Articles
The Tyee •

Grabby the Sea Lion Should Inspire New Tourism Campaigns

The world’s enthusiasm for our toddler-grabbing sea lions suggests that tourism departments have been marketing Canada all wrong. Obviously, the key to pulling the punters is to promote our town as danger city

Did you see the throng of tourists at Steveston’s Fisherman’s Wharf, phones at the ready, the day after that sea lion popped out of the water to grab a pre-schooler? Her family appeared to be feeding the animal, but they say that’s not true.

What is indisputable is that they let their ki
NOW Magazine •

Is the rise of fake news a big lie?

The sudden concern over fake news — which is a feature of publishing as old as the printing press — strikes me as classic moral panic.

There’s nothing new about the bizarre stories found on the internet. What is new is a wave of social upheaval — Brexit, Syria, the U.S. election — that has left us all looking for an uber villain to blame for why we suddenly feel so unsafe. Our lizard brains are convinced that if we could just police, jail, censor or exclude that villain from society, we would a
The Tyee •

The Attention Merchants: A History of Advertising’s Long Grip on Media

• The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

A new book about the evolution of advertising from 19th century newspapers to Facebook has arrived just in time to remind people that the media are not to blame for the election of the short-fingered vulgarian. It’s way more complicated than that and has been for almost 200 years.

If I were writing the subtitle for Tim Wu’s excellent book, The Attention Merchants, I’d call it the story of how technology changes, but people d