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Canada’s magazine

What students are talking about today (October 26th edition)

Red Bull, Frankenstorm, Pippa, STEM & Toronto Fashion

Between the Pundits: Hungry for the truth

I waded into the whole poverty statistics rigmarole a few months back, after a Toronto Star editorial posited that “more than 905,000 across the Greater Toronto Area depended on food banks.” The claim was so outrageous that I hear Joe Atkinson clawed himself out of his own grave, dusted himself off and hopped the first trolley to One Yonge Street to inform his editorialists of the error. And in subsequent efforts, they did treat the figure—which represents the total number of visits to food banks across the GTA, not visitors—with slightly more respect. A “total of 905,000 people visited food banks across the Greater Toronto Area in the past year,” they wrote at Thanksgiving, which is… well, slightly closer to the truth, anyway.

Going hungry with Che

Slept in for a change. The Cannes programmers gave us a break today, clearing out the schedule to leave our palates fresh for this evening’s premiere of Che, Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic about Che Guevara. For once it was sunny. I was tempted to hit the beach, and almost did. But dark rooms exert an addictive pull in this place, along with the fear of missing something unmissable. So this afternoon I caught the final market screening of Hunger, which opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar last week. It’s a much-buzzed feature debut from British visual artist Steve McQueen (you think he’d at least call himself Steven to avoid confusion with the dead actor on IMDB.)