There is only one thing you should read today: The editors of Mediascout, one of the better media critique services out there, have put together a nice piece on the historical conflict that Canadians are currently seeing across their front pages this week.

While crying into our beers (Molson or Labatt) about the CBC’s loss of the Hockey Night in Canada song, Canadians also dealing with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools and the upcoming apology to Natives from the federal government. Link.

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) kicked off yesterday so the Internet memes are abuzz with iPorn. Every time Steve Job’s talks, tech bloggers, like me, are thrilled to blog about it. It turns each of us into ads for Apple and what is worse many of us are not even real shills because we don’t get any payment for our work for them. (more…)

VANCOUVER—Congress is over for another year. Plans are now well underway for Carleton in 2009, an exhausting thought. By all measures, this year’s event on the UBC campus was a success, even if the weather was lousy. Having visited learned societies for over a week I have a pretty good sense of the satisfaction levels of congress participants and I believe most were pretty happy with the level of the papers they heard and the service they received. You can’t beat that.

Still, I am always amazed to overhear academics grumbling: the campus is too far from downtown; the taxi lines are too long; food services are limited on the weekend, and so on. Human nature, the very thing these thousands of scholars spend a lifetime studying, will have its way, and even one of the most privileged groups in society will find reasons to complain. It’s not that everything is perfect. It’s that educated people somehow forget to connect their experience to the sheer facts of running an event of this size. The UBC caterer, who has to feed these thousand or so of scholarly souls, was responsible for well over 150 deliveries a day for eight days, scattered all over the vast campus and all designed for different needs. That’s not even counting the daily receptions with hot food, wines, chafing dishes, and other disasters waiting to happen. That everyone got fed their veggie wraps, salads, cookies, and juices on time, between bites of Keynes or Nietzsche, is pretty amazing in itself. But even big-brained scholars can occlude the network of labourers that hums along beside them, efficiently working to serve their higher-paid masters.

Speaking of complaining, there’s a lot of talk about the need to invest in science and technology these days, to build, you know, the knowledge economy. Everyone’s favourite Canadian philanthropist is Michael Lazaridis, who during Congress week donated $50 million to the Waterloo-based Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, topping up the $100 million he has already contributed. In this country, that’s big news, trumping reports of even the most dazzling scholarly papers. Lazaridis’s gift was rightly applauded by Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente last weekend, but in praising Lazaridis’s vision of an internationally competitive, innovative Canada, she typically tossed off a supercilious remark about education trends. “Too many of our kids (and I’m saying these things, because Mr. Lazaridis is far too polite),â€? she wrote, “drift into liberal arts and gender studies instead of engineering and math.â€?

Give me a break, Wente. Lazaridis is the last person who would agree with you. RIM employs hundreds of arts graduates, and Lazaridis is on record as saying that Canada needs highly educated personnel to take this country forward, not just techno geeks. Imagine a world without the liberal arts. What would scientists read to their children?

The annual Congress of Canadian learned societies brings together thousands of people who are using their heads to talk, take up, challenge, explore the very ideas Lazaridis is promoting. This country, like all others, needs to educate fully rounded citizens, those who can understand what is human and social about us as well as those who can build the CN Tower out of Lego. Stop complaining, Wente. Come visit us at Carleton next year. We’ll show you vision.

The ten medals mean that The Walrus has received the most awards of any Canadian magazine at the NMAs for the third consecutive year.The Walrus won six gold and four silver medals at the National Magazine Awards (NMA), held June 6 at the Carlu in Toronto. The ten medals mean that The Walrus has received the most awards of any Canadian magazine at the NMAs for the third consecutive year.

The magazine also received twenty-seven honourable mentions, and the award for Best New Writer, Patrick White, for his article “Red Rush” (April 2007).

Read more about the NMA awards in the Globe and Mail.

Gold medal winners:

• Fiction: Stephen Heighton, “The Dead Are More Visible” (December 2007)
• Spot Illustration: Leif Parsons, “Tank Tank” (June 2007)
• Arts + Entertainment: Adam Gopnik, “The Mindful Museum” (June 2007)
• Portrait Photography: Robyn Cumming, “Miss Canadiana”, in “Alienated Cosmopolitans” (May 2007)
• Illustration: Sam Weber, “God’s Slow Death” (April 2007)
• Politics and Public Interest: Don Gillmor, “Once Upon a Country” (February 2007)

Silver medal winners:

• Best Cover: Antonio E De Luca, December 2007
• Still-life Photography: Russell Monk, “Rock Bottom” (December 2007)
• Personal Journalism: Rick Salutin “The Autobiography of an Idea” (December 2007)
• Photojournalism + Photo Essay: Benoit Aquin, “The Chinese Dust Bowl” (October 2007)

For an archive list of honourable mention recipients, click here.

Up next for The Walrus: this Thursday, June 12, Luminato’s The Dark City

How many Kindles and Sony ebooks are there in the world? From the Oxford University Press blog. Link.

The WWDC starts at 1 p.m. EST and web searches for Apple, iPhone, and Steve Jobs have gone up over the past thirty days. From Google trends. Link.

Similar data from Hitwise. Future historians will love this sort of information. Link.

Interesting bit on Generation Y regarding information usage, particularly books. From ReadWriteWeb. Link.

So you’ve posted your profile on a dating site hoping to developing a relationship with someone will add to your already thrilling life. And some unappealing people have messaged you. Now what?

WARNING: What I write here might lead to irrevocable changes in your life. I am the online dating success story, having mined and plucked the Internet dating vine of its most fantastic fruit. Soulmate type stuff. I will now share my technique. (more…)

ARCACHON, FRANCE—The four-hour train trip from Paris got us into lovely Arcachon, an Atlantic coast town two hours north of the Spanish border, just in time to catch Saturday’s opening match between the Czechs and the Swiss. The Sportstrotter fiancé and I watched at Café de la Plage, a classy bar just a football throw-in from the ocean, where we enjoyed the first of four weekend meals involving oysters (they’re a bit too salty for breakfast, you know). Our weekend count hit thirty-three oysters, a feeble dent in the area’s annual haul of some 15,000 tons. But we did our best. The match atmosphere subdued in this not-yet-hitting-its-stride summer holiday town, with the bartender refusing to put the game sound on, opting instead for an enthusiastic song and dance to Elton John and Billy Joel. Still, we caught Vaclav Sverkos’s goal off a slick through ball in the seventy-first minute, the young Czech forward slotting home the goal fifteen minutes after coming on as a substitute and ruining the day for the giddy Swiss fans in Basel, who were dealt a double blow along with a 1-0 loss when their top forward, Alex Frei, was knocked out of the game (and, reportedly, the tournament) with a knee injury that had him in tears on the sideline. Not a great day for the colour-reversed Red Crosses. (more…)

Changing models. Everyone knows it. Everyone’s talking about it. Link.

Magazines as a luxury good. Do you hear the echo? Link.

Vintage 1998 article about digital books. “The book is the network, the network is knowledge, and someday soon you’ll be able to curl up in bed with all of it.” Ugh! From The Atlantic. Link.

The true tablet is coming. Link.

PARIS—This afternoon I’m off to Arcachon, a small holiday town on France’s Côte d’Argent and a short drive from Bordeaux. No, I didn’t run the calculations and determine this to be the capital of French and European football passion, and thus the perfect place to celebrate the start of Euro 2008. I’m here for the wine, to celebrate my birthday, and to maybe dip a toe in the ocean. Hey, even the Sportstrotter needs a weekend away from the grind.

First off, if you missed yesterday’s preview and want to catch up, you can find it here. For everybody in the know, let’s live in the now. I’ll be enjoying the region’s glut of oysters tonight, but will also be keeping an eye on the first games of the tournament, Switzerland versus the Czech Republic and Portugal versus the Turkey. The Czechs and the Portuguese are the favourites from this group. But compared with most World Cups, the Euro’s group stage often doesn’t work out the way one would expect, so don’t be shocked to see favourites upset by a draw, or even a loss. My rocks-for-brains gut feeling: Switzerland, eager to impress the home fans and shed the image of “stultifying enemy of good football� that they earned with their defence-first-and-always performance two years ago in Germany, comes out with an attacking mindset against the Czechs, who take advantage of this by scoring early, and maybe even often. In the nightcap, the Turks surprise the Portuguese. Don’t ask me why—the Euro isn’t always about why. These things happen. Just roll with it.

In what is surely one of the worst ideas in recent cinematic history, Warner Brothers has asked Guy Ritchie to direct a new Sherlock Holmes movie. Making it even worse? The script is to be based on a comic book, and both of these iterations are to focus, Variety tells us, on our hero’s physical side in an attempt “reinvent Holmes and sidekick Dr. John H. Watson.â€? According to information shared by Lionel Wigram, the film’s producer, the new Holmes will “be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman.â€? The Guardian headline really says it all: “Guy Ritchie takes on ‘all-action’ Sherlock Holmes.” I like to think that those scare quotes are some British copy editor’s way of saying, “Hey, listen everybody: how dumb is this?!â€?

In effect, greenlighting this project is like saying that it would be really cool to make a movie about Hulk Hogan’s recent dalliance with modal logic. It’s not inconceivable that the Hulkamaniac is into the whole possible worlds thing, but it certainly isn’t his day job. The fact that Holmes is physically agile and has a history of boxing makes him a rounder character, but it doesn’t define that roundness; while I would find Hogan more interesting if he had some serious thoughts about David Lewis, I would never expect—nor would I want—it to be more essential to his character than, say, the time he body-slammed Andre the Giant while defending the world title at Wrestlemania III.

The last time I wrote about Holmes, my focus was on the brilliant new Penguin series of paperbacks. While thinking about the man in preparation for writing that, it occurred to me that the notion of order is central to the Holmes world. I didn’t mention it in the post, because it seemed sort of self-evident; the books and stories are based on the possibilities of reasoning, which is an inherently structural act. While Holmes may have distracting tendencies—his occasionally debilitating drug addiction, say—the idea of order is at the centre of his capabilities.

Which is why this news is particularly terrible. Setting aside the fact that the direction of the film stands in distinct opposition to any reasonable interpretation of what is essential to the character (and ignoring the fact that it’s a crass attempt to make a biceps-and-zingers superhero out of a character who is already a superhero, though of a different kind), the idea of Guy Ritchie helming this picture is ridiculous. Ritchie’s style—frantic, frenetic, jittery, annoying—is the antithesis of the masterly calm that defines Holmes’s personal world, and the precision with which Conan Doyle relates the events that happen within it.

But I suppose it’s all tied up in that word ‘reinvention’ To truly reinvent the character, it seems, they’ll need to change not only his fundamental nature, but the way he relates to what is fundamental to his world. So perhaps Guy Ritchie and his MTV editing team are exactly the right choice. Because if you’re going to kill an idol, you might as well make doubly sure he’s dead.

VANCOUVER—Everything is wet here. Richard Florida came to campus. Hundreds of rain-soaked academics crowded into a large UBC lecture hall to hear what he had to say. But they were also there just to see him in the flesh. That’s what you do when someone famous comes to town. Florida possesses that aura of royal jelly some people get when they are constantly under a spotlight or microphone. He’s become the go-to guy for evidence of the economic benefits of the arts. No one has quite managed to put together an argument, backed up with evidence, of how cities thrive as magnets for what he has coined the “creative class.” That’s me and you, yuppies, and gays and lesbians, designers, artists of all kinds—educated people who have acquired a taste of urban cool. It’s not about suburbs and strip malls and the ugly, numbing tedium of sameness. It’s about the aesthetics of hipness.

Of course, Florida is admired but he also reviled because he has emerged not only as a public intellectual, but also as a popular one, and a lot of academics are uncomfortable with that sort of rock-star status. I think his lecture helped them get over it. He’s one of the smoothest presenters I’ve ever seen or heard, highly conscious of the criticisms of his work and quick to admit his flaws, apologize for the weakness of his research, and then move on to a defense of what he has managed to accomplish. It’s a pretty disarming strategy and it worked—on this listener, anyway.

It helps when you begin by telling your audience you’re basically an Italian working-class kid from New Jersey. A big charge against Florida is that he promotes an elitist view of society, that his creative class is a self-entitling one. So when he offers up his own working-class childhood as the springboard for thinking about the benefits of being smart and rooted in family, place, and culture, even the most hardened skeptic has to grant him a little credit. And, man, is he ever sharp about building credit.

It occurred to me that male academics might just be jealous of Florida’s charismatic power. It’s not every day a guy with a Ph.D walks into a party like he was walking onto a yacht, to borrow from Carly Simon. There’s a lot of bad dressing in the academy. Like monks, we’re not supposed to be calling too much attention to our physical bodies.

Florida is the living emblem of the creative class, all about brains and fashion. He wore an expensive black suit jacket with lapels just wide enough to suggest his Italian rat-pack roots. It was buttoned over a gorgeous white shirt with French cuffs, open collar, no tie. His jeans were rich and dark, could almost pass for trousers, and his hair was perfect. He had one eye in the mirror as he watched himself gavotte, sure, but he played to the audience’s belief in the power of the creative life and ultimately validated our attempts to prove the value of the life of the mind. How can you argue with that?

What is the most depressing industry to work in? Portfolio will tell you. Link

Video of a small bookstore in Germany. No real story here, just a video of small bookstore in Germany. From Monocle. Link

The Long Now Foundation’s “Seminars About Long Term Thinking.” Link.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of the drive in theatre, from Smithsonian Magazine. Bring me popcorn and a fried pickle! Link.

PARIS—I was finally going to write about pétanque this week. Really, I was.

But then the big cheeses at the Union of European Football Association checked their 2008 Far Side desk calendars, and noticed that June 7 was not simply the day that featured a comic of two safari hats on top of a pit of quicksand, with a nearby parrot squawking, “Let go Morty, you’re pulling me in! Let go Morty, you’re pulling me in!â€?

No, those boys discovered that June 7 was also the Sportstrotter’s birthday, and so UEFA President Michel “Don’t Call Me Mike” Platini proclaimed to his chargés (en Français, bien sur): “You know what, that Sportstrotter’s not half bad. We should throw him a party. A twenty-three-day, thirty-one-game party featuring sixteen of Europe’s best national teams.â€?

And so it came to pass that tomorrow begins the 2008 European football championship. And it was good. Scratch that: it was very good. (more…)

Lincoln Hall’s new book, Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest, is pretty much what it sounds like: an account of how Hall, who had nearly reached the summit of Everest in 1984, suffered a cerebral edema and was left high on the mountain during his second attempt in May 2006. Presumed dead after hours of immobility and non-responsiveness, he was found alive the next morning having miraculously survived the night with no shelter, oxygen, water, or warmth. As far as things to have done go, that’s pretty impressive.

Almost as impressive is the book itself. Hall, an Australian magazine editor by trade who has been climbing for decades, recounts his story in elegant prose and with a generosity of spirit that comes not only from his very nature, but also his dedication to Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual orientation that infuses the narrative with calmness, kindness, and a thoughtful precision. The end result is a sort of existential account of a near tragedy, vastly more meditative than the typical climbing yarn, and ultimately more rewarding.

I met with Lincoln Hall earlier this week.

Jared Bland: Toward the end of the book, you ask yourself how it is that you could still be alive, but realize that you don’t think you’ll know until you’ve recovered properly and had time to explore it. It’s been just over two years since these events. Do you have a better idea of what happened? (more…)

CNN’’s take on the Kindle. Link.

The grand migration from TV to personal computers… march… march… From ReadWriteWeb. Link.

Euro 2008 is coming. Can you feel it? From Google Trends. Link.

Social networking + Web 2.0 + manure = food for all. Interesting take on the removal of “market” from “farmers market.” From The World’s Fair. Link.