Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2021 i Zoomer Magazine

AT 78, JOSEPH ROBINETTE Biden Jr., elected the 46th president of the United States, is the oldest man to ever hold that office. He defeated Donald J. Trump who, at 74, had held that record and leaves his disastrous one-term presidency in disgrace, proving the old adage, “There’s no fool like an old fool.” But the behaviour that led to Trump’s shocking but not entirely surprising self-immolation is more typical of another, much younger demographic. Trump’s remarkable make-believe world, lack of impulse control and refusal to take responsibility for any of his decisions that had negative consequences allows one to see his tenure in the Oval Office as that of a toddler with power. Similarly, one could view Trump’s enablers on staff and in the Republican party brass as parents…

The charm of The Bright Side: Twelve Months, Three Heartbreaks, and One (Maybe) Miracle lies in its relatability, which is underscored by Toronto author and journalist Cathrin Bradbury’s wry voice, black humour and frank assessment of the world and her place in it. In the following excerpt from the story of a modern woman’s family and love life, Bradbury is staring down 60 and has moved into Phase Two with her new beau, whom she calls Promising New Man, or PNM for short. He’d wooed her with a ferocity that would have had her running for the hills in her 30s but, at a battered 59, it was a spray of catnip. She began to feel that she deserved to be adored. “It wasn’t anti-feminist, it was just my turn,” she…

OLIVIA COLMAN HAS MADE an art of holding her fire. As The Crown’s second Elizabeth II, she quietly stole the show in her two-season term with a soft coup worthy of The Queen’s Gambit. While keeping her opinions and emotions under tighter lockdown than the Crown jewels, she could command a scene with the sheer power of observation. As prime ministers shuffled in and out of her chambers, a raised eyebrow or a crisp question was all it took to read her mind. Up to a point. Up to the final episode of season 4 and, for those who never expected to see the Queen erupt, this is a spoiler alert: when Prince Charles corners her to whine about his marriage to Diana, she cuts him down with surgical…

Even before COVID-19 touched off a global rethink of life in the big city, Raheema Brettingham’s husband, Larry, often mused about selling their home in Toronto’s west end and moving to Vancouver Island. As the lockdown measures tightened and the couple saw their world reduced to strolls around the neighbourhood, he began to press the idea more intently. Even so, the 59-year-old self-described “city girl” felt she wasn’t ready to leave Toronto. “I used to love hopping on the subway to go downtown and meet friends,” she says. “So, every time he talked to me about it, I said, ‘No, no, no.’” Then in June, Larry, 67, sat down to pen an email to his wife detailing his case for ditching Hogtown. It wasn’t just that pandemic restrictions had robbed…

EASY JOKES about track pants and breakfast dessert have become cloying. We have entered the long-haul part of the pandemic, and it is time to put some snappy back in our routines, and that means getting properly dressed again. There is plenty of good science to show us that continuing to get dressed each day bolsters our mental health, our self-esteem and motivation. A good outfit can win the war: there is a reason military uniforms with their stiffened creases and polished shoes matter. In times of chaos, we must take order any damn way we can get it. “I can’t stress this enough,” says fashion psychologist Shakaila Forbes-Bell, writing about the sartorial challenges of the pandemic on her website fashionispsychology.com. “Giving up the glam life is not recommended.”…

Meteorologists would definitely classify Hazel McCallion, known affectionately as Hurricane Hazel, as a “Category 5.” The indefatigable former mayor of Mississauga, Ont. – her 36-year tenure is the city’s longest – was born during a global depression and has come a long way since her youthful days earning $5 a game playing in a women’s hockey league. Armed with her trademark no-nonsense attitude, Madam Mayor embodies the essence of old-school “shaking hands and kissing babies” politics. She celebrated her 98th birthday in 2019 by going rock climbing (because of course!), was routinely photographed at events pre-pandemic and still holds down a day job, serving as Chief Elder Officer at Revera retirement homes. And as she celebrates her centenary this Valentine’s Day, she’s gifting a one-of-a-kind love letter to her…

You might call it “mission impossible” – and not the filming of the next high-octane installment that has Tom Cruise on the sidelines yelling at crew members for not following COVID protocols. Hollywood studios are still contending with the unpredictablity of releasing films in a pandemic, which even pushed back the Oscars from February to April. While some studios are going the streaming route, others are banking on people returning to watch movies on the big screen. Warner Bros., for one, made the unprecedented call to release its entire 2021 slate on HBO Max as well as in theatres (though only in the U.S.). When Canadians will be allowed to attend theatres again in large numbers remains to be seen, but early 2021 is still delivering some of the…

TO SAY OLIVIA Colman’s new film is about dementia sells it short. The Father is not just about memory loss but loss of self – a graphic reminder of our mortality. I remember visiting my father after his final stroke significantly reduced his mental functioning. My mother couldn’t bear to see him that way. But I loved how he would gaze out the window at the rustling leaves, happily lost in the moment, when he wasn’t compulsively checking his watch – two things Anthony Hopkins does in The Father. Whatever the medical cause, dementia is not a disease like the others. It’s a vacant room where reality is sent spinning, which may be why actors and filmmakers are drawn to it. What happens to the mind when it loses its…

The economic impact of COVID-19, with its social-distancing requirements, limit on in-store customers and heightened health protocols, has been a knockout punch for many entrepreneurs running small enterprises. “Businesses that have been around for decades, even generations, are in danger,” says Laura Jones, vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), a non-profit that represents 110,000 members. “Small business doesn’t exist to decorate our communities,” warns Jones. “Yes, they make our communities lovely but they need to make sales to survive.” The Ontario government controversially allowed chains like Walmart and Costco to stay open in locked-down regions because they sell food and medicine even as they shuttered smaller shops just before the busy holiday season. Manitoba restricted big-box stores to selling essential items only. Independent operators were floundering, with…

You love to travel. And not just the act of get-up-and-go and soak-up-the-experiences of it. You also love to dream about it, read about it, map your way and plan it, too. You don’t necessarily go it alone, either. You’ll check out sources like the travel pages of Zoomer and everythingzoomer.com, read reviews, compare prices, talk to a travel agent – even (and perhaps, especially!) during a pandemic. This is what we, your fellow globe-trotting friends at Zoomer, call the Savvy Traveller. This autumn, we reached out and asked you to inform us of how your attitudes toward travel may be changing, what with COVID-19. More than 2,700 of you responded and we highlight our key finding here. The clearest message was this: although you may be grounded now, many…

IT APPEARS THAT YOU and Doug are certainly eating well! Most impressive.” That’s the message my friend Sandy sent in response to one of my Instagram posts – I’m not sure if it was monkfish Provençal, matzo ball soup or mac and cheese that made her get in touch. But increasingly, those food pictures are a main point of contact with my friends. I used to use social media to showcase the people I met, the issues we explored and the events we attended. With all of that gone during lockdown, I turned to posting the food I cook most every night. I was an enthusiastic home cook in “the before time.” The pandemic has intensified my passion for it, but sometimes I wonder if it’s just the virtual equivalent…

In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the 1974 TV movie that established Cicely Tyson as a cinematic force, her fictional 110-year-old character scrutinizes a big-city magazine writer who has made the pilgrimage south to interview the former slave about her life. “You wanna know how come I live so long,” a wary Pittman challenges the JFK lookalike, weighing whether to co-operate. Initially noncommittal, she unveils a tumultuous tale that begins in captivity on a Louisiana plantation at the end of the American Civil War, spans natural disasters and painful personal losses and ends with the tenacious matriarch embroiled in her small town’s desegregation efforts during the 1960s civil rights movement. Equally compelling is the journey and staying power of the similarly steely Tyson, 96, who was born in New…

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced at a fall 2020 UN meeting that the government of Canada was going to pursue policy objectives in support of “the Great Reset,” an effort to “reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.” While some may find the scope and suddeness of this economic reimagining rather unsettling, the University of Toronto’s Dimitry Anastakis argues that economies are always in a state of flux. Our economic model is simply adapting to societal shifts, many of which were already underway pre-COVID. “The Great Reset is really just an acceleration of trends that were already happening,” says Anastakis, who is a business historian at the Rotman School of Management. “It is basically a recognition that we have a bunch of…

BEFORE A MUTANT bat virus crippled the planet, the World Health Organization compiled a top-10 list of threats to global health. Along with air pollution and climate change, cancer and heart disease, in 2019 the WHO ranked people’s reluctance to be vaccinated against infectious diseases as a major hazard to the world’s well-being. At the time, the global health agency was referring to rising opposition to shots for polio, whooping cough, mumps and measles, old contagions making a comeback as the anti-vax movement spread from Western nations to other countries. Now, a little more than a year later, when the new scourge of COVID-19 has brought humanity to its knees, vaccines look like the only hope of stopping it. The consequences of vaccine hesitancy could be catastrophic. Yet recent…