '70s. What started with annoying chain e-mails that touted get-rich-quick schemes and better sex has evolved into international breaches of security and impressive feats of cyber-stealing. To mark today's publication of Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace, and our interview with its author Ronald Deibert, we assembled this history of cyber-shenanigans. 

The news that broke last Thursday night is not Rob Ford’s first run-in with allegations of illegal drugs or substance abuse. Nor is it his second. Or his third. For Toronto’s mayor, these stories have followed him since he became a councillor, been given increased prominence since he ran for mayor, and now threaten to swallow any remaining relevance his political career might have had. As Alexandra Kimball wrote in this space last week, part of the issue is the drug he’s alleged to have done. And while there’s no way for this not to be a political story, the rocks that I founder on are personal ones: how to trust the claims of innocence from a man with his history.

It’s important not to stigmatize. Drug users don’t lie because they’re bad people; the lies come because that’s what addiction forces you to do. It tells you that you’ve got your life together as it falls apart. It tells you that your family and friends don’t understand the stress you’re under. It tells you that taking a break at work to sneak a drink (or worse) isn’t just acceptable, it’s going to help you power through the day. The cliché of addiction—“you have to hit bottom”—is another way of saying you have to stop lying to yourself and others.

Which brings us to Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto.

The United States has been scared for a long time. Not timid, but terrified. There are books to be written on American fear—Gore Vidal wrote a few of them—but to keep it brief: From the antebellum South to McCarthy to Obama, the States has done foolish, stupid, and unforgivable things out of sheer apoplectic terror of race rebellion, communists, socialists and terrorists. So much so, in fact, that their century of aggression begins to look like overcompensation, like Sgt. Benson in Partners or Arnie in Christine.

At least as far back as Vandenburg and Truman, people have realized that fear can be power’s best friend. It became most obvious, at least to me, under Bush.

On Tuesday morning, the New York Times published an essay by Angelina Jolie, where she bluntly described her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy. Jolie tested positive for a rare gene, BRAC1, which greatly increases the likelihood that the person with the gene will develop breast and/or ovarian cancer. In addition to making the decision to have the painful surgeries, Jolie also described her choice to publicly discuss her health. Shortly after her piece was published, there was a frenzy of media response pieces, many of which were directed at the distinctly angry public reaction to Jolie’s essay (measured imperfectly through comments, blog posts, and tweets). At Salon, Maria Konnikova made the excellent point that while Jolie was bringing a different kind of awareness to breast cancer prevention, under the current healthcare system in the states her actions and choices are not only widely unavailable to American women, but in fact the broader awareness of genetic testing for BRAC1 may harm some women in material ways. Here in Canada, each province has different levels of coverage (though all provinces cover testing for the BRAC1 and 2 genes, depending on a patient’s medical history), but more options are available to the average Canadian woman when considering her own health.

Loneliness can kill you, and loneliness is on the rise. This week, The New Republic published a report on the dangers of isolation, connecting social stresses with genetic changes in the brain and citing a survey that found that one in three Americans over 45 claimed to be chronically lonely, up from one in 10 just a decade earlier. A New York Times article on the same subject, published the same day, mentioned a strong link between loneliness and dementia. In a May 2012 Atlantic feature, Stephen Marche notes that loneliness is not a function of your relationship status but the quality of your confidants. He also notes that fewer people report having confidants these days: in 2004, 25 percent of Americans said they had no one to talk to, up from just 10 percent in 1985.