I, like Hazlitt’s own Alex Molotkow, am totally in favour of seeing people who are or look kinda like Lena Dunham have sex with people who are or look like Patrick Wilson on screen. And, when it comes to the some media “critics” freaking out about Dunham’s body—or Melissa McCarthy’s somewhat zaftigier body—David Berry hits the nail on the head: “the most basic thought that should be in a man’s mind is: ‘I am not an arbiter of what is attractive.’ This is pretty basic self-awareness stuff, but there it is: You can acknowledge someone is outside the norm without assigning a value to that fact. More to the point, unless the question is explicitly 'Do you find Person X attractive?'—which, just to spell it out here, it effectively never is in a cultural criticism context—your opinion on the matter does not matter one tiny, goddamn iota.”
Nicholas Hune-Brown’s recent Toronto Life cover story is a great one; deftly weaving together personal experience, interviews, Stats Can findings and social science, Hune-Brown evenhandedly investigates and celebrates one of Toronto’s semi-secret special qualities—we live in a city with a great deal of racial diversity, and that diversity is increasingly intermingled in our city’s many mixed-race kids. It seems that this cohort will likely not be remembered as Generation Drizzy.
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s, in reviewing Ali Smith’s Artful, has written a wonderful exploration of the anxiety that rides in on that weird wave constituted by fiction hitting the shores of fact, and the power of belief to both keep us submerged and prevent us from drowning.
