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New on F&O

Happy Monday, world. Here’s our lineup of new work on Facts and Opinions: In Arts: The Fan Dancer: Sally Rand. By Brian Brennan (subscription required*) My assignment was to interview a 71-year-old grandmother who danced nude while waving a couple of big white ostrich-feather fans like the veils of Salome. She had been a star in 1933 when she created a sensation at the Chicago World’s Fair, but now she seemed more of a curiosity. A 1972 article in The Village Voice had been headlined, “What do you say to a naked 68-year-old lady?”  What indeed? Between glamour and intimacy:

Ethics, journalism and junk media

I worked with Stephen Ward a lifetime ago, at The Canadian Press news service in Halifax. A philosopher by education, he took journalism seriously, and went on to a career of thinking, writing about, and graduate-level teaching in the field. He has now set up a site focused on media ethics, and I’m pleased that F&O is able, with his permission and at no charge*, to publish an excerpt of one of his pieces in our Expert Witness series, by specialists in their fields. Journalism is not a profession and it eludes definition — not least because of the hard-fought right to freedom of

Universities in Crisis: a series

Jim McNiven wraps up his three-part series The Future of the Global University System (public access) with thoughts on Globalizing Access to Higher Education. An excerpt: Let’s take a tour d’horizon of what seem to be the relevant pieces of the situation outlined in the preceding two Parts of this essay. Governments, either quickly or slowly, are withdrawing from public funding for post-secondary education. As a general rule, governments everywhere are operating with deficits and growing debt loads, which are becoming unsustainable, either mathematically or politically. Something has to give. If there is a cheaper way to provide post-secondary education, then this

We can climb out of the hole we’ve dug: Wood

“It’s one of those authorless pieces of universal wisdom: When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging,” writes Chris Wood. We have dug ourselves to the bottom of a hole — but there is a way out, he argues. An excerpt of this week’s Natural Security column, Stop Digging!:   We are not only in a hole… we may be digging our way through an ecological safety margin, a range of resilience in natural systems that we are putting under increasing stress, with a rising risk of breaking through at any moment into a new

Brennan’s Brief Encounter with Sally Rand, Fan Dancer

Fan dancer Sally Rand was still dancing nude on stage with her trademark ostrich-feather fans when she was in her 70s. In his new time capsule piece, Arts columnist Brian Brennan recalls that she wouldn’t dance while the television cameras were rolling. That, she said, “would destroy the illusion.” And excerpt of Brennan’s latest  Brief Encounters column, The Fan Dancer: Sally Rand. My assignment was to interview a 71-year-old grandmother who danced nude while waving a couple of big white ostrich-feather fans like the veils of Salome. She had been a star in 1933 when she created a sensation at the

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