Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2020 i Zoomer Magazine

“If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all,” said Hillary Clinton, then First Lady of the United States, in a seminal 1995 speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. She got one of her wishes. The statement caused a geopolitical brohaha for the unprecedented act of a First Lady criticizing, even if obliquely, an American adversary on its home soil and foreshadowed Clinton’s turn as Secretary of State during the Obama administration’s first term. And it has indeed echoed through the decades as an oft-referenced feminist rallying cry. However, it is now clear, despite some progress, it wasn’t “once and for all,”…

After 20 years of writing adventures for her chic Parisian P.I. Aimée Leduc, New York Times bestselling crime novelist Cara Black, 68, set aside her acclaimed contemporary crime series to write her first stand-alone novel: a spy thriller that satisfies her obsession with the Second World War and the history of Occupation-era France. Over years of research trips for her long-running series, a story idea emerged as she scoured French flea markets for vintage maps and period photographs, and Black kept a separate journal for anecdotes told to her by older Parisians. The result is Three Hours in Paris, an atmospheric cat-and-mouse tale about a female sniper’s attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler during his June 1940 visit to the City of Light. As any Francophile knows, whether it’s modern…

IHAD NO IDEA it was a retirement party. My friend Jane had invited me to join a group of high-powered women executives that meets for dinner periodically. The somewhat tongue-in-cheek subject line on the organizing emails was “Dinner with Amazing Women.” By the time we got together, after the inevitable cancelled dates and rescheduling, the head of Canadian operations for a large multinational retailer had announced she was stepping down. I was surprised. She is hugely energetic, engaged in her career and younger than 65. The glowing references to unlimited travel and time to relax didn’t ring right. But there is one circumstance I can identify with. Her husband was already retired – and had been for two years. Readers will recall that my husband, Doug, retired last summer.…

JAMES TAYLOR recalls the anxiety setting in ahead of a gig at Toronto’s Massey Hall early in his career. “When we did our sound check, I thought, ‘How are we gonna fill this place?’” He did fill it, of course, along with countless other venues during his celebrated career, and the 71-year-old is still making history. In 2015, he toppled Taylor Swift (whose parents named her after him) to notch his first career Billboard No. 1 album, Before This World, 47 years after his debut disc. And this March, American Standard entered the charts at No. 4, making Taylor the only artist to land in the Billboard Top 10 every decade for the last six decades. Taylor has endured the fire and rain, so to speak, of his life,…

“So you’ve got a new anti-aging cream. That don’t impress me much” Shania Twain, 54, tells the LadyGang podcast, “Aging is a battle you can’t win” and that she’d rather “enjoy what I do have” than stress over slowing her aging process. A new study shows that hearing aids could help stave off cognitive decline … researchers recently shouted. Son of Canadian Second World War vet Pte. Fred Arsenault asks public to send 100 cards to his father for his 100th birthday. His father receives 90,000 Which, I believe, is what they describe in the military as “Shock and awwww.” Meanwhile, a woman old enough to have been Arsenault’s babysitter marked her own major milestone Phyllis Ridgway, Canada’s oldest person, turns 113 and credits her longevity to drinking apple…

When news reports began filtering out of China of a virulent new illness called novel coronavirus, few could have predicted how much it would turn our world upside down. This COVID-19, we soon learned, was not just another version of the common cold. Instead, it was a highly contagious new virus that experts forecast could affect up to 70 per cent of the population, with the elderly and those with underlying conditions especially at risk. The media quickly pounced on the outbreak and, as each new and alarming story emerged and was amplified on social media, fear became almost as contagious as the disease itself. We watched hourly updates of the virus’s spread through China, then Asia, Iran, Italy and inevitably around the world. In an effort to mitigate the…

IT WAS A VISIONARY and transformative document that set human rights standards for women around the globe with the goal of eradicating the poverty, violence and general inequity in pay and power that prevents mothers and daughters, grandmothers and aunts from reaching their full potential. Twenty-five years after 189 states signed the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action at a United Nations world conference on women, its lofty goals are far from realized. No country on the planet can claim to have achieved gender equality, and many have made few gains. UN Women, an agency created by the United Nations in 2010 to address gender equality and the empowerment of women, estimates that 35 per cent of the world’s 3.9 billion women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate…

My dad had been dying for decades. Ashley Archer, the broad-shouldered, thick-bellied former football player and air force medic who met a woman one night skating in Montreal and turned his life upside down for her, and then me and then my sister, was sick as long as I knew him. One of my first memories of him is a growing red splotch on a bed sheet, an ambulance and something about hernias and stitches. He smoked for 40 years, ate his whole life like the famished farm boy I only lately realized he never stopped wanting to be and lost all of his money and most of the will to do much of anything after my mother died 35 years ago. Now he was 81, on dialysis, mostly…

WHO NATASHA KOIFMAN, founder of NKPR, public relations and artist management agency THE SINGULAR NOTION #allblackeverything. “Wearing black makes me feel confident, and I feel it contributes to my success. It’s part of my brand.” THE INSPIRATION “It started in my 20s, when I was working in financial services and I found myself wanting to have a uniform – the men had a uniform with suits and jackets and the women had dresses with flowers and pastels – but that wasn’t me.” THE EDGE “I wanted my version of a power suit to be one where I can feel confident and where my ideas stood out instead of what I was wearing. So I wore black turtlenecks and black pants religiously for years. People who follow me on social…

IN JAMAICA, YOU CAN’T throw a lemon peel from your Vesper martini without hitting a person, place or thing connected to James Bond. That’s quite a feat, considering the suave spy was conjured up almost 70 years ago by former British naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming on a typewriter at Goldeneye, his island getaway near Oracabessa on the north coast. You can picture Fleming winging his way over Jamaica as he describes his fictional secret agent getting a glimpse of the lush colonial outpost from the air in Dr. No. “Bond watched the big green turtle-backed island grow on the horizon and the water below him turn from the dark blue of the Cuba Deep to the azure and milk of the inshore,” he wrote in 1957. Just as…