Deepfakes, video forgeries that appear to make people say or do things they never did, have the power to influence an election
Tag Archives: propaganda
How Russia’s attack on Freeland got traction in Canada
Terry Glavin traces Moscow’s “Nazi-grandfather” calumny through a maze of cranks, propagandists and Putin fanciers—to Canada’s mainstream media
A future that never was in China
A touring collection of Mao-era propaganda art marks an anniversary China would rather forget
Carleton hosts event honouring Ayatollah Khomeini
Conference featured controversial speaker
Pharaoh’s good-eating guide
Someday, the USDA Food Pyramid will be a core case study in disaster for design students. The New York Times reports that the administration is reversing the incomprehensible 2005 decision to divide the famous pyramid into coloured wedges instead of labelled ascending slices. This was an idea which, and stop me if this seems obvious, contradicted the whole pretext for a pyramid-shaped infographic. You depict something as a pyramid when you want to imply a quantitatively large and fundamental base—in the ideal diet, whole grains and vegetables—and a smaller, less important top, which in the original plan for the pyramid was basically occupied by meat and eggs. The Meat ’n’ Eggs Lobby (i.e., the agriculture industry that the USDA exists to serve) didn’t like the hierarchical implications, and so the pyramid became, in the words of a nutritionist quoted by the Times, a diagram “which basically conveys no useful information”.