Marie-Claude Lortie, a columnist at La Presse in Montreal, posed a question the other day that no Québecois has dared ask: “Toronto plus cool que Montréal?” Translation, for those who need one: Is Toronto now cooler than Montreal?
Toronto’s presumed ranking on the coolness scale has been stuck for years below New York (bigger and more fun) and Montreal (smoked meat, respectable bagels and a decent hockey team) and others besides. Now there is change afoot.
On Monday La Presse published Ms. Lortie’s guidebook, Carnet d’une urbaine à Toronto — Notebook of a Downtowner in Toronto. It is packed with her breathless descriptions of funky boutiques and mouth-watering delicacies.
[. . .]
Libération, the Paris newspaper, last week proclaimed “Toronto-mania,” noting, “Toronto is seducing young Canadians.” Writing on the BBC’s web site, journalist David Allan asked, “When Did Toronto Get So Cool?”
Many have trumpeted Toronto’s building boom; in March we had 134 high-rise buildings under construction, compared with 116 in New York. Our coolness, though, lies far away from the highrises, these writers say. All three drool over the Drake Hotel, on Queen Street West; the writers extol the Gladstone, Balzac’s coffee, Magic Pony on Queen West, Bambi’s (a bar hidden in a basement on Dundas West) and Kensington Market’s bookstore, Good Egg.
Full disclosure: my friendship with Ms. Lortie dates to 1990, when we covered the Oka Crisis — her for La Presse, me for The Gazette. A year later, in 1991, she visited Toronto to cover an NDP convention.
“It was long before Starbucks or Second Cup,” she says. “I was desperate for a cappuccino. I went to Bar Italia. I was charmed by Little Italy.”
Fast-forward twenty-odd years and countless visits to Toronto. Ms. Lortie is sitting in Little Italy again, with her husband, when he asks the unmentionable: “Coudonc? [Holy cow!] Is Toronto now cooler than Montreal?”
Drawing on a cigarette in his flat in central Tehran, Araz Alipour can count on one hand the number of friends who stayed in Iran after college. “Easily 90 percent of them have gone overseas,” the 29-year-old software developer says, reflecting on the flight of many of the nation’s science and engineering students. “Of my 45 university classmates, maybe five remain.”
Tens of thousands of Iranians have left the country of 77 million in recent years, largely for Europe and North America, in search of jobs and higher salaries. During the past two years, at least 40 percent of top-performing students with undergraduate degrees in science and engineering left the country to pursue advanced degrees, according to Iran’s National Elites Foundation, a government-run organization that supports academically gifted and high-achieving students. “Mostly they want to go to Canada, Australia, Germany, or Sweden,” says Bahram Yousefi, 26, a translator who works with college students on their graduate school applications. “There’s no job security, no life security here,” he says.
Nine months after taking office, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is under pressure to follow through on campaign promises to slow the brain drain that contributes to the country’s economic woes. From 2009-13, net emigration from Iran was 300,000, according to the World Bank. The number of Iranians studying in the U.S. increased 25 percent, to more than 8,700, in the 2012-13 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education. Many won’t return. According to a 2012 survey by the Arlington, Va.-based National Science Foundation, 89 percent of Iranian doctoral students remain in the U.S. after graduation—equal to the Chinese and the highest percentage of nationalities surveyed.
Unemployment among Iran’s 15- to 29-year-olds is about 26 percent, twice the national average, though Rouhani has pledged to increase jobs and raise salaries. While there’s no official data, graduates who recently started work in Iran say they earn no more than $500 a month. “No matter how good you are, you’re never going to earn $3,000 a month, a starting salary for Iranians in Canada or the U.S.,” says Mohammad, a postdoctoral student of communications in Ireland (he asked that his surname and the name of his college not be published).
Last week, proof of Gaelic’s reflowering was on full display on the grounds of the provincial legislature.
There, youthful members of the Gaelic College’s Young Heroes immersion program sang old Gaelic tunes and helped raise the flag marking Gaelic Awareness Month across Nova Scotia.
If he were a little younger, MacKenzie — whose mother comes from a well-known Mabou bag-piping clan and whose father is a Gaelic speaker and teacher from South Uist, Scotland — could have been right there with them.
Like his two brothers, the acclaimed fiddler and piper also speaks fluent Gaelic.
Increasingly, he’s got company.
The 2011 Canadian census showed that 1,275 Nova Scotians — the bulk in Cape Breton — identified themselves as Gaelic speakers.
On one hand, that’s a thin sliver of the 24,303 Gaelic speakers identified in the 1931 census.
On the other hand, it’s nearly triple the level of a decade ago.
What’s more, that number doesn’t include all 2,000 folks enrolled in Gaelic language programs around the province.
Or the thousands more people who may only speak a few words of the language but share a deepening connection to the Gaelic culture and ethos.
A gigantic planet-like object like no other has been found circling a tiny star at a record distance.
The object is a kind of "super Jupiter" – a gas giant about 10 times bigger than the biggest planet in our solar system, says Marie-Eve Naud, a PhD student at the University of Montreal and lead author of a scientific report describing the planet. The study is being published in the Astrophysical Journal this week.
GU PSc b is 2,000 times farther from its star than the Earth is from the sun, 67 times farther than Neptune and 50 times farther than Pluto — more distant than any planet ever discovered by a long shot, said René Doyon, a University of Montreal professor who is Naud's co-supervisor and co-author of the report.
But despite the vast distance between them, the planet is bound to its star via gravity, Doyon told CBCNews.ca. "The planet is actually moving with its star."
The researchers estimate that the planet completes its orbit around the star about once every 80,000 years. The star itself is located about 155 light years away, in the constellation Pisces, and is a small, young one, with just a third the mass of our sun.
On the other hand, the unusual object is so big that it may not be a planet at all. It may instead qualify as a brown dwarf or a "failed star" too small to ignite the nuclear reactions that power stars.
"Either way this is exciting," Doyon said. If it's a planet, it shows that planets can form farther away from stars than previously thought, and may not always form from the "planetary disk" of dust near a star. If it's a brown dwarf, it shrinks the known size limit of objects that can form in a way similar to the way stars form.
A crisp portrait of a planet 56 light years away has been captured by a new high-tech planet-hunting camera developed largely by Canadians.
The Gemini Planet Imager snapped an "amazingly clear and bright" image of the gas giant Beta Pictoris b after an exposure of just one minute, said Quinn Konopacky, a University of Toronto researcher who co-authored a new scientific paper describing the feat.
"I was very, very excited," recalled Konopacky of her first time seeing the planet's portrait, in an interview with CBC News Monday.
[. . .]
The new image and information about the planet teased out of the image data are being published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week by an international team led by Bruce Macintosh of Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The Gemini Planet Imager, billed as the "world's most powerful exoplanet camera" captured its first portrait of an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — shortly after it was installed on the Gemini South telescope in Chile in November.
"It was almost straight out of the box," said Konopacky, who used the data from the instrument to confirm the planet's distance from its star – about the same as the distance between the sun and Saturn.
The way the planet stands out from the background in the images "is basically unprecedented," she added.
Beta Pictoris b was first imaged in 2008, but previous images were "noisy" — that is, they were fuzzy the way analog TV images used to be if the signal wasn't good.
In comparison, the images from the Gemini Planet Imager are like high-definition TV where "everything just pops," Konopacky said.
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