Canada
The State Department isn't as easy to influence as Congress.
Say Yes to the Pipeline—and New Green Regulations
Why triangulation is the answer on Keystone
How to fix the messy politics of the embattled pipeline project.
Life of Pi's Clumsy 3D Storytelling
“I think it's one of the most noble risks we have ever taken.” This comes from an executive at Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that gave us Sunrise, Shirley Temple, and The Robe. When a corporation has ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, talk of nobility is often a warning sign of stupidity. So sane producers may have read Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, seen that it was selling 9 million copies across the world, and concluded that there was no need for a movie of Life of Pi—the same escape clause I raised a week ago in connection with the latest Anna Karenina.
Worthwhile Canadian Coolness
Six More Years of Disappointment for Venezuelan Expats
VANCOUVER—The line was 30 deep before 6 a.m. at the Venezuelan consulate in downtown Vancouver, the only location in western Canada for ex-pats to vote in their presidential election Sunday. By noon more than 600 Venezuelans had stood in the short hallway, marked the labyrinthine bingo-card-like ballot and dipped a pinky tip in a well of blue ink on a wooden stool.
Mac’n’Cheese, Jargonese, and Disillusioned Homecomings: Today’s TNR Reader
Editor’s Note: We’ll be running the article recommendations of our friends at TNR Reader each afternoon on The Plank, just in time to print out or save for your commute home. Enjoy! Kraft in Canada: Mac and cheese and the Canadian psyche.Walrus Magazine |23 min (5,723 words) The Kashmiris who left to fight for their liberation are coming home. What happens next?Caravan Magazine |32 min (8,182 words) The weirdest kids’ show ever: “Adventure Time” is totally avant-garde but still totally relatable. The Guardian |4 min (931 words) Should academic-speak be subject to the red pen?
How Obama’s Biggest Donors Get Their Goodies in Charlotte
The most cunning, odious and successful of Gore Vidal’s provocations was surely a mid-career contribution to a special issue of The Nation in 1986, marking the magazine’s one-hundred-twentieth anniversary. The essay was called “The Empire Lovers Strike Back” and is best read today in conjunction with a previous Nation essay from the same year, “The American Empire Ran Out of Gas,” and a clarifying subsequent commentary in The Sunday Telegraph in 1993 called “Race Against Time,” all of which he went on to reprint in his essay collections, perhaps under different titles.
The Need to Lead
Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global PowerBy Zbigniew Brzezinski (Basic Books, 208 pp., $26) When it comes to offering a vision to guide American foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s latest book, unlike so much other literature of this type, refuses to lament or exaggerate the alleged decline in American power and influence. Instead Strategic Vision offers a kind of blueprint—a path that Washington must take, in Brzezinski’s view, to ensure a secure international order, in which free markets and democratic principles can thrive.
