to move up and down
Young girls make vicious bullies
I don’t remember being bullied by other girls when I was young. But I do remember with shame having failed to do the right thing as a teenager at summer camp, when a cabinmate — we weren’t close, and she wasn’t socially attractive, but still — was cruelly humiliated.
“Shira” kept a diary, as many of us did at the time. A mischief-maker found it, and some intimate details of Shira’s sexual fantasies about a male counsellor were read aloud to shrieks of pitiless laughter. To this day I can vividly recall the moment’s exact setting, and Shira’s horrified face. I also recall my own visceral empathy with her pain, in spite of which I didn’t step up to the plate and denounce my cabinmates’ barbarism.
The rumours spread around the camp, and Shira’s summer was ruined. Looking back, I have to wonder how that vignette affected her life and her relationships with women as an adult. Such a betrayal isn’t something any girl would forget.
The good retrospective news for Shira is that she grew up before the era of social media; her mortification was socially contained and unarchived. Shira’s fate today might have been that of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince of South Hadley, Mass., an Irish newcomer who, relentlessly hounded on Facebook and in text messages by girl peers (“slut” was the leitmotif), hanged herself in her closet in 2010. In the aftermath, the question remains: “Are girls really meaner?” (Illustration: Kelsey Heinrichs/National Post)
I, geek
Fanboys. Nerds. Geeks. Fans of comic books, science fiction and the like are known by many names. Regardless of word choice, the prevailing image is clear: Socially awkward guys who have no life, have never had a girlfriend (let alone sex) and who still live in their parents’ basements.
It is an image that endures in the popular consciousness, perpetuated in part by shows like Big Bang Theory and the Comic Book Guy character on The Simpsons. Millions of us also clearly recall William Shatner’s classic 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch in which he tells Star Trek fans to “Get a life!” This month’s 2011 installment of Comic Con in Montreal, an annual twoday convention for comic book and science fiction fans, drew in over 25,000 people - including me.
Yet the crowd that filled Place Bonaventure’s convention hall didn’t exactly conform to the stereotype. Indeed, as a I roamed the hall, I thought this might be a good time to challenge some of the myths about me and my fellow “geeks.” (Illustration Kelsey Heinrichs)
A world built on numbers
A new book by Keith Devlin explores how man’s mastery of numerals and equations made our civilization possible.
Try to imagine a day without numbers. Never mind a day, try to imagine getting through the first hour without numbers: no alarm clock, no time, no date, no TV or radio, no stock market report or sports results in the newspapers, no bank account to check. It’s not clear exactly where you are waking up either, for without numbers modern housing would not exist.
The fact is, our lives are totally dependent on numbers. You may not have “a head for figures,” but you certainly have a head full of figures. Most of the things you do each day depend on and are conditioned by numbers. Some of them are obvious, like the ones listed above; others govern our lives behind the scenes. The degree to which our modern society depends on numbers that are hidden from us was made clear by the worldwide financial meltdown in 2008, when over-confident reliance on the advanced mathematics of futures predictions and the credit market led to a total collapse of the global financial system.
How did we - as a species and as a society - become so familiar with and totally reliant on these abstractions our ancestors invented just a few thousand years ago? (Illustration: Kelsey Heinrichs)
Dream Home
Few of my neighbours go to church. But they do attend Sunday services. The proceedings take place in the early afternoon, at shifting locations around the city. Congregants are called to worship with signs proclaiming “Open House.” Inside, real estate agents share the Gospel According To While You Were Out. Some of the visitors are looking to buy a roof over their heads — but most are there for what might be loosely described as spiritual reasons: Having shunned God’s house, modern yuppies instead worship their own, travelling from open house to open house, proclaiming to one and all the Good News of granite countertops and imported-tile backsplashes.
As my wife and I learned last month, when we put our own house on the market, this is not that old-timey real-estate religion. In my parents’ day, getting a house ready for sale meant vacuuming the carpets, mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, tidying the bedrooms. These days, it means constructing a full-fledged alternate reality — a beautiful, surreal plane from which everything and everyone you love has been expensively airbrushed out of existence.
No matter how professional and well-mannered your stagers are, there is no getting around the fundamentally humiliating nature of the client’s experience. Implicit in the stager’s recommendations is the fact that the way you live is undesirable — ugly — to prospective home buyers. When the stager enters your house, you hope that this will be an easy job for her, your house being so tasteful and uncluttered. “I wouldn’t touch a thing!” you imagine her saying as she admires your carefully chosen decor and furnishings. Instead, you hear a parade of euphemisms. “This couch, uh — it has that studenty look, don’t you think?” or “A bed made of rattan! I love it! But, you know, not everyone has our avant-garde tastes.” (Illustration: Kelsey Heinrichs)
When paranoia goes intergalactic
In a new book about conspiracy theories, Jonathan Kay profiles self-appointed prophets who believe our puppet-masters live in outer space. Third of four parts.
“Lurid as these science-fiction fantasies may be, they dovetail with the Cosmic Voyager’s more general, overarching belief that the world we see is merely a fragment of some much deeper reality. Just as a conventional New Order conspiracy theorist sees Barack Obama and George W. Bush as puppets for some shadowy petro-industrial cabal, a UFO conspiracist sees mankind itself as a mere pawn in a giant galactic space opera.” (Illustration by Kelsey Heinrichs)
Part One: The enduring influence of The Protocols of Zion
Part Two: Bringing paranoia to the digital masses
A club for sad liars, looking desperately for love
Most of what I wrote about myself in the Nerve online dating personals was untrue. You can try being meta about it. I don’t usually do this sort of thing. Or: I can’t believe I’m doing this. Hey, guess what: nor can anyone. Online dating is one of those things nobody wants to admit to a natural proclivity for, or being an old hand at. And yet they are very much a form unto themselves, a species of fiction, really, wherein wannabe Romeos dash off lightly fictionalized, Gatsbyesque versions of themselves in a tone halfway between come-hither foxiness and plangent entreaty, as if forever posed in some doorway, blowing smoke rings and delivering unrehearsed zingers, before disappearing into the night to work in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. (Illustration by Kelsey Heinrichs)
