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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.

The type of plagiarism Gingerich and Dodson were studying wasn’t the deliberate kind, where you turn in a paper full of Wikipedia’s insights on Moby Dick verbatim. Instead, they were interested in accidental plagiarism, or cryptomnesia, where you read or hear something and later believe that you made it up yourself. When George Harrison was accused of plagiarizing the tune for “My Sweet Lord” from Ronald Mack’s “He’s So Fine,” Harrison said he knew he had heard Mack’s song, but that he never meant to copy it. The researchers write: “Harrison’s mistake may have been an instance of cryptomnesia, a type of memory illusion in which individuals mistakenly trust that they have generated a new idea when, in reality, they have merely accessed a previously experienced idea and inadvertently claimed it as their own.”

To test how mood might affect a person’s ability to remember whether an idea was their own or someone else’s, Gingerich and Dodson put together an experiment involving 21 men, 29 women, and a computer game much like Boggle.

First, they divided the subjects into two groups, and primed both of them with a writing activity: the “happy” group was asked to write about a positive personal experience they’d had, and the “sad” group was asked to write about a sad personal experience.

Then the subjects played the game. You all know Boggle, yes? With the shakey thing and the cubes with letters on them, and you shake it up and when the letters fall into place you have two minutes to write down all the words you can make with adjoining letters? This game was essentially like that, but instead of writing down as many words as they could think of, subjects were asked to write down one word, then let their “partner”—the computer—generate three. The subjects played 24 rounds in total, but halfway through, they spent another few minutes writing their happy or sad stories, so that the moods established at the beginning would be sustained.

Then, after a break long enough to let their memories dim a little, the subjects were shown each puzzle again and asked to recall the words that they themselves had come up with earlier. They filled out a questionnaire reporting on their mood during the experiment.

Gingerich and Dodson found that the “sad” people were less likely than the “happy” people to misremember a computer-generated response as their own. If they had been writing essays, the “sad” people would have cited their sources more accurately than the “happy” people.

Previous work in the field has suggested that sad and happy moods change the way people think. The researchers cite earlier studies showing that “when individuals are in a happy mood they tend to process information more globally or relationally... and when they are in a sad mood, they tend to process information in a more local or item-specific manner.” On the Boggle task, this means “sad” people pay greater attention to the nitty-gritty of whose answers are whose, while the happy people are cheerfully noticing “our” answers, and also, presumably, humming “He’s So Fine” while chasing butterflies across their computer screens.

It seems like there’s good news for teachers here—all you have to do to reduce plagiarism is make your students crazy miserable. In general, however, it seems as though the effects of sad mood cut both ways: they make you more careful, but less creative. Feeling sad makes people more systematic, which can lead to fewer errors. But feeling happy makes people feel safer, which allows them to play with new ideas and come up with more inventive ways of solving problems.

Ladies and gentlemen, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican who staunchly opposed any federal aid for New York and New Jersey in the wake of Hurricane Sandy who is now calling for federal aid in the wake of the tornado that hit central Oklahoma, and the town of Moore, on Monday. You’ll be shocked to learn that Inhofe thinks the two situations are completely different.

Inhofe is also well-known for being one of the US Senate’s loudest opponents of any measures to combat climate change, something he calls “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” No, really, he’s got a book and everything.

Meanwhile in the real world, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography’s instruments on Mauna Loa announced earlier this month that the world had stumbled across a notable tripwire: for the first time in human history, the Earth’s atmosphere contained more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We can confidently say “human history” because the last time the fossil record showed 400 ppm of CO2, approximately three millon years ago, our ancestors were not recognizably human. We are, in a very real way, in terra incognita.

Scripps’ observatory was set up by Charles Keeling in the ’50s, and as far as anyone knows it wasn’t actually just an excuse to spend time in Hawaii on someone else’s dime. Charles’ son Ralph Keeling maintains the records of its observations now. (Hey, as family businesses go...) Longevity is actually one of the most important things about the “Keeling Curve,” as the long upward arc of CO2 readings is known: we have 55 years of measurements, spanning any number of economic and environmental trends. So we know that while the atmosphere kept warming with the sun up to the 1970s, it also kept warming in the 1980s and ’90s as the sun’s cycles moved in the other direction. If Keeling (pere or fils) had started the observations a generation later, one of the key pieces of evidence for human-caused climate change would be missing or, at the very least, weaker.

Crossing the 400 ppm line isn’t inherently important: there’s no scientist who thinks that 400 is dangerous but 399 was safe. People are people, though, and our brains react to round numbers like this for the same reason we treat it like a big deal when the odometer clicks over to a round 100,000.

The real horror story may turn out to be that we overshot safe concentrations of atmospheric CO2 some time ago. Recently retired NASA climate scientist James Hansen has been saying as much for years, noting that the last time greenhouse gases were this high the Earth’s oceans were four metres higher. Sandy’s storm surge in the Northeast last year was just over four metres, so we may just be pencilled in for a tide like Sandy’s coming in and never going out again.

There was, for a moment in the late 2000s, a point where everyone was talking about Peak Oil: the idea that we’d reached a permanent plateau in oil production and were destined to live in an energy-constrained world at best, and a Mad Max-style armageddon at worst. The shale fracking revolution in the US has put that idea back in the closet for now, but the last few weeks of headlines are a reminder that even if gas is cheap, Google Glass won’t be the scariest thing we have to deal with.

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Photo: The Oklahoma City sky by Wesley Fryer

Lost to American history is the political visionary Roman L. Hruska, a Republican senator of the Nixon years. In 1970 he backed G. Harrold Carswell as a candidate for the Supreme Court, described by critics at the time as a “mediocre” judge. “Even if he were mediocre,” Hruska told the Senate, in a canny lemons-to-lemonade gambit, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?” Carswell’s nomination was rejected. Roman Hruska retired from politics in 1976, and two years later the White House renamed a federal facility in Clay County, Nebraska, as the Roman L. Hruska Meat Animal Research Center: a proper tribute to an early champion of the unremarkable.

Photos of Hruska suggest a man who wore suits even to the beach. He lived to be 94, perhaps his only nod to excess, and was buried, of all places, in the Bohemian Cemetery in Omaha. What’s missing, however, is any recognition of Hruska as a political prophet: he saw it all coming, the end of Cold War hysteria, the end of ideology, and the triumph of uninspired and uninspiring leadership as the guiding principle of mainstream party politics in both the US and Canada. No longer is mediocrity entitled to a “little representation”; it’s now seen as the key to electoral success. Here, Canadian voters are asked to support the party least likely to alarm the marketplace, and they have three remarkably similar choices. Sometimes they vote Liberal, sometimes they vote Tory, and in Quebec they vote NDP but maybe just the once. It all depends on who can make our lives less dramatic and therefore more economically stable. Justin Trudeau uses the term “middle-class” at every opportunity, as if average were a Canadian value. “Canadians are generally skeptical of transformative change,” said pollster Nik Nanos after Trudeau won the Liberal leadership race, adding that the new leader “must be very careful not to overreach.” He hasn’t, he won’t. He might win.

Who are these Canadians who are generally skeptical of transformative change? I travel in the wrong circles. I haven’t met any. My people are mostly radicals who talk about climate change and income inequality and whether cyclists should be allowed on the sidewalk. A little transformation would be right up their alley. But they can’t compete with the Marshmallow Middle and its sticky hold on both politics and commerce. James Altucher, author and entrepreneur, wrote in The Rumpus that “everything I have done has been distinguished by its mediocrity, its lack of a grand vision, and any success I’ve had can be put as much in the luck basket as the effort basket... If you want to get rich, sell your company, have time for hobbies, raise a halfway decent family (with mediocre children), and enjoy the sunset with your wife on occasion.” Even in business, among consultants, it’s fashionable to talk about the long-term benefits of setting a low bar. The goal is to not to re-invent the wheel but, well, just sell wheels. Everyone likes wheels. Make no waves, keep your head down... this is the mantra of the global marketplace which rolls along like marbles on glass until the next crash, by which time you’ve cashed out.

In a marketplace where employers find any reason to downsize, or in a hyper-vigilant security state, it makes some sense not to stand out. I was thinking this reading William H. Gass’s novel Middle C which, from title to end, imagines a character who aspires not to greatness but to the protection of anonymity. Middle C of course is both the purest and most banal musical note: in a chord it disappears, but without it there’s no chord. Middle C is also the barely passing school grade, neither failure nor success, both of which draw too much notice. In the book, Joey Skizzen, born in Austria before the war, winds up in England when his father Rudi dreams up a plan to get the family out before the Nazis march in: they will pretend to be Jewish, to take advantage of the underground railroad smuggling Jews out of Europe. The plan works, and it doesn’t cost Joey’s father, now calling himself Yankel Fixel, a dime.

“What he wanted was to fade into the background,” Joey says of his father, “be a piece of household goods lost in the rubble of war.” In London, Yankel Fixel becomes yet another self-made nobody: Raymond Scoffield. Raymond has plans. But those plans don’t involve the rest of the family, and Joey, his mother, and his sister, wind up in America to search for him after disappears. For Joey, the American midwest offers a chance to follow in dad’s footsteps—“the chance at an unnoticed life.” In school he cultivates a deliberate non-identity: “From the back row he never asked a question or answered one, if he could help it. He never took chances, shuffled his feet, whispered or passed notes, or surreptitiously read an illicit book while it hid inside the assigned one. He dressed as plainly as possible, stayed awake in study hall, didn’t join, date, suck up or hang around. He was resolutely friendly but had no chums.” History, his own and the world’s, is unkind to those who stick out: those who are noticed are targets for the jealousy, or, more often, the violence of others. “[D]o not fall so low as to be treadable,” says Joey, “because people tend to watch where they step, curse when they stumble, and tromp upon supines and other grovelers. Never fail, merely pass. Slip by.”

From street level, Joey is the middle-class marshmallow American that mainstream politics wants to court: never takes chances, never shuffles his feet. But Gass counters this acquired mediocrity by assigning a rich (and sometimes baffling) inner life to Joey. He’s a closet activist: he collects newspaper clippings of human atrocities, genocides, war, constructing his own Inhumanity Museum in his attic. On the outside he’s a self-invented nobody but inside he seethes with conviction.

Last year an Environics poll for the left-leaning Broadbent Institute found that 79 percent of Canadians felt that income inequality, if “left unchecked,” would have a “long-term negative impact on Canada by reducing our standard of living,” whatever that means. But it sounds dangerously close to moral conviction: it’s as if the mushy middle is paying attention to those left behind. Rather than keeping their heads down they’re making strange new noises.

The Joey Skizzens are the reason brand-name political parties will never overreach. But then they risk underestimating that which might one day undo them: the rich inner life, and (surprise!) some voters have it. Privately, they care about more than themselves. As Roman Hruska would say, they deserve a little representation.

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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.

The way it’s been related, the proof in question is not a grainy photograph, taken at a distance or at night. It is video, well-lit, and allegedly contains Ford moving, speaking and gesticulating. What that means is that in order for it to be faked, the sellers wouldn’t simply have had to “doctor” a video, like they were putting a dead celebrity in a commercial; they would have needed to create a believable digital replica of the man, a realistic video game version of the mayor who walks and talks just like him.

Here’s the thing: if you had George Lucas’ special effects team, the world’s faster supercomputers, and an unlimited budget, you couldn’t make that happen. Can we make dinosaurs and aliens? Sure. Are we able to make elves and “the One” do very cool, acrobatic things from a distance? Of course. Can we create convincing digital representations of human beings that move and talk and stand up to scrutiny in a video shot from five to seven feet away? Nope. We’re kinda-sorta getting there, but to even approach believability, you need the person you’re trying to replicate in order to digitize them. A video of a digital Robert Bruce Ford doing whatever his creators want him to do is, at this point in history, unequivocally a technological impossibility.

Whether or not this means the allegations are true, however, isn’t my concern here. Rather, interesting to me are the implications of the seemingly widespread belief that creating such believable alternate realities using technology is not only possible, but easy. After all, it wasn’t just Toronto’s deputy mayor who raised the idea of the video being a fake—everyone from Internet commenters to CBC news anchors have floated the notion.

So what’s going on? For one, it seems our relationship to the image is undergoing yet another change. Beyond specific examples of their use, the mere existence of tools such as Photoshop and other digital video effects means the already shaky assumption that you could believe the truth of images is now even further undercut. Technologies that can make the unreal appear true highlight the fact that images and video are never simply “a window onto reality,” but are constructed and framed in certain ways. That was true previously as well, but it was often hidden. Newer technological advancements just mean that critically evaluating everything we see is now more necessary than ever. Score one for your high-school media studies teacher.

But in an era when no one takes a magazine cover at face value, this is hardly a revelation. That said, there is something else going on here. Relying on a relationship between images or videos and reality has been a staple of law and society for some time now. That phenomenon, otherwise known as “referentiality,” has been part of the reason mass media became so vital for combating ignorance and breaking news: broadcasters could actually show you what had happened or what is happening right now. In that sense, documentary technologies like the camera were part of the tradition of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Forget assumptions or belief, they said—instead, focus on fact and evidence.

The trouble is, when fact and evidence are so easily dismissed—as many citations of the “eagle baby” video attest to—the basic structure of evidence leading to rational deduction also gets undercut. Instead of simply showcasing that images and video can be changed, the very existence of digital technologies capable of such manipulations brings to the fore another phenomenon: that how we relate to the world is as much about what we believe as what we see.

The net effect, then: When commenters suggest the Ford video is faked, it’s because the idea of this evidence doesn’t fit their ideological agenda—a situation neatly mirrored in those who believe the claims unquestioningly. That old chestnut about being entitled to one’s own opinion but not one’s own facts is a little less clear-cut than it used to be. What happens when, instead of arguing over viewpoints, people start debating the legitimacy of what, just a few years ago, you could safely say was proof?

Thus far, Ford and his team have mostly reacted to the accusations with stony silence. I’m not sure they’re smart enough or cynical enough to be relying on what Gawker editor John Cook has called the “epistemological rabbit hole” that comes from trying to ascertain truth in a situation like this. It doesn’t really matter, though—whether specific examples of media are proven to be authentic or false is, very strangely, irrelevant. The simple possibility that such referential evidence can be fake allows individuals to retreat into ideological bubbles of their own choosing. Because that which we’d once have called evidence is now yet another thing that may or may not be true, agreeing on facts—and forming social or political consensus around them—just gets that much harder. And as long as the mayor of Canada’s largest city stays silent or simply denies that the video exists, we are stuck in a no-man’s land where what is true hardly matters at all.

Read The Gift of Ford, a Hazlitt E-Book Original by Ivor Tossell.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Gypsy girls, setting their long, raven hair on fire on the banks of the Danube; sea beams illuminating samurai girls drawing their naginatas: All these moments---”

+

Right after the guard yells, Lights out, ladies! Corazon clambers from her bunk to mine.

Conrad, Gordito mio. I am still confused, she says, hitching up the skirt she made from a sweet potato sack.

Tell me again, she murmurs.

She gets confused about the details. Pay attention this time, I tell her, as she curls into a kittenish ball.

I was watching MJ sleep when my girl Nicole called and started talking about that instrument of hers.

So I slipped off to the washroom, for a few minutes, maybe longer. It doesn’t matter.

You know that tape where Michael sounds retarded-stoned?

Well it is two recordings, mostly deleted.

I recorded the first one with my iPhone one morning, about a month before he passed. He was just rambling on about children, millions of children, and his show at the O2.

People were going to see that show and say, “Go. Go. I’ve never seen nothing like this. Go.”

Or was he just telling me to get my lard ass off his Tinkerbell sheets?

I don’t know, but the recording went on and spilled into a new file. I titled them MAY and JUNE. But all that’s left is his May mumbling, which was fake to begin with.

When he died, I listened to the whole thing.

I went to call 911 but it was too late.

What I was listening to made me stick the phone in mouth like a wafer and delete almost everything I had.

That messed-up voice is crazy: his voice was deep and clear.

I am sitting in a cage, dressed like a juicy orange. Sometimes I get punched, and sometimes I get shanked.

I have opened men’s chests and held their beating hearts in my hand; I have fanned myself with callaloo leaves and christened my babies with tears.

I never killed anybody.

After he said all that stuff about “Go,” he cleared his throat and paused.

This is what else he said and I swear it:

+

“Now that Tubby is pleasuring himself with my La Mer cream and silk kerchiefs, I can talk.

I see the hot shot. It’s on the dresser by my Gerber plates, and stone booties.

Not this morning. Not yet.

I want everyone to know that the pain inside of me is terrible: my body is almost broken and my mind, my thoughts!

I need to be unconscious to leap from loneliness to dread; from morning to night.

As the milk fills my vein, I rush off the lash of the belt; the shame and the lies; the terrifying angle of my decline.

And the tiniest babies crawl over my flesh like insects, and fill my mouth with thick, brown sugar.

I saw my face just now and screamed, as I always do. In a bitter, unsent letter to Orlan, I said, but I do it so it feels like hell.”

+

That’s how the first one ends and I had to look up ORLAN who is a crazy lady who cut up her own face and called it art.

He made the second recording the night we lost him.

I remember there was all this crinkling and rustling, then a whoosh, and a car firing. He had left a big bag filled with Styrofoam peanuts in the bed, which I missed when I peeked in on him.

One of his seated mannequin friends—Rutger Hauer, shirtless, wet and slouched forward—was missing too.

A song playing between rushing sheets of rain on glass, R. Kelly’s remix of “Ignition.”

Corazon always says, “And then?” and claps her pink-gloved hands like cymbals.

He said,

“I had a list. Topple HIStory statue, defile star at 6927 Hollywood Boulevard, drop gold statuettes and records from the Sony building, have wigs made from rat hair and steal coral lipstick and a box-cutter from the CVS: it goes on.

I was going to corral my enemies into the streets, and dance myself to death.

As it is, blood seeps from my shoes as I walk; my heart is beating very slowly, too slowly to do any of this.

To say goodbye. I have whispered to each child, telling them how they can live a life that is pure and filled with love.

The bloody tracks I left on their floors are Scarlet Tanagers that fill their nests with tiny, jeweled crowns.

Where are you going? the baby asked, and I told him I was going to kill Michael Jackson.

He looked at me like he was taking a knife to his memory, and turned to face the wall.”

+

I told that Flanagan to check the bedroom again for broken glass from that mirror or the cheap lipstick, and he said he wouldn’t touch that freak’s intimate items for all the booze on Earth.

Something wrong with him, he said, and his wife screeched what sounded like assent

So Corazon says, Where was he going, chulo?

He just wanted to be alone, I say and sigh as she helps my hand along.

+

“I look at pictures of myself as a kid, or a very young man and I cry.

I cry because no one understood the full extent of my endeavor, its premise and resolution.

I systematically mutilated myself. I accentuated this mutilation with twink-tones of caramel and burgundy, old-lady lace and brooches, and uniforms from the military of the insane.

I sang of what I was doing—“Oh God, he’s taking Demerol!”—and called myself a lizard as I patty-caked more sludge over my razor-thin nose.

I never smiled when I danced; I asked, rhetorically, Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.

And danced and danced macabre.

I wrenched the genius from the child-star, then kissed him, because I would torture him for 40 years, having divided his beauty and brilliance like an atom and blown it all up.

I performed my rage and loneliness, cruel secrets and terrible injuries for so long—”

The storm rages harder as the tires screech, turning around.

A window slides open, wings flutter.

He has the white dove.

+

Michael came into the bedroom, and slid the bag under the bed, then slipped between the sheets.

His children’s sleeping whispers trailing behind him, he reaches into the night table drawer for a hand mirror.

He looks into it and smiles: the image shatters.

He closes his eyes and remembers massive waves of love; smaller, more piercing streams.

He sees himself, untouched and radiant, leaping from treetops; spinning in a velvet box.

“All these moments,” he says.

“Will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

+

His face was wet with tears, I say.

I cried too.

I yanked the spike out of his arm and closed his eyes, then mine.

I am a fat boy in St. Andrews, turning my face to the sun like a flower.

+

“Time to die,” is the last thing he said, in a rattle.

Soon enough Grasa dulce asesino, says Corazon, stroking my face with her blade.

Sooner, she sings, she sings me to sleep.

Endnotes: #Gator’s Last Dance #Conrad Murray #Nicole Alvarez #Blade Runner #Performance Art #Escalade #Michael Flanagan, Esq. #”Tears in Rain” #Blanket #Michael Jackson #May 10, 2009 #June 25, 2009 #RIP

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Shelf Esteem is a weekly measure of the books on the shelves of writers, editors, and other word lovers, as told to Emily M. Keeler. This week’s shelf belongs Jowita Bydlowska, the author of the bestselling memoir Drunk Mom. Jowita’s books are in her west Toronto home, which she shares with her partner and fellow writer, Russell Smith, and their son Hugo. When I arrived, Jowita was defending her home against a particularly stinky raccoon that had decided to occupy the balcony overlooking her backyard, but almost as soon as she started describing her favourite books, we both forgot about the smelly vermin outside.

I tried to not clean this up on purpose, because this is how it naturally is. Russell has his own bookshelf upstairs. Some of these are ours, a lot of them are books by friends, which is fantastic, because so many of them are signed. They used to be alphabetically organized, and then Hugo happened. So his books are slowly moving up and up, and spreading like mold. It’s gonna be kid’s books everywhere.

There’s one kids book that I’m obsessed with. I wrote about how obsessed I am with this book. I Want My Hat Back is the best. It’s about death. Hugo’s not crazy about it.

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They’re all mixed up. I’m just putting books wherever there is space really. This section is full of my favourite ones. I go back to them all the time. This is a book I’ve had since I was 8. It’s in Polish, but it’s French. It’s called Nicholas in English. It’s about a little boy, named Nicholas, and he has different adventures. It’s a really—not dark, but it’s very adult humour. He observes his parents all the time, he describes their fights, but from a child’s point of view. As a grown-up, you totally get what he's talking about. I don’t know, I just felt that children’s books, growing up, were really infantalizing. They talked down to you. This one was kind of showing that kids know more than you think they do.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"7465","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"653","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"976"}}]]

I don’t understand—these are library books, but I’ll show them to you anyway. I’m guessing they’re for younger kids, but they’re so stupid. This is a good example. It’s all like this, very simple, all exclamation marks, very aggressive, or something. It has lots of pictures. I’m assuming it’s for younger kids, but there’s no rhyme or reason to it. I like books with stories.

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I used to be really into Michel Houellebecq, like everyone else at some point in their lives. Platform is my favourite book ever. It’s very romantic. Atomized was probably the first book that I read in English that made me really excited about books written in English. Does that make sense? I had to read the ones we all read in high school, like The Great Gatsby, The Handmaid’s Tale, and I liked them, but at that time my sense of the language wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate anything. But this made me really excited about reading in English, and writing. I didn’t try to write like him, though.

I loved Let the Right One In. They made a movie of it, but the book is brilliant. It’s even more disturbing. Well of course, this one. This book, Sarah, sort of showed me what you can do with language. I know JT Leroy is not “real” but...and this is the last one, when all the shit hit the fan. She commissioned an artist to do all the illustrations, and they’re quite beautiful.

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I love Maidenhead. I love Tamara Faith Berger. There are new ones, right? Being re-issued. We have a few first editions of Lie With Me. In all different colours. You can collect them. I think we have them because—Russell worked on this one, or something, at Gutter Press. There were like five different colours.

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This is a book [The Boy in the Moon] that made me cry. Ian Brown, his son has a very serious genetic disorder and he’s severely disabled. The book just talks about his son growing up, in their house, and how difficult it is. It’s so beautiful. It’s set up almost like a narrative, where it seems like things are going to get better. He’s in a special home at the end of the book—the parents can’t take care of him, he can’t feed himself or walk, he’s self-harming, he just needs constant care. And in the end, after things are really really bad, he takes his son to Sick Kids, and he has his first seizure. So he realizes things are only going to get worse. You read this as a story and you think, oh, it’s going to get better, or it’s going to be okay, but it’s real life and it doesn’t get better. I love his writing.

This one, How Should a Person Be? is really good. I read it right after it came out here, and it got this sort of lukewarm reception. I remember reading it, and being like, oh, it’s okay. And then after reading it I realized it was actually doing something to my brain that I didn’t expect it to do. And it’s so sexy, too. It’s a filthy, filthy good book. I love it.

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I’m all into embarrassing myself. When I was about 11, I never read comic books, but when I was about 11 this book was there. It’s a comic book, there’s a whole series, and it’s like Game of Thrones slash that new series about Vikings. I read these books obsessively. It was the first comic book that was from outside of the Iron Curtain. It was impossible to get anything that wasn’t Polish or Russian for a long time, and I don’t know how these got printed, but suddenly it showed up in book stores and kids were lining up to buy them. There were fights over who was going to get to read the next one. There was one girl in my class who was really unpleasant, she was a bit of a bully, I remember having to suck up to her because she had these comics. So when I grew up, and I had this little boy—under the pretence of buying these books for him I ordered them online from a European publisher, and now I have them. He’s going to read them one day...they were like ₤90, or something.

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So this is where I go back to. I loved Miranda July’s Nobody Belongs Here More Than You, and this is so embarrassing—I should know better, I’m old enough, but I loved it and so many people hated it that I developed this problem where I wasn’t sure anymore if I really liked it? It’s so embarrassing. I think it’s people, when they hit their 30s, they suddenly decide to develop—I don’t know, it’s not a more sophisticated taste, but they’re sometimes embarrassed of their 20s. I had a lot of friends who were like, oh yeah, I read this when I was 27, it was so twee, and so on. So it’s there, and I will stand by it. Most of the time.

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And this, my iPod, is the most important book of all. Perhaps related to my awfulness as a mum, in the beginning, I got this. And as things got better, I got really obsessively paranoid about something happening to Hugo. So I used to sleep on the floor of his room and hold his hand every night. And because the light had to be off, I got this iPod. Look at all these books, and a lot of them are good. This one, The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, was fantastic. It’s almost Beckettian, written by a woman who is very unapologetic and goes crazy when her husband leaves her. It’s very similar to The Woman Upstairs, which everyone’s talking about. It’s really disturbing, and it ends really beautifully. And I think it was maybe the second book, after The Boy in the Moon, that made me cry. But maybe I was PMSing that day.

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It’s funny, Lucky Jim is Russell’s favourite book. We’ve been together for 11 years, and so for 11 years he’s been trying to get me to read this book. It’s become sort of something I can’t do on principle. I kind of want to—I know I should, I actually desperately want to read it, but I’m just not going to. Maybe I’ll read it secretly. It’s sad, because ten years ago, when he gave it to me—I just have a problem with me suggesting what I should read. Even though he’s my partner. I’ve read a lot of books that he’s suggested, but that one, I just can’t.

Shelf Esteem runs every Tuesday.

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Ron Deibert has seen the future of the Internet, and it’s freaking him out.

Deibert is the head of the Citizen Lab, a Toronto-based institute that studies how the Internet and online communications affect society and human rights. In his new book Black Code: Inside the Battle For Cyberspace, he argues that our global network is in danger. The Internet, he notes, began life as an open system run by academics, characterized by trust. In those early days, you could have sent spam or pried into another person’s private info, but you didn’t do it because everyone trusted one another. Once the Internet became mainstream, this open, trusting environment was quickly abused and hijacked. Hucksters flooded inboxes with spam, criminals began stealing and selling data, and “denial of service attacks” took down web sites. Meanwhile, corporations, governments and spy agencies became so unsettled by the open network—where anyone could say or do almost anything—that they began passing laws and setting up technologies to curtail this explosive burst of everyday-citizen activity.11To mark the publication of Black Code we assembled this timeline of cyber-shenanigans.

Black Code is a catalogue of what this shutdown looks like. He tours Internet server farms and sees the wiretaps installed by governments. His group uncovers criminals who unleash “trojan horses” on Facebook to ensnare users, and the Chinese creators of “Ghostnet”, a global online spying network. And he surveys the “next billion digital natives”—the people coming online in countries where the governments have even less desire for open communications.

When I spoke to Deibert, we dove deeply into how and why our online world is being squeezed shut.

In your book, you say something like: “Fifty years from now, future historians may look back and say ‘You know, there was that brief window in the 1990s and 2000s when citizens came close to building that planetary library, a global public sphere, but then let it slip from their grasp.’” When the original architects of the Internet put the system together, they made it very open—any node could talk to any other node, and you could write any code you wanted and put it online without needing to vet it with any authorities. This created a ton of amazing phenomena, like blogging or Wikipedia or even just email. But it assumed that everyone who would use the Internet was a trusted actor—that people online would behave well, right?

Although a lot of people talk about the Silicon Valley libertarian norms around the Internet, as important—maybe even more important—was the fact that the Internet was primarily borne within universities and based on the university culture of peer networking, and peer-to-peer trust. It’s a non-hierarchical organization, for the most part. But when it expanded it became the infrastructure for planet Earth and everything involved in it.

Which is when bad actors started flooding in—and, as you write, they started abusing this open system. This is the “Black Code” you talk about. Some if it is criminal activity—cybercriminals plundering your financial info online—or even corporate activity that’s legal but just creepy, like tracking your activities online so they can profile you and sell you ads. And some of it is powerful forces that are upset by how open the system is: Governments that pass laws limiting what people can do online, spy agencies using the openness to do surveillance, or Internet providers preventing people from using tools like Bittorrent because Hollywood is worried that people are stealing movies.

It’s “black” in the sense of criminal forces subverting that system of trust. That’s definitely a part of it. And that has been there from the beginning. When e-mail was invented, it wasn’t long after you had spam. Then there are states, and especially defence-intelligence agencies who are traditionally known as black—Deep Black, Black Ops—the agencies which you might have said were on the precipice of extinction at the end of Cold War, but have suddenly assumed predominance over this domain. If you look around the world today, cyber security ranks high [as a priority] in most countries, certainly in the United States, and these three letter agencies are now positioning themselves to be the primary agencies dealing with cyber security.

Another meaning of black code is an ominous looking-forward that ties it all together, that where we’re headed is actually down a path that will subvert the original intentions of this network. I have a quote from H.G. Wells at the end of the book about the “world brain,” where he kind of anticipated this global library that would be accessible to everyone. That’s Wikipedia! But we take it for granted, and I see dark clouds on the horizon.

You argue that the big intelligence agencies so prominent in the Cold War—like the National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA—didn’t have much of a mandate after the Cold War was over, but they’ve come roaring back, doing tons of online surveillance. What was the tipping point, the moment when they realized this was the area they ought to be spying into?

I really think the consequences of 9/11 cannot be overestimated. It was so dramatic that all of us who lived through it remember that existential moment, and if you look within weeks of 9/11 happening, most countries passed legislation that was seen as an emergency measure. “We need to roll back civil liberties, give intelligence agencies powers that they don’t have.” Remember, at the time the primary conclusion drawn was that there had been a failure to connect the dots, and that there was a failure to share information between law enforcement and intelligence. They had these barriers between them to protect civil liberties, hampering investigations and could have led to—you know, if only someone had spotted a rental car purchased here, an illegal visa, and so on.

That cleared the way so to speak, but standing in the wings were the agencies themselves. During the Cold War, the massive data collection apparatuses and globe-spanning satellites of the United States and the Soviet Union were primarily focused on each other. So the NSA, what was it trying to listen in on? Russian telemetry tests and Politburo conversations. After the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, the threat environment changed to a distributed non-state actor. Basically, all of society. Simultaneous with that was the rise of the Internet, and then the Internet of things, and the world of big data, which has basically led to this voracious, almost there is no end to it, this desire to…

Accumulate data.

And again there is another factor here, and that is in an era of financial austerity, the one big market opportunity right now is in cyber security. So a huge cyber security industrial complex has sprouted around big data analytics. All of that together, 9/11-style Patriot Act security legislation, threats being dispersed in society, the traumatic event of 9/11 coming from non-state actors, big data analytics and the market for it the has led to a kind of contingent, accidental coming together of this huge set of actors that now are positioning to essentially monitor and control cyberspace.

And we’re leaving a lot of trails online for them to spy into. A lot of our social activities take place in public—and on the servers of for-profit corporations like Facebook or Twitter or mobile-phone networks.

One [revolution] that is overlooked but is happening now, and started only within the last five to seven years, is the volume of data that we now entrust to third parties, especially private companies, data that either didn’t exist before or was locked away in a filing cabinet or kept in our bedrooms. It was made possible by the rise of social networking, mobile, and cloud computing. The obvious part of that is people socially share so much that they never did before, it’s kind of a new set of mores.

But what people don’t see is the data about the data: The metadata that we share. Right now I’m sitting here with my cell phone in my pocket, it’s constantly emitting a beacon. That beacon sends data to either the Wifi router here in the lab or the cell phone tower that is somewhere down the street on a building. Within that metadata is data about my phone, my ownership of the phone, header information, maybe time, date, location, GPS, and so on. And that’s me. Extrapolate that to maybe billions of people who use the Internet on a daily basis and suddenly you have this turning of our lives inside out. Even our unconscious lives.

And that information doesn’t go off into the ether, it doesn’t go off into space. It exists somewhere in a material sense. That’s another part of my book, what I’ve been trying to do over the course of my career, to peel back the layers of the deep infrastructure that we don’t see, that we take for granted, from the wires and cables all the way up to the satellites in space.

An interesting aspect of the Arab Spring was how much of the activists’ communications took place on corporate spaces like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. But there were all these interesting collisions between corporate policy and the needs of political subversion and activism. When Wael Abbas, an Egyptian journalist and activist, would film instances of police brutality or get sent films he would upload them to YouTube. But then YouTube—and this was before the Arab Spring—would occasionally delete stuff because it was too graphic; it contravened their policies. It took a long time for Abbas to get in touch with someone at YouTube to explain what was going on. Then, as Clay Shirky has said, these companies realized that like it or not, they had to have a foreign policy.

Some of the companies have developed a foreign policy, Google among them, and I’ve had longstanding relations talking to Google executives about this. I generally applaud what they’ve done in this space with transparency reports and the global networking issue. Unfortunately, companies like that are extraordinarily rare, especially in the telecommunications sector.

Spy agencies have a long record of working with for-profit companies and using their tools for spying, so today’s online world fits into that historic pattern.

There’s a comfortable relationship between intelligence agencies in the private sector, the CIA, and startup companies. The more interesting relationship to spot is with telecommunications companies, going back even to the telegraph, Western Union. Intelligence agencies like the NSA. The culture of the telecommunications industry—the AT&Ts, Verizons, BlackBerrys even of the world—the mobile sector, is much different than the Silicon Valley world. They have decades-long experience working very closely with law enforcement, defence, and intelligence agencies.

And now they’re moving into jurisdictions where the vast majority of their user base is going to come from countries that don’t have the same basic protections, assuming we still even have them. We’re rolling them back, but at least we still have a semblance of a memory of them. Whereas in countries like India where it is highly chaotic, or repressive, autocratic regimes like that of China, Russia, and Indonesia, or corrupt regimes, failing states—there cyber security is at the top of their agenda. They are looking to private companies to police the Internet on their behalf, which is creating huge human rights problems. There really isn’t much of a tradition of corporate social responsibility among telecommunications companies.

In Evgeny Morozov’s book The Net Delusion, he criticizes the notion that the Internet’s early culture of openness and free speech would transform repressive governments—because some of the time the effect is in the opposite direction. The repressive needs of despotic regimes abroad wind up influencing what the free market, the makers of the technology, and Europe and the US, are willing to do. In your book, you document how repressive governments worldwide—and non-repressive Western ones—are all using spying software and hardware created by companies like Nokia or Cisco. Cisco’s stuff was used pretty heavily to build the Great Firewall of China. “You need technology to track and bust activists? Yeah, we’ve got that. We can do that.”

And this is interesting, because as you point out, the culture of the Internet is going to change as it becomes less and less Western. The next billion or more users are will be in places like Russia, India, and China. That is going to create a powerful new centre of gravity on the way that network technologies work.

Absolutely. I was just at a meeting where someone conveyed a statistic from China: 546 million Internet users, 75 percent of them mobile. That is phenomenal. There is a conceit in the West that technology will be used in a certain way, that it comes built with certain properties mind. I think there is a deeper point here to be made that the culture of cyberspace reflects the users. And the users as much as the rulers of those countries may approach it in an entirely different way.

If you look at that next billion, most of them are coming from failed, autocratic, repressive regimes, that’s one part of it. But they’re also coming from cultures where religion plays a much greater role, culture in general plays a much greater role. They may not share our assumptions about libertarianism and access to information, especially the people who grew up here in the West with the Internet. We think of the Internet as a natural expression of our desire for basic human rights. They might come at it with completely different notions of rights, and that eventually will begin to bear down on the architecture of cyberspace. We’re seeing it already in the way that countries like Iran, looking to build a Halal Internet. And in some places like Mexico, organized crime is actually the dominant shaper of cyberspaces.

Since 2003, the Open Net Initiative has been trying to answer the question: When you’re sitting in Canada and you access the Internet, is it the same Internet you access in Saudi Arabia or Iran? The average user in Indonesia, they’re not coming into a cyberspace in which a computer connects them to a network that connects them to the very same network I have access to. Instead, they are signing up usually to a mobile provider, and those mobile providers have licensing agreements with governments for whom cyber security is at the top of the agenda.

That is a critical difference with when we came online—our governments didn’t have an Internet policy at all, it was actually laissez-faire, hands-off. We do have to give Al Gore and his colleagues credit. Now, in Indonesia it’s the exact opposite. Not only is it not laissez-faire, there is a very comprehensive cyber security policy, a part of which is to restrict certain types of content, and to monitor what you’re doing. Practically speaking, a BlackBerry user in Indonesia—there are now data centres there run by BlackBerry—all their web browsing is filtered through that data centre where there are content filters. You’re experiencing a different Internet than you are here in Canada. People use the term Balkanization for this, but it’s really about carving up and colonizing the global public sphere.

[pagebreak]Speaking of organized crime, in the book you go through a list of what it costs to get nasty things done online. It’s only $30 to $70 to hire someone to run a “denial of service attack” that shuts down a web site, or $162 to hack a Gmail account. It was surprisingly cheap! So now it’s really, really easy for any one—any stateless actor—to disrupt what people are doing. Anonymous does this for activist purposes, and criminals do it for illicit profit.

There is a flip side to that. A market has emerged to essentially take the techniques and tradecraft of cybercrime, which is so easy to purchase off the shelf, and package them—and I mean literally packaged in glossy brochures—to sell to defence, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies.

So is the Internet fated to be an increasingly closed system, where governments and corporations place ever more limits on what we do online? Or is there any pressure that could help balance things out?

At the very end of your book you try to tackle this question, and suggest a few principles that could restore sanity. One of the principles you talk about is restraint: government and corporations and individual users need to react with restraint in the face of their desires to control things. It sounds nice in theory, but how exactly one would convince governments and corporations that “restraint” would be in their self-interest.

Many people look around and think, “We must need some new theory or some new cyber virtual reality, some new political construct that will match the greatness of this system that has been created and the magnitude of all of it around us.” Here, I’m a political scientist and theorist, a historian. The way I approach this is to look at both sides. On the one hand you have the security crowd, and whenever anything gets securitized there is a tendency to some sort of realist paradigm, hierarchy, realpolitik, closure, secrecy. And then there is another reaction to it, usually on the libertarian side, and you can see that in Anonymous and other activists that I fit very comfortably with, who say, “We need to do away with government” at every turn but they don’t want to talk about security.

When I say that we need a security theory it’s not anything new. The core of it goes back to theorists of ancient Greece, and the Roman republic; it’s found in Machiavelli and the Venetian trading systems, and in the founding of the United States. It’s about mixture, division, and restraint, and we’re losing sight of them. If we want to create a planetary network that protects and preserves basic human rights like access to information, freedom of speech, privacy, association, and so on, we need to somehow build this from the ground up. That means checks and balances on concentrated power. You need to have multiple constituents requiring consultation—that’s mixture. And you divide political authority as you do in the early founding of the United States, with no one agency or branch being able to determine anything without the cooperation of the others, and lastly having that restraint.

We’ve lost sight of the idea of oversight and accountability. In Canada, there’s a signals intelligence agency whose budget has at least quadrupled since 9/11. They’re building a new headquarters in Ottawa that looks like a massive airport terminal, and very few Canadians have even heard of it. Oversight around that agency is miniscule. It’s not appropriate to the powers that the agency has and I would argue it is the same for the National Security Agency in the United States.

We have to go back and read Machiavelli as far as I’m concerned, and study the founding of the United States, and remind ourselves how to protect our liberty and secure ourselves from threats. Republicanism is what I’m talking about.

Republicanism as in “the formation of a republic.”

Mixture, division, restraint, we’re talking about that being the best set of practices when it actually comes to securing the Internet and critical infrastructure. We can’t centralize things. Secrecy is bad. You need to have multiple points of control, with redundancy built into the network. We’re losing sight of that because with the national security crowd on the one hand and the anarchist mindset on the other, the extremes are dominating the debate right now.

I see what you mean about this technology field being filled with libertarians who regard with disdain the entire concept of governance. They regard it as something to be ignored at best.

There is a thing for public authority in general, when in fact public authority is essential for the preservation of liberties. You need a state. The state needs to be restrained, and that is the beauty of the model. Unfortunately, it’s eroding very quickly with this world that we’re heading into. And you have people like John Perry Barlow saying “get out government, we don’t want you here, you don’t belong,” when in fact he is missing a much bigger point. You wouldn’t have had the opportunity if it weren’t for the state in the first place.

Or maybe there’s another solution to the closed-down Internet: Create a new one. Two years ago I was listening to John Perry Barlow talk; it was around the time of the Arab Spring, when the Egyptian government was shutting down the Internet because they were so unsettled by what was happening, and there all these were revelations about how Western corporations had sold Egypt and Tunisia the technology they used to spy on activists.

Barlow made a point that I’ve heard several times since: “Maybe we need to be looking at a competition here. There is only one Internet, maybe there should be a couple.” He was suggesting that maybe activists need to start building their own networks that are local and eventually global, so they can communicate without needing to travel over the fiber and switches and software owned and controlled by governments and corporations. Some local communities are already doing this—like the local “mesh” networks in Spain and Greece where thousands of households trade messages just by hopping from house to house via Wifi.

But is this just a pipe dream?

You can understand why it is intuitively appealing, and I applaud ingenuity from the margins. I like mesh networks, when people are coming up with alternative things. But you cannot avoid political structure, and thinking about the political architecture around this. You may succeed in evading it for a while, you might reach a certain point where it succeeds, but the problem is one of scale. Once you get to a point where it matters, where it’s not a marginal entity, something that actually hits the radar, you can’t avoid it. You have to start dealing with political issues, meaning what is the proper architecture of authority that governs this space.

I think people are so put off by politics today, they’ve lost a sense of enthusiasm about why politics is important in the first place. We need to have political authority. It’s a way of organizing life so that we don’t descend into chaos or live in a complete dictatorship. That is why you have political theory, and I think we need to apply some basic political theory to the constitution of this domain as a whole. If it was properly done there would be much greater latitude for innovation from the margins.

One thing I should emphasize is that this book is about the Citizen Lab. The Citizen Lab is not just any old NGO, it’s based at a university. And universities are critical to all that we’ve been talking about here, and they’re not doing their job right now. The Internet was born in the university system, as we talked about at the outset—a lot of basic principles of the Internet were borne from traditions that come from the university. Right now the Internet is under threat and universities have to step up to the plate. They have a stake and a voice when it comes to cyber security, and universities themselves are under threat. I would like to see, in the next ten years, an inter-university network that would really stake out some of these principles. Reaffirm them and include people, some of those grandfathers of the Internet, that would surely understand this, to talk about why something like a global communications system that is distributed, like the Internet was designed, is essential for the future of human knowledge. That really boils down to universities understanding that their own existence is staked on the Internet.

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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. 

1973
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. starts a program to look into technologies that link computer networks.

1982
15-year-old Pennsylvanian Rich Skrenta writes the Elk Cloner program, the first computer virus ever found “in the wild.”

1984
Author of Neuromancer, William Gibson, coins the term “cyberspace.”

February 1998
A series of attacks on U.S. Department of Defense computers is dubbed Solar Sunrise, in which sensitive data was stolen across 500 systems, seemingly from servers around the world. The hack is traced to three teenagers in California.

May 1998
Stephen Glass is busted for fabricating, “Hack Heaven,” his story for The New Republic. The article told the fictitious tale of Ian Retsil, a 15-year-old hacker who used a school computer to bypass the security settings of fictional software company Jukt Micronics.

May 2000
Quaint by today’s standards, ILOVEYOU, or the Love Letter virus, was a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of Windows computers. A user is sent an email with “ILOVEYOU” in the subject line, and once opened, it overwrites image files and sends itself to the first 50 names in the user’s address book.

July 2001
Code Red, and still remembered for how quickly it spread, exploited a flaw in Microsoft operating systems that enabled it to deface and take down some websites. At one point it brought down the White House webpage, and forced other government agencies to take down their websites as well.

2003
Anonymous is born on 4chan’s image board.

2003
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security combines several of its cyberdefense offices into a new department, the National CyberSecurity Division. Its purpose is to protect government computers from hacks.

May 2003
Yet another email worm attacks users, but Fizzer was different—it went after money. Fizzer is the worm that sent out the now-everyday porn and pill email spam. It got so big that Microsoft offered a $250,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest of its creator.

May 2004
The Sasser worm attacks the British Coast Guard, Agence France-Presse, and Delta Airlines. The virus also affects universities, hospitals, and major corporations—and it all came from a 17-year-old German kid.

December 2006
Internet-based watchdog and activist group WikiLeaks publishes its first document, a secret decision signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union. The document calls for the execution of government officials.

April 2007
A large-scale cyber attack, originating in Russia (and perhaps with government encouragement), brings down major Estonian websites and IT networks, including the president’s office, the parliament, police, and the country’s two largest banks.

June 2007
U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates gets his unclassified email account hacked. The attack allegedly coordinated by the People’s Liberation Army in China.

December 2008
The Koobface worm—an anagram of Facebook—is first detected on social media platforms.The worm targets users of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter among others, and uses compromised computers to build a peer-to-peer botnet.

May 2010
A memo by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says that the risk of cyber attacks are growing substantially.

January 2010
Dozens of Silicon Valley tech companies—including Google—report that hackers from China attacked their computer networks.

June 2010
The computer worm Stuxnet, thought to have been created by the U.S. and Israel, attacks the operating systems of nuclear facilities in Iran.

October 2010
WikiLeaks posts 391,832 classified U.S. military documents on the war in Iraq. It was the largest leak in history, and revealed instances of the military ignoring detainee abuse and an increase in the civilian casualty count.

December 2010
Anonymous targets PayPal and Mastercard in what it calls Operation Payback, a movement to take revenge on companies that have suspended WikiLeaks accounts.

January 2011
Hackers from China target not only the Canadian government but also the Defence Research and Development Canada, the scientific and technological arm of the Department of National Defence. The hacks leave officials concerned about how much sensitive information was accessed.

April 2011
A hacker steals the names, e-mail addresses, and passwords of more than 70 million users of Sony’s online gaming network. The hack costs an estimated $170 million.

September 2011
Conservative MP Bob Dechert admits that he sent flirtatious emails to Shi Rong, a journalist working in for China’s Xinhua news agency. Xinhua is state-controlled, and many believe that some of its correspondents pass information to Chinese intelligence or even operate as spies.

October 2012
Ottawa considers banning China’s Huawei, a telecommunications equipment and services company, for fear that the Chinese government is using their products to spy on other countries. Huawei denies the claim.

April 2012
Former presidential advisor and counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke publishes Cyber War about the threat of cyber-terrorism. In the book, Clarke warns about an “electronic Pearl Harbor” replete with mass blackouts and subway crashes.

February 2013
A 12-storey building on the outskirts of Shanghai is discovered to be the headquarters of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army—the unit suspected of being behind cyber attacks around the world.

March 2013
Internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz commits suicide at 26. In 2011, Swartz was arrested for allegedly downloading around four million academic journals with intent to distribute them for free.

April 2013
Matthew Keys, the deputy social media editor for Reuters, is fired after being indicted on federal charges for conspiring with Anonymous. It’s alleged that Keys conspired with Anonymous in order to hack into and change a news story on the Los Angeles Times website.

April 2013
The 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report says that 96 per cent of incidents of government cyber-espionage originate in China. The other 4 percent are from unknown sources.

May 2013
In just 10 hours, hackers in more than two dozen countries steal $45 million from thousands of ATMs around the world. They erased withdrawal limits on prepaid debit cards in tens of thousands of transactions. Eight defendants are charged for attacks in December and February.

May 2013
All four members of LulzSec, a group of hackers that attacked multiple organizations, are sentenced in the UK for their crimes. Hacking mostly for the fun of it, LulzSec went after Sony, the CIA, and Fox.

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It’s been a banner week for human civilization. A topless painting of Bea Arthur sold for $1.9 million, Denmark won the Eurovision contest with a song about crying, and, to top it all off, the mayor of Toronto made a really cool short film that’s getting tons of buzz. But all that stuff is nothing compared to the week’s two hottest stories. First up, Venezuela ran out of toilet paper. So, if you were thinking of taking the family on one of those all-inclusive Venezuelan bathroom tours, don’t. The second top story was soccer superstar David Beckham’s shocking announcement that he was ending his life—his life as a professional athlete, that is! Now, let’s contrast and compare these two stories and see which one is better through the magic of a Culture War™.

Venezuela’s Toilet Paper Crisis
A spectre is haunting Venezuela. No, not the spectre of communism; this spectre is far stankier and not even a beret can make it look cool. It’s the spectre of no toilet paper. Yes, like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, Venezuela is in the midst of a terrifying nationwide toilet paper shortage that threatens to plunge the country into deep, filthy chaos. Store shelves are bare. The people are angry. Things are so bad that one of those adorable Charmin bears was torn apart limb from limb by an angry mob in Caracas—and you don’t want to know what they did with its fur. What is to be done?

Economists blame the TP shortage on the rigid price control system put into place by late president Hugo Chavez, a system that often leads to shortages of staples like milk, eggs, and cornmeal. The country’s socialist government, however, blames its political rivals and the media for creating a fake toilet paper crisis as part of a diabolical plot to foment unrest and bring the Venezuelan government to its knees. But the main thing to remember is EWWWWW GROSS NO TOILET PAPER??? SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE HELL??? I SUPPOSE I’LL JUST HAVE TO USE THIS OLD EGG CARTON??? OUCH!!! OUCH!!! OUUUCCHH!!! THERE IS NO GOD!!!

Things are particularly bad for Venezuelan practical jokers, who’ve been forced to find other materials to playfully drape over their victims’ trees. Luckily, there’s some light at the end of the toilet: the Venezuelan government has vowed to import 50 million rolls of toilet paper to calm the population and prevent societal breakdown. ¡Viva la Revolución!

Beckham Retires
As someone who’s never watched a second of David Beckham in action, I was devastated to hear he was retiring from soccer. I’d grown accustomed to the arrangement we had, and was looking forward to many more years of ignoring his accomplishments. Alas, it’s all over and harsh reality has set in. Now I’ll have to ignore everything he’s not doing.

The question is, how will he pass the hours now that he’s quit the ol’ 9 to 5? Will he focus full time on walking around in his underwear? Will he launch a public speaking career (which would be super funny considering his ridiculous squeaky voice)? Will he bend the kids’ school lunches? Or will he just lie around the house eating Pringles all day, watching videos of his greatest goals and shouting out, “I am Becks!” for hours on end, until his wife Posh Spice leaves him? It’s going to be interesting to see which one of my ideas he runs with.

The Winner
The winner of this week’s Culture War is… the Venezuelan toilet paper shortage. It’s a story that has it all: tragedy, comedy, political intrigue and—especially—romance. Someone should make a movie about it. Perhaps Oliver Stone? I see Javier Bardem as the embattled Venezuelan President. And Nathan Lane as a man screaming for toilet paper.

Culture War runs every Tuesday.

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I read the word “glade” the other day and emailed my dad. It seems unlikely that William Butler Yeats wrote the “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” with the intention of producing this particular effect. But Yeats’ line, “And live alone in the bee-loud glade,” triggered a memory of sitting on the floor when I was maybe ten years old, listening as my dad read to my sister and me from The Adventures of Robin Hood. I remember “glade” specifically because he mispronounced it, and my 12-year-old sister wouldn’t let him live it down.

There’s a contradiction at the heart of our relationship with literature, in that we ask it both to deliver us from ourselves and to ourselves. I was reading Yeats in part to get out of my own head, but sometimes reading is like travelling—wherever you go, there you are. We want to be rescued from our limited lives and narrow points of view by being introduced to people and places we don’t know and ideas we’ve never thought of. But we also want literature to speak directly to us about our own experiences, so we create opportunities for the text to circle back to our favourite subject—ourselves.

David Shields’ new book, How Literature Saved My Life, is a contortionist portrait of the reading brain. Like the scene in Being John Malkovich in which Malkovich opens the secret porthole to his own brain and looks out onto a solipsistic Malkovichian world—the waiter and all the restaurant patrons wear his own face, the menu is inscribed with a list of dishes all called Malkovich, the murmur of the diners is Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich—Shields is looking at himself seeing himself in books.

When Shields sets out into the world of a book to meet its characters, some shared quality always seems to send him hurtling back towards himself. When Benna Carpenter, protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams, offers a mournful comment on loneliness, Shields asks, “Why is she (why am I) so sad?” Moore has endowed Benna with an affinity for people who misspeak. Shields jumps up to declare that he himself stutters, and that he was once in a room with Lorrie Moore and hoped she would notice him: “She gave a reading at her alma mater, where I was then teaching, and I hoped, a little naively, that she’d find my speech impediment irresistible.”

In a way, literature asks us to do this. The ideal response to an artwork is personal and individual, and engages the reader (or viewer, or listener) in a way that usually has little or nothing to do with the formal or intellectual content of the work. In school, even though I loved books, I hated English class because the way I was being asked to interact with works felt so unnatural. Why would I lay the book out like a dead frog, its themes and characters and metaphors things to be prodded, dissected, and classified? Surely the most important thing about Lord of the Flies wasn’t the symbolism of Ralph’s conch shell, but the sick feeling the story gave you, of shame and fear and ugly recognition. In an odd way, books felt too private to talk about.

A reader's favourite subject is himself. As David Shields' Literature Saved My Life makes clear, we visit the worlds of literature to find ourselves.

It’s also impossible to evaluate a book without thinking quite a lot about yourself. It can seem like the job of the critic to pretend more certainty than anyone actually feels, but most of us are aware of a few solid facts: I am only one person; I am saddled with a set of biases I can only dimly recognize, if I squint; I may or may not be the reader this author had in mind. I hated Fifth Business, and a Catholic friend said, “You just really don’t understand repression.” We all have huge swathes of experience cut off to us by virtue of having had other whole swathes of experience. Shields has an extended passage in which he compares himself to George Bush: “He once said he couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be poor; I have trouble reading books by people whose sensibility is wildly divergent from my own.”

How Literature Saved My Life came out at the same time as another book with a remarkably similar title: How Poetry Saved My Life, by Amber Dawn. Dawn is a former sex worker, and her book is subtitled A Hustler’s Memoir. Both Shields and Dawn remark on how literature rescued them from themselves, lifting them out of less than fulfilling lives. Shields’ existential angst is a touch more rarefied, consisting of travails like trying to work on his novel while having to teach movie stars’ kids at a private high school, whereas Dawn describes how hopelessly distant the literary world seemed from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: “I remember reading poet Kate Braid’s Inward to the Bones with my then-girlfriend in an SRO (single room occupancy) on Carrall and Hastings Streets in Vancouver’s skid row. She and I—street hustlers, both of us—would daydream about somehow winning our way into Kate Braid’s poetry class, as if it were a lottery.”

It would seem as if these two projects—Shields’ self-referential reading diary, and Dawn’s memoir of a life that threatened to swallow her sense of self—are poles apart. But in her introduction, Dawn offers an invitation. The memoir is in three sections, and she writes, “I’d like to suggest that there is a fourth section, one that invites you, the reader, to explore your own story of survival, speaking out, finding community, and treasuring your own experiences. If you so choose, you’ll notice these invitations throughout the book.” Shields is making that phantom fourth section visible.

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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. On the one hand, we have three reporters from two different outlets who claim to have seen the same video (they disagree on some details, but not many) showing Ford smoking crack, or possibly some other illegal drug. One presumably doesn’t meet drug dealers because they owe you a pack of smokes and some tallboys.

On the other, we’ve got Ford saying the allegations are ridiculous, trotting out the Dougs—Deputy Mayor Holyday and mayoral brother-in-chief Doug Ford—to say the increasingly implausible: they’ve never seen Ford have a drink, never seen him use any kind of drugs, and gosh, couldn’t that have been a faked video like that eagle stealing the baby? (Holyday should really be applauded for grasping the Internet’s spirit of re-appropriation and reuse for that one.)

Ford’s own innocence would be more credible if he didn’t own his ample record. From most to least substantiated: his DUI and possession of marijuana in Florida; his drunken shouting at the Air Canada Centre; the Toronto Star’s previous reporting on his drinking; and Sarah Thomson’s allegation that he groped her while not in his right mind. None of these events prove that the video exists or depicts what it’s said to, but if, like me, you’ve been watching Ford for the last three years, it’s hard not to react to the latest allegations with a shrug and a sighed, “Okay, now that’s happening.”

But even if it wasn’t Rob Ford and all of the baggage he carries, this would be a story where it’s hard to give a person the benefit of the doubt. Addiction makes us lie, even with the spectre of video evidence. Our own attempts to defend ourselves, to the jaded or familiar, ring hollow. And the people who do stick by us look, to third parties, increasingly naive and desperate to cling to illusions in the face of evidence.

More than the illegality, more than the homophobic or racist remarks said to be on the video, if it depicts what three people say it does, then we’re left with the most fundamental question for someone who holds elected office: can you trust him?

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How Françoise Mouly maintains her noticeable composure is anyone’s guess. Seconds before our interview, the woman best known—titularly, at least—as the art director of the New Yorker politely asks me where she can find WiFi, and goes off in swift search of it. A moment later she returns, with a smile and an evident “crisis averted” look. Whatever it had been, it was quickly resolved before her eyes—on her device, through a sequence of progressively assuaging emails.

The moment is unsurprising for someone holding such a high-profile position, but Mouly’s concern seems oddly romantic—rooted in a fierce, and indeed renowned, dedication to art and artists. Before her over-twenty-year tenure at the New Yorker, Mouly made her name as a comic artist and publisher with Raw, the comics anthology she published and co-edited with husband Art Spiegelman. Raw forged a path for the underground-comics movement, which surfaced (and then arguably exploded) with the success of Spiegelman’s Maus in the early 1990s—the same time that Mouly was hired by Tina Brown at the New Yorker.

It was a new dawning for illustration and Mouly was a vital part of it. She began her New Yorker tenure—the most visible part of it of course being the publication’s famous, copy-less cover—by hiring many artists with whom she had worked at Raw: in addition to Spiegelman, Joost Swarte, Chris Ware, R. Crumb and others. She brought back older New Yorker artists such as Sempé and Saul Steinberg. With Brown, Mouly lent an edge to the New Yorker. Its covers became the talk of the town once more.

Mouly has developed a solid stable of artists to whom regular readers of the New Yorker have become accustomed. Two of Barry Blitt’s Barack Obama covers, for instance, are well known: a recent, post–fiscal cliff image of the President herding cats; and, of course, the 2008, pre-election cover of Barack and Michelle in the oval office, he dressed as Osama Bin Laden, she as Angela Davis, with the American flag burning in the fireplace. (It’s a cover over which Mouly regularly expresses pride.)

But the New Yorker is only a part of Mouly’s life. Her other effort at present is children’s literature, and she is extremely passionate about it. She launched Raw Junior in 2000, which published Little Lit, a comics anthology series for children. In 2008 she launched Toon Books, an imprint that describes itself as the first publisher of “high-quality comics” for children ages four and up. The books are hardcover, and done in consultation with educators.

Tying everything together is Mouly’s passion for the illustrated image. In interview, she associates this with all aspects of life. Given her dedication to the physical book and old-school notions of publishing and learning, one might accuse her of overzealousness or even naïveté—had she not been so conspicuously successful in all her endeavours. Mouly’s air is soft but steely. Her lilting French accent and quiet, sleepy beauty recall Charlotte Rampling. After only half-an-hour with her, one has little doubt that she is that rare thing: an ambitious, tough person determined to herald ideals of thoughtfulness, intelligence and sensitivity.

I sat down for a chat with Mouly in the stacks of the Toronto Reference Library when she was in town for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) last week.

It’s been interesting researching your career; there’s so much there. Do you think, if you had been able to look ahead thirty years ago, that you’d be surprised as to where you are now? Was a trajectory apparent?

I would be surprised that there’s so much consistency! Because years ago, I was acting out of passion. I had no idea where this would lead. I was mostly reacting to people who said, “You can’t do this”—it’s not like I had a vision. I would have been unable to predict that we would succeed to the extent we’ve succeeded. I certainly would not have predicted the kind of recognition that Art got. He was just as smart and articulate thirty years ago, but he was a lone voice in the wilderness. Now he says the same things and everybody’s like, “My god, he’s a genius.” But he hasn’t changed. It’s simply that so many more people are able to hear it.

I’d never have predicted his book would become so entrenched. Not only in terms of being accepted—it was inconceivable to do a comic book about the Holocaust. You couldn’t even think of wanting to do that; it was so outrageous. Now, it seems to be the cornerstone of an entire shelf in the library! There are so many comic books about the Holocaust. So that, I couldn’t have imagined—let alone the shape, the almost immutable format of memoirs. Art chose a format for Maus that didn’t exist. No one had done a book that was trade-paperback size with French flaps, a 200-page continuous story. So the fact that not only would it be accepted but that almost every other cartoonist on earth would attempt to do his or her graphic novel, as if that were the only way you could do comics—that’s strange.

Also, the fact that the publishing industry, the print industry, would collapse was not even conceivable. When I had a computer in 1980, it was a tool; it wasn’t driving, you know? It was something you used to do something, not an end in and of itself. But through all of this, the permanency of the actual book in the two areas I’m interested in—one is comics, and the other is books for children—is just as essential thirty years later. These things somehow remain when everything else has turned to rubble. Heidi MacDonald just published an article in PW about how graphic novels have become the hottest thing for librarians. That was not even possible to think of.

And now Art has a touring retrospective. That must be strange to see but also gratifying.

It really is. I sympathize with him because there’s a danger in finding oneself entombed in one’s own success. I’ve had many friends and people asking me to do an anthology of Raw, or turn towards the past and what it was like then, but it’s really not interesting to me. What I’m doing now is so much more interesting to me. That’s something that I feel very grateful for: that I find what I’m doing now just as difficult as what I was doing then; that, no matter how many genuine, gratifying accomplishments, there’s still such a sense that there’s so much left to do in the fields I’ve chosen. Fighting for good books to be put in the hands of kids: there are many books I publish that I feel like, if I didn’t do it, nobody else would. I’m really grateful for that—keeps me alert.

Tell me more about the children’s-lit imprint you’ve been working on for the past few years.

I’m in a strange position where I’m the art editor of the New Yorker. It’s the best magazine in the world, has contributors of the highest caliber, and I’m responsible for the cover of that magazine. It’s as visible as it gets. But I still have a hard time getting comics published inside. I’m in competition with the journalistic reports, and all the editors are fighting for more pages. And there’s no room for children’s literature—of all the missions the New Yorker it has, that’s not one of them.

It’s a very adult magazine!

Very much so. It doesn’t consider itself a family magazine. Some magazines do, but not the New Yorker. So it’s very complementary for me. I feel that for two reasons. I did Raw Junior in 1998, about five years after I started the New Yorker. One reason was to keep my hands in publishing, on a first-hand basis. As much as I value my position at the New Yorker, I’m part of a team. There’s something in me that is eager to have something that I’m solely in charge of; that’s my thing, where I don’t have to compromise or argue.

Also, it’s something I get to produce myself. I choose the paper and the format, the author, and create a book object. I can’t do that with the New Yorker. I’ve tried. I’ve done everything I could, but we run over a million copies a week. It’s not taken well when I say things like, “Hey! Let’s do a five-colour Pantone die-cut!” I’ve done as many things as can be done. But I like the idea of still having the handmade process a small press can provide. In the 21st century there’s something magical about an artist who can actually create content with a pen. There’s something so pure about a drawing that captures the imagination and enters into the cultural dialogue. For kids to be good citizens in the twentieth century, they have to be visually literate.

There seems to be a commonality to all your projects: Raw, which pushed the envelope of comics culture; the New Yorker, the covers for which enter a broader cultural discourse; and your work with children’s literature, which attempts to reach out and shape a formative experience of reading and images. These are all influencing roles. Is there an aspect to your work in which you’re trying to… not indoctrinate, but enrich?

I think that if you set out with a scripted outcome, you don’t succeed. I’m acting out things that work on me. I spent most of my terribly unhappy childhood years immersed in books. I found early on that it was a great way to escape any kind of arguments with my parents or emotional upheaval. I loved reading and being lost in a book. I trained as an architect. As an architect you’re part of a team and no architect can build a house by themselves. But a bookmaker can make a book all by themselves. And an author: look at my husband’s book, or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—she manages to convey a very rich world, and her personality is very well expressed in a book that shows her handwriting, that has a sense of her.

In a way I got a very classical education growing up in France in the sixties, and learning Latin, Greek, French and English. But I’m well versed in the technological part of the 21st century. The common denominator for me is stories, narrative structure. That’s how I understand things. I find them, books, the right recipient for something that is both complex and nourishing. I watch movies and enjoy them; I watch, you know, The Wire and TV shows, but still, the stories I read in books inhabit my brain in a special way. Those characters are very present in my thinking. And children’s books are a very real part of how I think. So I find it a privilege to actually be in communication, to leave a trace of something that’s actually going to be read.

On that note, two interesting things I’ve come across that you’ve said: “Fifty per cent of the image is actually when it is looked at and read” and “Cartoonists have to use clichés.” One of the perennial issues in publishing, but especially now that we’re facing this supposed crisis and death, is that there’s a lot of second-guessing about a general readership. Who’s the reader? Who’s the viewer? There are a lot of editorial and publishing meetings about what “the reader” wants and is going to think. But you wonder, ‘Who is that person, really?’

It’s an interesting question because at the New Yorker, since the magazine was launched in 1925, we’ve managed to refine things, as an identity. We’re a repository, a filter, for high-quality content. And as interested as we are in our reader, it’s not interactive in quite that sense, even though it spurs us on. For example, the cover: the sketches are looked at by the checkers with a very critical eye. Everything in the magazine is looked at with a very critical eye, because we’re going to get those letters saying, “Oh, on that sailboat your artist drew, the sails are shown going the wrong way” or something. Unbelievably learned and savant! The readers are interacting with the magazine in a more expert way than the writers who are being published. It forces you as an editor to really be on your toes and to take your readers very seriously.

So it’s a little different and a more salutary interaction than only publishing to get the most emails and the most-read things—to play by the numbers, and if something has a huge following then you give it a bump. At the New Yorker, at least you still trust yourself as an editor, even if people don’t vote for everything you do. You still appreciate something as an interesting piece. That’s a fine line to be able to sort through all of the information.

There’s something in my sense of what a publisher can do, which is very old-fashioned, which is that the publisher can follow specific sets of interests. It’s one of the things we did in Raw, putting together interesting cartoonists, whether they be European or American or Japanese, all the different traditions. Intentionally, we didn’t define a house style. Quality was the common denominator. Also, each artist we published had a unique voice. That was really important because it wasn’t just a matter of the content, the forms that it took, a way of drawing or approach to narrative or character. It was a matter of having use. There is a sense of entitlement that the cartoonist doesn’t have. Chris Ware said it best: “When I’m at a museum and I’m looking at a painting and I don’t understand it, I think I’m an idiot. But if I’m reading a comic and I don’t get it, I think the cartoonist is an idiot.” And in that sense a cartoonist is not entitled to be towering over his audience. The cartoonist is actually engaging in a fifty-fifty. Certain expectations have to be met and they have to communicate. He or she is not just answerable to his own inner demons. Even if the story is personal it’s still a form of communication. That’s mandated from the moment that you decide you are going to be printing it.

You must follow the news assiduously. Working at the New Yorker as long as you have must have changed your brain in some ways.

Oh yes. I’m so up on things. But you know, working at the New Yorker, I don’t make those covers. I’m in a dialogue with the artists who make those covers. It’s a back-and-forth. It’s knowing and listening to people and listening to what they propose.

Some weeks I’m sure it’s obvious or becomes obvious what the subject of the cover is going to be. Does it cross your mind, in terms of the event being addressed, that, like, “This one’s for Barry, for Art, for Chris, for whomever?”

To some extent. But you know I’m very pragmatic, so whatever works. When I entered the New Yorker, my predecessor said, Well here’s how you do it: you accumulate a stack of drawings, then you go see the editor and they say yes and you put those ones on the right and they say no and you put those ones on the left, and then the ones that have been chosen, you schedule them for the next six weeks. Well, that’s definitely not the way I do it! From the beginning, I had to find my own methodology.

Pretty much when I started, covers were only vaguely related to the season but not much of that, really—and absolutely not timely. And the editors, starting with Tina Brown, wanted something that was more responsive to events. It’s not predictable like TIME or Newsweek. It’s not a news magazine in that sense. And that’s great because we only do a timely image if we have something to say. There have been a number of events, for example the Aurora shooting, where I sent out various calls and talked to various artists and didn’t find an image that I felt was worth doing, so we didn’t do it. And that’s OK too. We don’t have to respond to every blip on the news cycle. But it’s a big privilege to be able to select an artist who genuinely has something to contribute that goes beyond the obvious.

The other thing that’s great with the New Yorker covers is that they are somewhat autonomous from the rest of the magazine. So there could be an article about the Aurora shooting, a think piece or something, but no corresponding cover. Also there are no words, so the image has to be self-contained and explain itself and communicate what it’s about. It has to read very quickly because it’s on the newsstand and you get it in your mailbox. Again, to use Chris Ware’s words, it’s no good if people come to me and say they have no idea what a cover is about and ask me to explain it. It forces a dialogue with the reader; the reader has a certain expectation; but with the images that come, and many artists send many sketches, many more than what gets published, it’s a search for good ideas. Because I work with the best artists in the world, after that it will almost inevitably turn into really good pictures. What’s hard is to find good ideas. But fortunately at the New Yorker it’s a forum that’s rewarding and challenging enough that the artist devotes the energy necessary. The image enters broadly and they get a lot of response.

So, then, how often is the process collaborative between you and the artist? I know that Christoph Niemann’s cherry-blossom cover about Fukushima was changed from a white to a black background to suggest a darker mood.

It really depends on the artist. There are artists where there’s an extensive back-and-forth. But there are some artists where we touch nothing. For example, we just published a cover by Chris Ware. At some point with my team we noticed there was a tiny piece between the shoes of one of the characters that was a little darker, so we corrected it and told Chris but he told us it wasn’t a mistake—that it was intentional, a shadow! So we reverted to the original.

There’s an example of someone where there’s absolutely nothing to add or change, because he’s figured it out. There my contribution is pretty minimal. Then there are other artists where it’s different. There are a number of covers by Barry Blitt for which he sent me two or three different versions and I built one that is none of the above but a little bit of each one. The goal is that all of this be totally seamless and each image be the best expression of what the artist has intended. And if I do something, it’s not to appropriate it into my own narrative but to put myself in the service of what the artist is saying.

You mentioned before the start of the interview that you were preparing a special animated cover of the magazine for the iPad by Christoph Niemann. As somebody who is known for hand-crafted, careful and often very beautiful work, what is your relationship with digital technology as it pertains to publishing?

It’s a good way to make print objects known. For the kids’ books I use e-books; I do all kinds of online versions; I have extensive websites, all sorts of resources. It’s a great, great tool. I spend my life on a computer—I hate it but I do it! But, if it’s an end in and of itself, then it’s a snake that swallows its own tail. It can become suffocating. But as a tool to actually disseminate information, it’s great. Some things exist best in the ephemeral online version. But if you’re talking about a book and the story and something for children…

I heard Frank Cammusso talk this morning. He’s done many children’s books including some Toon books and he was talking about his three-and-a-half-year-old son, and when it comes time for bedtime, he can’t read him something on an iPad, because the iPad is a portal to excitement. He wants to go on YouTube and knows how to navigate it. That’s not what he wants for his son at bedtime so he brings in this printed book, and that’s where the book has this unique quality of being always the same. It’s graven; every time you turn that page the same image will appear. You can move it back and forth and hold it up and of course it doesn’t need to be plugged in and can be read in any kind of light; it has a kind of universality and permanence. And it can be the same book that Dad read when he was a child.

I just released Blown Covers last year, a book of sketches for New Yorker covers that weren’t published, and the only reason I was able to do this is because twenty, fifteen, ten years ago, everything was sent to me as faxes. So I have a piece of paper with those black-and-white sketches. More and more artists are sending me digital files and instead of doing thumbnails they’re sending it in colour and I’m not printing it or keeping it. I wouldn’t be able to search for it and they disappear from my brain the moment I see them. Whereas a little black-and-white thumbnail, I can keep it and remember it; it has an iconic quality.

You were mentioning symbols and clichés: what is interesting to me about visual representation in comics and in cartoons is that it is units of thoughts. One of my big privileges as the New Yorker art director was to be Saul Steinberg’s editor. Steinberg said that what for him was very exciting, was that if he did a drawing that succeeded, it shaped the way you thought. So his View of the World from Ninth Avenue: once you have seen it, it imprints itself and becomes a vocabulary. You can’t remember not knowing that concept. You’ve acquired a new concept for chauvinism and narrow-mindedness that is now embedded in your brain.

The contest you’ve been running with the Eustace Tilley covers: this year’s Brooklyn dandy cover has, for me, certainly changed how I see that image.

That’s a good example, actually. Eustace Tilley: that drawing was done in 1925, and when I first looked at it I saw in it what everyone else does—haughty sophistication, looking down upon the common mortal. But when I learned more about Rea Irvin and I looked at the covers done right after in 1925, I realized the magazine was positioning itself for F. Scott Fitzgerald and the flappers: those were the ones represented on the other covers. The dandy with a high collar is based on a drawing of the Comte d’Orsay from 1840, so about hundred years before 1925. They’re mocking fuddy duddies, the grandparents who are looking down on them because they’re so hip, so young.

It’s through the years that it somehow gets taken at face value, through the reader of the New Yorker, and its shift from Harold Ross as a humour magazine to a highly respected magazine of journalistic pieces—as if the New Yorker is not mocking fuddy duddies but has become the fuddy duddy. In 1993, we had a drawing by Charles Burns where he does a totally exploded, grossly visceral version of Eustace Tilley and next year R. Crumb did his version of Eustace Tilley as a punk in Times Square and Art did one of him as Dick Tracy and Ana Juan did one of him as a woman. Through all these variations, you open up this icon, this cliché, into something that can mock itself, which is a breath of fresh air, and also acknowledges women artists, writers, a younger readership—a much broader, more inclusive readership. Clichés are interesting because they’re reduction and simplification and in this way become ciphers for ideas.

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What are we talking about, when we talk about Rob Ford? Class, I think, is always there, as is irony. At their core, the most spectacular Ford stories hinge on a deep mixing: the privileges of white, masculine power with the signifiers of poverty and powerlessness. The big-necked guy in an SUV, straight-talking, hard-drinking—and meanwhile, he’s crushing the union. Arguably, Ford started this himself, running for office on a regular-guy schtick that endeared him to working-class voters in (but mostly around) the GTA. His platform traded in the tropes of honesty and hard work, longstanding blue-collar values that, through another lens, we could understand as stereotypes.

But while Ford expressed certain “positive” blue collar values, anti-Ford media and other critics tarred him with negative stereotypes of working-classness, and thus the irony of Ford took hold. The public image of Ford is pure white trash, in its specific male incarnation. Obesity, bigotry, recklessness, and illiteracy have long been slurs against blue-collar men; Ford checks every box, and those for more recent tropes—DUIs, football, McDonald’s—too. He even fucks up according to white trash script, in an excessive, bodily way: overeating, behaving (what’s been described by witnesses as) shitface-drunk in public, allegedly grabbing a woman’s ass at a fancy party. That Ford rarely apologizes, or even seems aware that he’s offended, makes these scandals seem less like fuck-ups than a certain style of governing: expressions of Ford’s particular power. This is why, occasionally, Ford coverage admits pangs of sympathy, even admiration. White trash is nothing if not audacious.

The idea of smoking crack while in office is pretty audacious, but here, Fordean irony takes on a racial cast. “I have very mixed feelings about Robert ‘Bubbles’ Ford,” wrote a friend of mine on Facebook this morning after the crack story broke. “White millionaires like to get high off high-quality drugs. It's kind of authentic in an odd way.” Read a random tweet: “Ford is so ghetto.” Are we scandalized by the Ford crack story because it’s hard drugs, or because it’s crack: a drug associated, in legend if not fact, with urban black poverty? I don’t think we’d be as outraged, if the drug were cocaine, and the setting a posh hotel. Because race is the culmination of all privilege narratives, because when we talk about power we are always, on some level talking about race, it’s fitting that the most outrageous Ford story of all is the most racialized one. So potent is the association of crack with black masculinity that Gawker bolstered the breaking story with a photo of Ford grinning redly between three young guys, all seemingly dark-skinned, all wearing hoodies, one—recent murder victim Anthony Smith—middle finger up: fuck you! The pic, provided by the story’s source, was not a capture from the video. But it was offered as proof, and we seem to have taken it as such, so meaningful is this image of a white politician with three sweatshirt-clad black men. The tipster understood how the signals would be read, and he was right.

Crack is the ultimate gesture in Ford’s history of irony, white-guy power wrapped around and through one of the most fraught—and dangerous—symbols of powerlessness. Among its other consequences, it spotlights the bigger, sadder irony in the workings of privilege: someone like Ford can smoke crack and face “scandal,” while black or poor people face sentencing or worse. And while we talk about Ford’s fat rolls and crack pipe—really talking, of course, about race and class and power—there’s another story still: that Ford has in fact used his privilege in mundane, entirely typical white-rich-guy ways: slashing funding for community programs; misappropriating city funds; begging off the job. I’m not sure if the crack allegations will bring him down, though something will. Like the mythic political figures before him—and that’s where he belongs, I think, with the corrupt emperors of Rome and pervert popes of the middle ages and Silvio Berlusconi—Ford will certainly fall as he ruled, swathed in story. Too bad it’s not the right story, and not for the right reasons.

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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 George W. Bush.

It doesn’t seem that Truman was especially scared, and though Nixon probably was, it wasn’t of the things he encouraged the population to fear. Bush is a cypher, but it looks like the secret behind the otherwise inexplicably horrible things that are happening under Obama—Guantanamo, the six indictments under the Espionage Act, the drones, the kill lists, the Associated Press spying, the atmosphere that allowed the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups—may be the direct result of Barack Hussein Obama himself being personally panic-stricken.

The Commander-in-Fear idea comes from the opening pages of Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars. After a detailed summary of the president-elect’s first security briefing, which was so secret it took place in a tiny, windowless room in the centre of a building so not even the highest of tech snooping devices could overhear—give me a better image of paranoid power—Woodward quotes Obama, through a source, saying, “I’m inheriting a world that could blow up any minute in half a dozen ways.”

Usually, I wouldn’t set too much store by what Bob Woodward reports. He’s a fan of narrative, and has a tendency to impose it on otherwise messy timelines. I tend to figure he probably gets the big picture right, but I don’t take any particular detail too seriously.

But James C. Goodale thinks Woodward’s nailed it with this ObamaFear theory, and that’s made me re-consider.

Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during what many consider its finest hour. It was he who put together the ultimately successful argument against the Nixon administration, that communicating with the press is different than communicating with the enemy, an argument the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with when they refused to find anything wrong with the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

He’s still practicing in New York City, and has just published a book, Fighting for the Press, in which he talks about the Pentagon Papers case, and relates it, in his final chapters, to the extraordinary things that have been happening under Obama. In fact, he says, “I wrote the book as a clarion call to see if I could get some criticism for what he’s doing.”

He’s on a train when I reach him on Wednesday and he says that shocking thing he’s said a few times in the past week. We’re talking about the Pentagon Papers case, the one that hinged on the line between passing information to the press and passing it to the enemy, the one that decided the people’s right to know what their government was doing superseded any harm that might stem from an enemy getting hold of the same information.

“I don’t think he is drawing the line,” Goodale says of Obama. “That’s where he’s similar to Nixon, and maybe even worse than Nixon.”

Maybe even worse than Nixon. In terms of relationship with the press and their constitution’s first amendment, that’s like calling a confidence man maybe even worse than Madoff or a mayor maybe even worse than Rob Ford.

He’s referring to the fact that Obama has tripled the number of indictments under the almost century-old Espionage Act during his five years, but he says it’s like he predicted this week’s Associated Press revelation. Same issue, same fear, same unjustifiable behaviour.

“I really think this is outrageous,” he says of the AP story. “Why didn’t they call AP and discuss it and talk it through so AP would be in a position to complain before the government got its sources? I believe that [Attorney General Eric] Holder had to approve the subpoena; under the Justice guidelines, he has to.

“I find it a little surprising that he would approve such a broad gauge thing. He’s running around the direct way of getting information. He’s being tricky about it. Hiding behind a telephone company: The optics of it are very, very poor.”

I ask Goodale if there’s anything about the Internet that might have changed things since the 1970s, anything that might justify Obama’s more frantic approach to national security and freedom of the press in cases like Bradley “Jesus Wept” Manning’s. No more than the photocopier changed things for Ellsberg, he says.

So, fear it is then. I’m sure Obama knows things the rest of his countrymen don’t, but I’m equally sure that it doesn’t form a reasonable basis from which to govern. As Goodale points out, Nixon also told his electorate that he knew things they didn’t, and that’s why he was doing the things he was doing. “If you pull out what was claimed at the time and look at it in the light of history, all those claims that ‘We know more than you,’ do turn out to be so much hot air complete nonsense,” he says.

It’s alarming to think that both domestic and foreign policy in the United States, a country that has so much influence on and power over so much of the rest of the world and the people who live in it, is being dictated by a trembling elite, scared of bombs, jittery about airplanes, anxious about losing their grip on power, who make a bogeyman of Mohammed and are petrified of people looking over their shoulders and reading their diary. But it looks like that’s exactly what’s going on.

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The other day I got an e-mail from some old school friends inviting my wife and me, as well as some others from that era, over for a little dinner party. This is the invitation and the e-mails that followed.

*

From Catherine:

Hey Michael and Lisa!

Daniel and I would love it if you could come over for supper and see the new home we just bought from the proceeds of my brilliant husband’s new book! It’s been way too long since we’ve seen you guys, and we really need to get together! We have a beautiful backyard, and hopefully the weather will cooperate and we can sit on the deck and enjoy a menu of Italian delights we picked up from our last sojourn in Italy! Hope you can all come!

Date: June 22, 2013

Time: 6:30 p.m.

Address: See below

*

From Michael:

As ridiculous and improbable as this is, we actually have obligations on that night and sadly can’t make it. This is a major rip-off as it sounds like a whole hell of a lot of fun! By the way, Rachelle and I will be looking for a new apartment for August, so if you hear of anything decent under $1,500 a month…

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From Lisa:

What a beautiful offer, we’d love to come! By coincidence, we were also recently in Italy, but instead of just eating, we were taking an intensive art history course on the Baroque period. We stayed at a villa on Lake Como (not George Clooney’s!) and sipped the most extraordinary wine! I’d love to tell you all about it, but is there perhaps another date that works better for you and Daniel as well as Michael and Rachelle? By the way, kids or no kids?

*

From Catherine:

Would June 15th work better? This is a no-kids dinner. Our girl will be Baking For Change that night with her Be The World group. (She is also on a girlcott of Abercrombie and Fitch, having given all of her A & F clothes to the homeless.) We’re very proud of her to go and do something like that on her own initiative, and still just in Grade 5! Hope everyone can make it on the 15th! And Michael, I’ll get Daniel to ask some of his students about the apartment situation, there’s usually a lot of movement around campus then!

*

From Lisa:

My in-laws are in town that weekend for Noah’s stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird. He’s playing Atticus Finch, and to help him really inhabit the role, Andre has been taking him in to the partners’ meetings so he understands how the legal world really works. Andre says he asks the most perceptive questions and it’s clear Noah just brightens up the day for everyone there! And he’s only 6, just such a brilliant, golden boy!

He picked up many Italian phrases when we were in Italy.

Catherine, maybe June 8th would work better for everyone?

PS: Michael, I remember that you and Rachelle were trying to have children, are you still childless? L

*

From Michael:

We are free any weekend in June, except the initial one offered. And yes, we are still childless. The doctors told me I had unusually small testicles, which of course was very disappointing to hear.

*

From Catherine:

June 8th is a no-go as we’re flying to Montreal to meet an architect who will be renovating our cottage in P.E.I. We got just so much inspiration from our trip to Italy. And Iceland, too. So mysterious. Michael, I’m sorry to hear that you two are a barren couple. Having a pet must be a comfort. Anyone for May 24?

*

From Lisa:

Oh, this is just getting ridiculous! Andre has a partners’ meeting in NYC that weekend and we’re going to hang out with our old high school pal Matthew Perry. Apparently we’re going to have dinner with Claire Danes! I just love Homeland, maybe we’ll get the skinny on season 4!

PS: Claire Danes just had a baby. They named it Cyrus Michael. Yuck!

*

From Michael:

We can’t make May 24th either, as we’ll be in Buffalo attending a Game of Thrones cosplay event. I’m going as Thoros of Myr and Rachelle as Daenerys of Targaryen, Mother of Dragons. Hopefully, we’ll be able to see all the sights, too. It’s my feeling that Buffalo is an underrated city, a real diamond in the rough.

*

From Lisa:

Michael,

Oh, Michael, you’re a diamond in the rough! I’ve so missed your wit! It’s really a shame you never established a set career, because you’re really very clever. Maybe not book smart like the others, but you’ve always had so much potential, it’s too bad you won’t be able to pass that potential down to a child of your own. Have you ever thought about becoming a Big Brother?

*

From Catherine:

Well, it looks like we’re just going to have to stick with original date of June 22nd. I’m sorry you won’t be able to make it, Michael, please give our regards to Rachelle and your pet (forgive me, but I honestly can’t recall if it was a cat or dog), and know that you two will be missed!

Catherine

PS: Just awful about those women in Cleveland, don’t you think??

PPS: Lisa, is Andre still off wheat, sugar and gluten?

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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.

The day the piece was published, I sat down with Alicia Louise Merchant to talk about Angelina Jolie and the frustrating narratives imposed on woman with breast cancer or high levels of breast cancer risk. Alicia is presently co-writing a book on youth and cancer, which has led to her speaking to dozens of people across North America about their individual cancer experiences, and she is a tireless advocate for specialized cancer support and care. She has written on her blog about the danger of neat narratives of cancer, of the idea of “survivorship.” Alicia also recently wrote a heartbreaking essay for Little Brother Magazine (which, full disclosure, I founded and edit) about Tig Notaro, public cancer narratives, and her own experiences of living with an incurable form of ovarian cancer. She wore a cornflower blue oxford shirt, which enhanced the colour of her bright eyes as she looked at me across the table.

*

In your essay for Little Brother, you wrote about there being a breast cancer narrative, and how that narrative is neat and tidy compared to other experiences of cancer. Do you think Jolie’s preventative procedure, and it being a big, public deal, plays into that narrative?

No, I think it actually doesn’t, because she’s being pre-emptive about it, and she’s also dealing with very real numbers. So she knows her risk ahead of time, which a lot of women don’t know. I think she’s drawing attention to the fact that this breast cancer narrative is not neat and tidy, that the only way that she can reduce her risk of getting this cancer is to cut her breasts out should incense people. It’s absolutely insane that in the 21st century we still have to resort to the same tactics we would have to treat the disease a hundred years ago.

Yes, absolutely. Though from her essay, it sounds as though Jolie’s experience was pretty ideal. I know that it’s not uncommon, especially for a double mastectomy, for there to be a greater degree of complication. It’s an intensive surgery.

Yes, but you have to keep in mind that most women who are going through double mastectomy are doing so because they’ve already had a cancer diagnosis. They’re having things like lymph nodes removed, or the cancer may have spread into the chest wall. Basically, it’s like Angelina Jolie looked at her situation and thought, I could have the mastectomy now, or in five years because I have to.

What do you think about her intentional inclusion about the procedure in no way minimizing her femininity?

That’s a tricky one. I think that’s a statement she’s directing more towards women and more towards women who have actually had breast cancer, because it is a really recurrent theme. It often comes up, a lot of woman who have gone through breast cancer will have said at some point that it affected their femininity, or affected how they see themselves as a woman. I mean, not everyone, but it’s part of that narrative. Going through a time where you feel desexed. So I think it’s empowering of Jolie to stand up and say something else. I think she’s addressing something that a lot of women might fear, and maybe don’t articulate.

I know that as part of your work, you talk to people with cancer in both Canada and the US. Watching various reactions surface from that piece, I noticed that a lot of people in America were talking about Jolie as being very privileged, because her wealth enabled her to get the expensive testing and surgeries. She remarked that the test for the BRAC1 gene cost her $3,000, whereas in Ontario, the test is covered by OHIP.

She’s definitely brought up the discussion of there being a hierarchy of health care in the United States. It’s not just that she had the money to have this expensive test done, she also had the money to have a preventative mastectomy and then have reconstruction done. Most American health insurance won’t cover preventative mastectomy. You have to wait until you get sick before they’ll allow you to have the procedure.

What I thought was really interesting was the sense of anger in the public’s reception of this piece. Commenters seemed so angry with her, saying how she should have used that money to help other women. It’s as though, now that she’s made this decision, and she’s in a position to do it and afford the procedures, it’s suddenly her responsibility to take care of all these women. There’s so much misplaced anger; instead of people questioning why this isn’t an option for them, they question why she made this decision when they can’t make it.

In Canada, every province has its own rules and levels of coverage for preventative mastectomy and reconstruction. You’d have to be at risk before getting the BRCA gene tested for, but everything is a lot more available to us. I hope that something comes out of this—not necessarily from Angelina Jolie—addressing the fact that there is a major divide in who has care access in the United States, and this divide is actually affecting who gets to live and who doesn’t.

Sometimes when celebrities have illnesses, and they choose to bring the public into that, it gets one relatively uniform kind of response. When Tig Notaro announced her breast cancer, for example, there was a very different response than what Angelina Jolie is receiving. Jolie, of course, is not sick.

I think her not being sick plays a big role in this. Think about Kylie Minogue, or any number of women who have been in the spotlight who have had breast cancer. They’ve been basically embraced and supported by, well, the world. I think one of the reasons why feelings are running high about this is because it does highlight that disparity in access to health care. And there’s also this idea that the public has ownership over women’s bodies—that she’s done something and she didn’t get permission for it, as if she should of waited until she got sick. (Which is also, I think, the mindset of a lot Americans. You don’t see a doctor, you don’t do anything until you get sick; preventative healthcare is not a big thing there, because most people can’t afford it.)

It’s funny—she’s doing more to raise awareness, and the kind of awareness that needs to be raised around breast cancer than any pink ribbon campaign. And she’s revealing the truth, she’s breaking free from the narrative, and it makes people unhappy. It doesn’t tie into this story of you get sick, you get treatment, you get better. She’s saying, well, I’m not going to get sick, I’m going to do something about this, and then I’m going to tell you what I had to do. She’s still not out of the woods, she still has a high risk of ovarian cancer—I don’t know if she’s going to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes similarly removed, and she still has a risk of developing breast cancer. It’s just more like the average woman’s. But this doesn’t fit in the narrative.

What do you mean about the “right kind of awareness”?

Breast cancer is messy. There are really difficult decisions that have to be made. It requires cutting your breasts out and having spacers put in your chest for three months, and bruising your nipples so you can save them. She’s also talking about why her risk is so high, and the fact that you can find out if you have that risk through a simple blood test. Never mind that it’s $3,000, it doesn’t have to be $3,000, that’s just the number that’s been placed on it by whoever decided to run these tests. So she’s raising real awareness about those factors, [about] who gets access to what care and when, what does it cost, what does it mean to actually prevent breast cancer. That’s what most awareness is: let’s prevent breast cancer. Well, when she shows you what preventing breast cancer looks like in her case, people are getting angry. People aren’t supposed to actually talk about boobs, and the breast cancer campaigns have always been about saving healthy boobs, and in people’s minds her breasts were still in the healthy category. I read literally dozens of comments where people were asking, Why would she maim herself? Why would she remove a healthy body part? She probably would’ve developed cancer; her risk was 85%. And she was able to reduce that risk by 80%!

Seriously.

It’s amazing. There would have been far less outrage if she “got her boobs done.” And she could have said that, she could have copped to getting implants and not said anything about the health reasons behind it. I can’t help but feel that she was making a point in including the cost of these tests in her op-ed. She could have glossed over that, but I think that she wanted to highlight the fact that it’s a matter of access based on finances and insurance. It’s mind-blowing how many people seem to be angry at Angelina Jolie for having the money, instead of being angry at their government, or the pharmaceutical companies, or the corporations that pollute our environment with carcinogens. But it’s easier to focus on this one person.

Unlike the pink ribbon campaign, which to me is kind of consumerist and fluffy, this is one woman who was very direct about making decisions.

At this point we know breast cancer exists, and I think she brought something visceral to the idea of breast cancer and breast cancer prevention. It’s still overlooked when it’s not pretty, not tied up in a neat bow.

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50. Going to meetings

49. World-class cities

48. Getting down to business

47. Ribs that just fall off the bone

46. Shootin’ hoops

45. That one sauce, what do you call it, starts with an “s”

44. Betting it all on black

43. Burning the midnight oil

42. Calcium

41. Cool memes

40. A tattoo of a sexy devil lady

39. “Apple vs. Samsung”

38. Rhymes

37. Just kicking back and putting your feet up after a long day

36. A real happy dog

35. Georges St-Pierre, live on Pay Per View

34. Tossing around the ol’ pigskin, what do you say

33. Websites

32. “Have you heard this new Daft Punk song?”

31. Waiting in line

30. One of the eggs always being broken

29. Good old-fashioned American ingenuity

28. Not realizing that was the season finale

27. Borders

26. Setting up the AC before it gets too hot out there

25. Sitting by the creek

24. Jumping to conclusions

23. Donald Sutherland

22. Road trips

21. Interior design

20. Mispronunciations

19. Posing

18. Saying what we’re all thinking

17. Game of Thrones spoilers

16. Being such a Miranda

15. Payin’ the tax-man

14. Riding around with the top down

13. Big savings

12. Smooth moves

11. “Ha, they’re bringing back 24 for 12 episodes? What, are they gonna call it, 12?”

10. Gleeking

9. Stunting

8. Representing

7. Sweating

6. Taking that dang tie off when you get home

5. Seersucker

4. Conspiracies

3. Garbage strikes

2. Adolf Hitler

1. Buying crack

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The Case of the Grinning Cat will be screened at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on May 19.

“It is a great asset in life”, Chris Marker observes dryly in The Case of the Grinning Cat, “not to know what you are talking about.” And it might be a great asset, likewise, to not know what Marker is talking about: his was always a cinema of roving curiosity, more interested in posing questions than in seeking out answers. He is often credited with pioneering the art of the essay-film—as he once said himself, “film is a system that allows Godard to be a novelist, Gatti to make theater, and me to make essays”—but if this is true it is more to the traditional meaning of the word, “to attempt”, than to any kind of long-form explanation or argument. Marker’s filmed essays represent attempts: they look at the world not with expertise or a pretense of understanding, but with the desire to explore its nuance and character, endeavoring to look and listen and watch.

Staring out at the world around him with endless curiosity—is it any surprise that Chris Marker loved cats? The filmmaker’s beloved (and somewhat infamous) orange tabby, Guillaume-en-egypte, appeared in many of Marker’s films, including at least two shorts in which he himself is the star. But Marker also considered Guillaume a kind of personal avatar or stand-in for the filmmaker’s own image, often opting to present the cat’s now-iconic cartoon likeness in place of an expected artist’s portrait. This may have been a simple case of reticence and reservation masked by self-styled authorial mystique, but doesn’t it also seem likely that Marker truly considered himself better represented by the animal with whom he shared so much in common? As a documentarian, if one can truly call him one at all, he sat perched on the edge of the action, observing it from a distance, ready to pounce but quite content to idle; one can even imagine the sage-like but slightly coy narration that became a trademark of his work belonging to a cat in awe and bemusement of his strange but familiar environment.

The Case of the Grinning Cat, though not widely considered among his most seminal films, nevertheless remains one of the most purely fascinating—one might even say it’s his most curious. The last feature he made before he passed away last summer, at 91, The Grinning Cat arrived in 2004 in the form of a video documentary made for French TV, but in every way that counts it is purely cinematic. The film begins, as many of Marker’s do, with the observation of a strange ritual: here it is the formation and execution of a complicated flash mob in Paris, in which dozens of strangers meet in a city square and, at a precise time during the afternoon, begin opening and closing their umbrellas at timed intervals. Marker tracks the flash mobbers on their brief escapade as if he were observing a strange foreign custom, soaking in the details of the event and the reactions from delighted and confused onlookers as if to point and say, isn’t the world we live in utterly odd? He regards these people in much the same way my cat regards me as I type this piece: he may not understand the purpose, but he enjoys the movements all the same.

Marker follows the flash mob through town until he stumbles upon a more salient point of interest tucked away in the periphery of the frame, as though accidentally uncovering a clue: a canary-yellow cat’s face with a massive cheshire grin has been painted across the side of a distant building, a wide-eyed observer perched high above the city. And this peculiar emblem, it soon becomes apparent, is not the first of its kind, as Marker discovers a veritable glaring of graffiti felines strewn about the Parisian streets. This quickly becomes the film’s central mystery: the swarm of smiling cats are made an obsession for what seems a kind of conspiratorial intrigue, transcending their painted roots to seem like not so much Banksy-esque street art installations as almost Pynchonian omens—strange tokens of portent connected to something bigger than none of us can see.

One of Marker’s unique gifts as a filmmaker is his ability to invest these minor urban anomalies with a kind of exaggerated fantasy allure, though without recourse to expected docu-drama trickery. He so deftly teases out connections between seemingly benign or irrelevant details—a cat who lives at a subway station, a fleeting celebrity scandal, mass demonstrations on election day—that one begins to suspect all of Paris is under the invisible control of the grinning cat’s cheshire smile, which appears in the least expected places with almost too-convenient regularity (it has been suggested elsewhere that Marker himself may have been responsible for the cat graffiti phenomenon, not simply documenting its arrival but encouraging or facilitating it somehow too). As the yellow cat finds its way onto signs and billboards and masks in the midst of student protests, Marker takes the opportunity to explore the landscape of the new world’s half-hearted “militant” left, a meager assortment of youthful protesters taking as a stand as a matter of mere posturing. Marker, like the cat, takes stock of the movements without judgement: he observes the huddled masses and their empty rhetoric, sympathizing with their desire to take action but dispirited with their lack of conviction or commitment.

And yet The Case of the Grinning Cat is not, despite its foray into the protest movements of the modern French youth, an explicitly political film, remaining more interested in the fabric of contemporary culture, cats and all, than in one particular facet of it above others. In the course of tracking what appears to be a deepening citywide mystery, Marker finds himself surveying the French election (in which the unsure left is galvanized only when threatened by a burgeoning extreme right), the reaction of the French youth to George Bush at the outset of the Iraq War (which leans more reactionary than you might have seen in American youth groups at the time, though Marker suggests also perhaps less informed), and a host of other social and political happenings popping up around the city to keep the populace properly stimulated. One has to wonder if Marker—who, we should remember, was active during the student protests of May ‘68—had not, by 2001, grown somewhat weary of tracking the developments of youth protest movements since his own halcyon days. He spent a year scouring the city for appearances of his beloved yellow cat, but had he not in effect been following the same journey for almost six decades as a filmmaker? Had his curiosity not been burning on all this time?

If there is one thing far too many contemporary documentarians lack, it’s the same thing too many contemporary film critics lack: a sense of curiosity and a desire to question. We are inundated with work which aims to argue and illuminate, essays and articles and films which hope to explain the world to us. But explanations are by nature reductive; every articulation of an idea fails to account for some of its nuance. That’s why Chris Marker’s essay-films remain such endlessly valuable resources to those who want to know more about the world we live in: the films themselves reflect that desire to learn, and their curiosity about their subjects make them infinitely wiser and more sophisticated than any number of films which offer answers or solutions. We do not discover, by the end of The Case of the Grinning Cat, the real answer of why the cats had appeared and what they were designed to achieve. But we do discover much else.

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A public figure’s final interview is not necessarily her best interview. In some cases it could be the most ordinary, unimpressive interview she’s ever given. She may not even know that death is imminent; or, if she does, if illness is lingering, her words might be products of it: panicky, delusional, bitter, beaten-down. None of this makes the words less meaningful, of course, and many people feel that language accretes a romantic potency as life inches away, until at the very end, with any luck, the survivors are left with some famous last words.

A few loved and liberally quoted of these include:

“I am perplexed. Satan get out,” —the occultist, Aleister Crowley.

“Tomorrow, I shall no longer be here,” —the prophet, Nostradamus

“LSD, 100 micrograms,” —the polymath, Aldous Huxley, whose wife administered a dose of the hallucinogen so he could hallucinate his way out of life.

These are punchy epitaphs, ready for Hollywood biopics. They neatly close the narrative of a person’s life, summing up their personality and the trajectory of their work in an economical language nugget.

We know about the three examples above because they were spoken by historical significants, and more specifically, by writers, those who chose to make meaningful language their life. These nuggets are perfect death fetishes—and what’s a more apt fetish container than a book, or better yet, a collection of books that looks nice up on a shelf? Melville House’s new series of Last Interview books attempt to capture death in language. The series includes volumes with Jacques Derrida, David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, and Roberto Bolaño, all writers whose work and life elicit enough fascination to warrant a close reading of their late conversations. Each book contains an author’s final interview, along with a handful of notable interviews from throughout their life.

Last words and last interviews are not the same thing, and yet we cherish both for the same reasons. The difference is a matter of degree: how close to death was the speaker? Final words have been collected in the sort of novelty, aphorism-packed books most commonly read on the toilet (e.g., Famous Last Words, Fond Farewells, Deathbed Diatribes, and Exclamations Upon Expiration, compiled by Ray Robinson). In 2008, Simon Critchley published an uncommonly thoughtful collection that broke the stigma of such death fetish books: The Book of Dead Philosopherswas an encyclopedia of all the text and ideas surrounding every well-known philosopher’s death (e.g., their final words, their written views on the subject of death/afterlife, the manner in which they died, and what their death precipitated). It’s an exciting collection that captures the history of philosophy through death.

Melville House’s Last Interview series seems to be less pointedly death-oriented. Unlike Critchley, who uses the words as a point of departure, the straight Q&A format that Melville uses carries no opinion or context with it. It is simply a documentation. In many instances, the interviews seem worthy of publication only because of the fatal events that followed. None are bad, but they might not be especially remarkable—which might be appropriate, since death is not always remarkable.

David Foster Wallace’s last interview, which was conducted five months before his death, is a short, uneventful Wall Street Journal Q&A on one of his lesser known, and more news-y books, a long nonfiction essay about the 2008 presidential campaign of John McCain. The interview ends with Wallace relating an anecdote about signing some copies of Infinite Jest with a cartoony face he liked to draw as a flourish. The final phrase is, “It always makes me smile to see that face,” which has a nice lilt to it, the sort of optimistic salutation that serves as a soothing salve on the wound of Wallace’s suicidal death not long after these words were published.

But what if Wallace hadn’t died? The same sentiment would have the punctuational weight of a gentle comma in the vast biography of Wallace’s life; but because of the circumstances that followed, these words are now the final period—at least, that’s how the series suggests you consider them. In some ways, the casual, tossed-off final remarks are fascinating. They slough off our romantic notions of death and carry a little sting of subversion. It’s as if the project is less interested in the text itself and more in the idea of the interview, a Kenny Goldsmithian conceptual curation of interviews, blind to content.

On the other end of the spectrum is philosopher Jacques Derrida, who knew he was dying from cancer and referred to the interview as his “obituary.” Derrida crafted his last interview purposely. His final words, published about two months before his death, read like the end of some grand French novel: “When I recall the happy moments, I bless them too, of course, at the same time as they propel me toward the thought of death, toward death, because all that has passed, come to an end…” ending on a suggestive ellipsis. A few paragraphs earlier, in that same answer, he states, “deconstruction is always on the side of yes, on the side of affirmation of life,” which is precisely the kind of neat statement that captures his entire life’s work, the influential field of semiotic analysis he helped to found in the ’60s. Derrida edited and approved the final draft, and did so knowing he was crafting the end of his biography.

The Derrida and Wallace interviews represent two different approaches to the interview, and yet, because of their context, they both have the feeling of a countdown to the final sentence. Of course, the recorded conversations might have petered out with cordial goodbyes and awkward niceties, but, as literature, the interviews never do. If an interview wanted to capture the true nature of death it could end mid-sentence, or with guilt and regret packed into its final statements, or at least with the complicated baggage that still clings to people when they die. But that’s not how readers like to look at the passage into death—we’d prefer a half-smile or a note of hopefulness. Vonnegut’s last words are tidy in this way, resonating with the same tone as his bittersweet, colloquial prose: “I’m enormously influenced by the sermon on the Mount,” he says, “But I gotta go. I’m not well. Good luck.”

All of these interviews seem to carry the same tonal ending, a cadence that feels false. For instance, I don’t believe I, or anyone I’ve ever known, has ended a conversation with a quote, especially not one from the Chilean naval officer Arturo Prat: “While I am still alive, this flag will not come down.” But this is how the Bolaño interview putatively ended.

We can devour tangy obits dozens at a time in a book like Famous Last Words, feeling their impact the way we would a subtle joke. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I hope people continue to die aphoristically, because I enjoy reading these words, and they translate well to literature. But we also have to be willing to read the real, awkward, half-uttered, conflicted, drooling language of death, without the editing.

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