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For the past four years the Omnium-Gatherum blog has opened your Saturday morning Inbox with news of driven people, eye-popping places, and new ideas that may have escaped your gaze.
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Now, for this week’s Omnium-Gatherum…
OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.
Yesterday, December 6, marked the 35th anniversary of the Montreal massacre when 25-year-old Marc Lépine murdered 14 women and wounded another 10 (as well as 4 men) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Lépine then killed himself.
He chose the engineering school because the women there were training for ‘non-traditional’ jobs, yelling “I hate feminists!” as he made his way through the classrooms, separating the women from the men and gunning them down.
Two months later, Ursula Franklin, a professor of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, spoke at a commemorative service there to mark this rare and shocking tragedy. Said Franklin: “Yes, it was the act of a madman, but it is not unrelated to what is going on around us. That people get mad may happen in any society, any place, every place. But how people get mad, how that escalation from prejudice to hate to violence occurs, what and who is hated and how it is expressed, is not unrelated to the world around us.”
In 1989, women studying engineering, medicine and law were a minority and often a rarity. They stood out in the way a woman does today in the special forces, or conducting an orchestra, or being a deckhand.
Today, 35 years later, women are in the ascendant: at the U of T, 39% of their engineering students, 56% of law students, and 62% of medical students are women. Today, at École Polytechnique, 31% of engineering students are women. Numbers like this generally hold true across the nation.
But if you’re an incel like Marc Lépine was, life is also going to get better.
An incel? Until a couple of years ago I didn’t know what an incel was. Indeed, the word barely existed.
An “incel” is an involuntary celibate. It’s also “a community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active.” [When I was young eons ago, they were called that most damning of indictments: losers].
For many years in America, ‘girlie men’ ruled. Cerebral bested physical.
But with the election of Donald Trump, ‘manly men’ are all the rage now. And rage they will under the protection of a President who has tapped into the anger of millions of white men who feel they’ve lost their power, purpose and manhood. Now, and for the next four years, through podcasts, fight nights and open threats of revenge, incels have the cover of normalcy they lacked.
At the same time, being a woman in America is getting more dangerous every day.
We might think that Canada is largely immune to America’s deadly polarization.
But while America has vastly more mass shootings when four or more people are injured or killed than Canada does, 656 last year alone compared to 5 here, none of these US shootings specifically targeted women.
Indeed, of the half dozen mass killings around the world that have targeted women in the past 35 years, Canada continues to be the record holder for the incels’ lament: “If I can’t have you, I’m going to kill you.”
Meanwhile…
1. Why can’t the world be more like them? Border collies and hare raisers and Philomena Cunk and AI bots you can fall in love with and polar bear cubs who may be real, or maybe not.
2. Yes, hospital food can kill you. Finally, science confirms our own experience. A German study found that better meals bring 15% fewer complications and 27% fewer deaths.
The good news is, we’re living longer. The bad news is, cancer is spreading, because you have to die from something. The really good news is, there’s a blood test that scans for 50+ different cancers. The bad news is, it costs over $2,000 and is still unproven.
Finally, Toronto has a new service for when you need lots of care at home, like after that stroke or hip surgery or chemo.
3. The Fifth Estate turns 50. The CBC’s iconic investigative show did a 50th anniversary edition with the felons, politicians, billionaires and killers we grew up on, and among its hosts were a very young Adrienne Clarkson, Linden MacIntyre, Bob McKeown, and Anna Maria Tremonti.
4. Car ads need cars. Jaguar decided its old macho brand needed a ‘refresh.’ Its new campaign bewildered millions and annoyed more. Here’s what Porsche and Volvo do instead.
5. Exploding myths. How the Nazis reinvented Hitler as a genial Bavarian gentleman.Plus, can loneliness be a myth? And, inner cities aren’t all bad. And not everyone thinks we’re on Indigenous land. And teenage daughters aren’t wild childs.
6. We need one of these in our House of Commons. The Brits have an app called Peer Review that connects every one of the 805 members of the House of Lords according to 11 archetypes like ‘loyalist’, ‘donor’, ‘ghost’, ‘workhorse’, and of course ‘highborn.’ It also goes deep, very deep, into their hidden connections.
7. Jane Fonda is a goddess. Here she is, at 86, on living longer. And more on that, and this time with her Type A friends.
8. Australia sets age limits on social media. Here’s a primer of essential links: from the basics, to tech companies’ reaction (they’re not happy. The fines for non-compliance aren’t paid by the kids or their parents, but by the companies)…to Quebec’s reaction.
9. Turning cynics into skeptics. If you’re a “toxic, smirking misanthrope, oozing contempt,” I have great news. You can learn to be a skeptic and be far less mordant. Indeed, if you’re a fan of Leonard Cohen, bliss is close at hand.
10. Boosting literacy. There’s a New York bookstore that charges less if you actually read the book you buy. Speaking of books, an Israeli AI publisher called Spines plans to flood the market with 8,000 new titles a year and cut publishing time from 18 months to 3 weeks. Major editorial gate-keeping? Not so much.
11.What I’m liking. Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe, by Sathnan Sanghera. A damning, hilarious review of just how thoroughly and enduringly Britannia’s every act, from enforcing slavery to classifying plants, has shaped who billions of us are today. In the author’s words, it’s…“What British people think empire did to the world and what the world thinks empire did to the world.”
12. Where I hope you’ll holiday. Last year we took friends kayaking off North Vancouver Island. The trip, organized by karibu adventures, was much more than breaching whales and clapping seals. It was an exploration of the B.C. Coast from an Indigenous perspective. Last weekend, The Globe and Mail featured next summer’s same trip. So…Go ! (and get a 5% discount as a reader of this blog.)