Gordon Laird, the Alberta investigative journalist and a former This Magazine one-man-band — at one time in the early ’90s he was simultaneously the magazine’s advertising sales rep, circulator, business manager, and a member of the editorial collective — has written a new book, and it’s a doozy. He’s in the midst of launching The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization, and in the next few days you have the opportunity to meet him at launches in Ottawa, Toronto, Burlington, and Calgary.

On Friday, October 23, he’s talking at the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival at noon [pdf], at Saint Bridgid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities, 314 St. Patrick Street. $15/$10

On Sunday, October 25, he’s holding an impromptu launch in Toronto at 2 p.m. at the Concord Café, 937 Bloor St. West (with top-secret one-day-only 50% off the hardcover price!). Free.

On Monday, October 26, he’ll read at the Burlington Public Library Time TBA, looks like. Call the Burlington Public Library at 905-639-3611 for further details. $10.

Finally, the following Sunday, November 1, he’ll be speaking as part of the first Pages at the Plaza event at 11 a.m., at The Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Rd. $5 admission, or $15 including lunch!

I haven’t finished reading the book yet (about halfway through) but what I’ve read I can fully recommend. It’s a sometimes dizzying but very readable plunge into the kaleidoscopic krazy kwilt of the modern consumer economy, highlighting the strange forces that link super-discount retailers in Las Vegas, rig-jumpers in Alberta’s Athabasca tar sands region, Shenzhen wage-slaves, and undocumented Mexican fruit-pickers. And for progressives who have always railed against the forces of Globalization, he shows that the process of “Deglobalization” is likely to be just as painful. I’ll be at the Toronto launch on Sunday, hope to see you there.

Maisonneuve has always marched to the beat of a different drummer, which is why we, and thousands of other readers, like reading it. Personally, I always liked the simplicity of the old covers, but I’m not going to dwell on the past. I’m not in love with the new cover design, but the changes inside the magazine are great. And Maisy now definitely looks unlike anything else you’ll see on newsstands—almost always a plus.

So when my copy of the Summer 2009 issue arrived in my mailbox yesterday, I flipped to the letters page to see what the feedback on the new look had been. And boy, was there a letter:

Wow. That is one of the ugliest magazine covers I have ever seen. It looks like a 1978 copy of This Magazine. After reading your description of the changes it is hard to believe that so much thought could go into something so drab. Good thing I have a subscription becuase this cover would turn me off if I saw it on the stands. But the inside is as good as ever. I especially like reading writers that I don’t see in other magazines.

—Scott Dobson, Toronto

Behold: This Magazine, 1978.

Oh, SNAP. A 1978 copy of This Magazine! Which is, admittedly, not about to win any beauty contests, as you can see from the March 1978 cover above. But that was 30 years ago, and while we’re still beautiful on the inside, This has also had some work done recently and we want to show it off. So: attention, Scott Dobson! Contact me (editor at thismagazine dot ca) and we’ll give you a free one-year subscription to This Magazine, 2009 incarnation. Do you know Scott Dobson? Are you Scott Dobson? Let the word go forth.

UPDATE: Meet Scott Dobson!

A helpful tipster out there put us in touch with Scott, who comments below on the This Magazine of his youth, in which we find ourselves in pretty awesome company: “In chronological order the most important things to me in the 70’s were Bobby Orr, Evel Knievel, Monty Python, and THIS magazine.” Thanks Scott — that free subscription will be in the mail soon.

Get your own – Open publication

You might have heard that educational reformer and Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers was turned back while trying to cross the Canadian border earlier this week. Ayers was on his way to a speaking engagement in Toronto at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, but border control agents had other ideas — although just what those ideas are, we don’t know, since the border agent cited as the reason a felony conviction from 1969, which apparently doesn’t exist.
Ayers’ name became a political byword in the last election when vice-presidential candidate and world-class twit Sarah Palin seized on a tenuous connection between Ayers and Barack Obama as proof that the now president was cavorting with terrorists.
But before Ayers was a fugutive from the law for his involvement with the Weather Underground, he was an educator and an activist in the late 1960s, running an experimental integrated school in Ann Arbor, Mich. The combination of radical leftist politics and schools naturally brought him into contact with (drum roll, please), the editors of This Magazine Is About Schools, the very publication you’re reading, which at the time was slightly over two years old. Ayers wrote this piece, “Travelling with Children & Travelling On“, about his experiences with the racially mixed school and the uphill work of integrating schools in the U.S. Shortly after, he became a leading figure in Students for a Democratic Society. The rest is history, but we thought you might like a look back at Ayers’s original article, which we pulled out of the archives and rescanned. You can read the PDF online and download it for yourself here.
[Thanks to reader Michael for finding the article title, which made the search a lot easier!]