If these pastimes—poker, baseball, debating Chinese–U.S. relations—seem atypical of the average twentysomething gay guy, perhaps it’s because gay nerds have a low profile in our culture. “To my friends, I’m kind of sexually gay but ethnically straight,” explains Silver, who came out to his parents after spending a year in London studying economics—“I don’t know how I got any work done”—and considers gay conformity as perfidious as straight conformity. He supports marriage equality, but worries that growing acceptance of gays will dent our capacity to question broader injustice.
“For me, I think the most important distinguishing characteristic is that I’m independent-minded,” he says. “I’m sure that being gay encouraged the independent-mindedness, but that same independent-mindedness makes me a little bit skeptical of parts of gay culture, I suppose.”
He recalls a series of flagpoles in Boystown in Chicago memorializing various gay Americans. “There was one little plaque for Keith Haring, and it was, like, ‘Keith Haring, gay American artist, 1962 to 1981,’ or whatever [actually 1958 to 1990], and I was like, Why isn’t he just an American artist? I don’t want to be Nate Silver, gay statistician, any more than I want to be known as a white, half-Jewish statistician who lives in New York.”
Silver, who once worked with the dating site OkCupid to calculate the best nights of the week to meet someone for a casual encounter (Wednesdays and Thursdays, apparently—“Friday and Saturday are a clusterfuck”), is not a fan of New York’s gay scene, which he thinks is too diffuse, but recalls many fond nights at Berlin, a nightclub in Chicago, where he met his former boyfriend, Robert Gauldin (the two recently separated but remain close; friends are optimistic for a reconciliation). “It was mainly a gay clientele but not entirely—they actually had good house music and good strong drinks, and it was about the right size,” he says. “And it’s also always the same—if there were a nuclear holocaust, it would live on.”
One reason our culture prefers perceiving homosexuality as a behavior and not an identity is severability. Homosexuality as an act can be a sin or a crime. You can ask forgiveness for it. You can serve your time. You can resign from Congress and go back to your wife, and everyone still gets to act like you're a regular "real" man.
The basic fact is that if you are attracted to people of the same biological sex, you will see the world differently and need some different cultural institutions to go about your life. Being gay means you understand people of the same sex and opposite sex differently than most people do. Being gay means you need to have ways of finding gay people to have sex and relationships with. It also means an increased risk of alienation from your parents (until recently), growing up without conceiving of the possibility of legally marrying someone you're sexually attracted to and being rejected by most traditional Western religions. Though we are spread throughout the population and look just the same as heterosexuals, gays have things in common.
[. . .]
There's a generalized presumption of heterosexuality in our society. If Nate Silver doesn't identify as gay, it will allow everyone to do what I did: presume that he's straight. We would thereby continue to define math as a thing straight people do. Gays and lesbians pretty much look like everybody else; we have names that are (mostly) just like everybody else's. Neil deGrasse Tyson challenges people's notions of what a black man and a scientist are when he shows up on TV, is visibly black and talks about science. Gays cannot be passively visible in the same way. We must be audible. If we want people to understand that gay people are just like everyone else, we can't just be like everyone else. A quiet gay or lesbian mathematician, postal worker or pro football player will be assumed straight, because everyone knows gays and lesbians are just florists and women's gym teachers. We need to make it safe for a person to be out in a non-traditionally gay field and not have it affect his or her work. Nate Silver being a gay statistician will help that.
Gay experiences are frequently ignored by society. White, heterosexual male perspective is integrated into all aspects of society, and any stuff that comes from a different perspective is viewed as tainted or a niche product. We need to accustom people to the idea that gays are more than a slutty parade and bathroom sex so that we can allow our perspective to enrich all disciplines. We need to make it safe for a statistician to be gay and have it affect their work, because some people are gay, some people are black, some people are women and all of those perspectives can enrich all fields. Nate Silver being a gay statistician will help that.
A decades-old cat sanctuary nestled behind Canada's Parliament buildings is heading towards a quiet end as its feline population slowly shrinks.
The sanctuary — a hold-over from the days when cats worked as mousers on Parliament Hill — was once home to as many as 30 strays, but spaying and neutering has reduced their ranks to just four today.
"There were kittens born here, the last ones probably 10 to 15 years ago," said Brian Caines, a sanctuary volunteer and former public servant.
"So now, we're down to four."
In 1955, more modern, chemical-based rodent control methods put the cats out of work, but they never left the hill. Volunteers like Irene Desormeaux, who died in 1987, took it upon themselves to take care of the animals.
In the 1980s, Rene Chartrand became known as "the cat man" after taking over for Desormeaux, building an elaborate wooden shelter for the animals and adopting the role as their full-time volunteer caregiver.
Chartrand cared for the cats without government help, relying entirely on public donations, until retiring in November 2008. He does not run the shelter any longer due to health reasons.
The structures have since been updated and replaced with newer ones to provide the cats shelter and some warmth from Ottawa's bitter winters. Caines said he got involved with the sanctuary when he worked for the Privy Council in the 1990s. The eventual decline of the cat population is a good thing, he said, since Parliament Hill isn't really the best place for them.
As any visitor to Ernest Hemingway’s house knows, the grounds here boast more than just Papa’s typewriter, his white iron-framed bed and the oft-used urinal he brought home from Sloppy Joe’s bar.
The place teems with six-toed cats — the so-called Hemingway cats — who for generations have stretched out on Hemingway’s couch, curled up on his pillow and mugged for the Papa-razzi. Tour guides recount over and over how the gypsy cats descend from Snowball, a fluffy white cat who was a gift to the Hemingways. Seafaring legend has it that polydactyl cats (those with extra toes) bring a bounty of luck, which certainly explains their own pampered good fortune.
But it seems the charms of even 45 celebrated six-toed cats have proved powerless against one implacable foe: federal regulators.
The museum’s nine-year bid to keep the cats beyond the reach of the Department of Agriculture ended in failure this month. The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that the agency has the power to regulate the cats under the Animal Welfare Act, which applies to zoo and traveling circus animals, because the museum uses them in advertisements, sells cat-related merchandise online and makes them available to paying tourists.
In other words, the cats are a living, breathing exhibit and require a federal license.
“The most ludicrous part of the whole thing is that if we were really dealing with the health and welfare of the cats, this would have never been an issue,” said Michael A. Marowski, the great-nephew of the woman who bought the Hemingway house in 1961, the year Hemingway died, and opened it as a museum in 1964.
“These cats are so well taken care of,” he said, “but because there is a book, and this book tells us that exhibited animals need to be kept this way, we have been put through this.”
Her Majesty’s visit itself was on the shorter side: after 30 minutes, she left the Cabinet room, where the meeting went on for another hour. Upon leaving, she was presented with 60 lacquered table mats - one for every year of her reign - emblazoned with traditional scenes from Buckingham Palace. This could be construed as a bit tacky, but apparently the gift, paid for by a whip-round among Cabinet ministers, was suggested by the Queen’s aides. And, as Pickles (again) defended: “One can never have too many table mats”.
After her Downing Street visit, the Queen crossed Whitehall on foot with William Hague - her 22nd Foreign Secretary - to his Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Not to be outdone by his Cabinet colleagues, Hague then presented his sovereign with a gift the size of about 6.6 billion table mats.
He said: “As a mark of this country’s gratitude to the Queen for her service, we are naming a part of the British Antarctic Territory in her honour as ‘Queen Elizabeth Land’ […] The British Antarctic Territory is a unique and important member of the network of fourteen UK Overseas Territories [12]. To be able to recognise the UK’s commitment to Antarctica with a permanent association with Her Majesty is a great honour”.
The Queen was presented with a stone prised from the frozen wastes that constitute her newest territory, roughly equal to the southern third of the British Antarctic Territory (BAT).
The BAT is situated south of 60˚S latitude and between 20˚W and 80˚W longitude, with those two meridians converging on the South Pole to give the territory its pizza-slice shape. It includes a handful of islands and the Antarctic Peninsula as well as the deep-frozen interior. Measuring 1.7 million km2 (660,000 sq. mi), the BAT is the largest of Britain’s overseas territories, but arguably also its least substantial. As may be gleaned from its main sources of income: a tax on the research scientists in the territory, and the sale of postage stamps.
[. . .]
This year wasn’t just the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, it was also the 30th anniversary of the short, sharp war between both countries over a group of islands north of the BAT, and east of Patagonia, Argentina’s Deep South. To the British, and those countries that recognise their claim to the islands these are the Falklands, while the Argentines, and those that support their claim know them as the Malvinas.
The naming of Queen Elizabeth Land prompted Argentina’s Foreign Ministry to lodge a formal complaint with British ambassador John Freeman in Buenos Aires, expressing their country’s "firmest rejection of the recently announced pretension of the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of naming an area of the Argentine Antarctic sector". As far as the Argentines are concerned, the naming is a reflection of "anachronistic [British] imperialist ambitions that hark back to ancient practices", an infringement of the spirit of the Antarctic treaty - and clearly linked to the fight over the Falklands/Malvinas. The previous slight to Buenos Aires regional ambitions was the posting, last March, of Prince William to the Falklands in his role as RAF search-and-rescue pilot.
On Tuesday, the Ontario Municipal Board released a decision on the fate of a plot of land on the Market’s western border. The plot is owned by Riotrin, a holding company majority owned by real-estate giant RioCan.
The land, which includes the former site of Kromer Radio as well as some surrounding lots, is big enough to accommodate a substantial shopping centre. RioCan applied to the City’s committee of adjustment for permission to build a three-storey building with 12,000 square metres of retail space there. That amount of space is more than enough to accommodate a supermarket. The notion of a Loblaws competing with Kensington’s small green grocers, cheese shops, and butchers is what has some neighbourhood residents and businesspeople up in arms.
The committee rejected RioCan’s application in May, and the company appealed to the OMB.
The OMB’s recent decision also rejects the application, but that doesn’t mean Kensington has heard the last of this particular development proposal.
That’s because the OMB hasn’t said that large-format retail isn’t appropriate for the area; it has only said that RioCan went about applying to build its project in the wrong way. Rather than going to the committee of adjustment, which approves “minor variances” from City bylaws, the OMB thinks RioCan should have applied for an amendment to the City’s zoning bylaw. That’s a much more arduous process, and it involves convincing city council that a project is in the city’s best interests.
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