Instead of taking your fingerprint, maybe police should swab our belly buttons with Q-tips. No, that’s ridiculous, actually. But the idea illustrates a point made by a group of North Carolina-based researchers in their new Belly Button Biodiversity (BBB) project. Last month, the group published results of their first of many experiments, in which they swabbed 60 belly buttons and identified a total of 2,368 species of bacteria. People’s individual profiles were snowflake-ily, bacterially unique.

As the BBB understands it, like exploring the depths of our majestic oceans, there’s much to be learned from our belly button hangers-on. National Geographic reported that 1,458 of the species “may be new to science,” and some of the bacteria were entirely out of their known context. One person’s belly button “harbored a bacterium that had previously been found only in soil from Japan,” where he had never been. Another had two types of “extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents.”

“The belly button has captured the imagination for centuries,” BBB notes on their impeccably-URL-ed site, WildLifeOfYourBody.org. Prior to those centuries, belly buttons captured no one’s imagination. To be fair, in those days, imaginations were much less amenable to capture. They wandered, wily and free, with a discerning taste, the likes of which our indolent, Internet-weary imaginations of today know nothing.

When you return from this journey into the belly button of your mind, you can participate in one of the BBB’s very real “sampling events,” where you volunteer to be navally swabbed with a Q-tip. They then assign you an anonymous number, and in a few days you can then go online and look photos of what grows – your belly button bacterial profile — and learn about the little beings with whom you share your body.

If you’re just starting to date someone, or more seriously vetting them as a marriage candidate, you might suggest going to one of these sampling sessions as a fun date. But then, like so many dates, it’s actually a test to see how dirty they are. It’s anonymous, yes, but if you stand next to each other in line, you’ll know what their number is, and you can look it up later.

It’s up to you how you interpret the results. Dirtier is not necessarily worse, and that’s one important point BBB wants their work to make. The vast majority of bacteria in the world live in harmony with us, and don’t want to kill us. No, they want us to live and thrive, so we can keep being their warm homes. So they may actually be helping us.

As the BBB puts it, most bacteria are, like people, “either good or simply present.”

So should you be making extra effort to clean out the many bacteria in your belly button? I say no. Unless it’s visibly grimy, or you have a history of belly button infections, or just reading about this research no longer allows you to live comfortably with the knowledge that you are an infestation. Others will disagree — like Dr. Claire Cronin of theMassachusetts Medical Society. She notes that in the era of laparoscopic surgery, where the belly button is commonly used as a port of surgical access, there is virtue in keeping tidy down there:

There is a surprising lack of awareness on the public’s part as to what can accumulate in a belly button … the volume of material increases as the patient ages and, just like their arteries, can harden. I like to think of it as a cache of a lifetime of little treasures. … Most patients have not received adequate instruction on proper umbilical hygiene. It has not received the same level of attention that the area behind the ears has. … There is a technique to cleaning the belly button. It involves soap and water and gentle probing. … Alcohol should not be used, in order to not disturb the delicate pH balance of the area.

Beyond worrying about the embarrassment of doctors discovering “blackened wax casts,” in your belly button, though, the BBB project could make important progress in understanding how the bacteria that colonize us actually affect our health. Analogous to the parasiteToxoplasmosis gondii – which we only recently found out is present in 20-50 percent of our brains, subtly shaping our personalities and maybe even making us try to hurt ourselves – some of these little bacteria that go unnoticed are probably affecting us in ways unknown, good and bad. Ways that we’re currently just chalking up to chance or genetics or God or gluten.

Meanwhile, BBB is now in the pilot phase of testing armpits, which is less fascinating, but doesn’t lose sight of their thesis that “in all likelihood your body hosts species that no scientist has ever studied.” That’s not meant to be used as a pick-up line.

Source: The Atlantic

The O’Neilleans are coming.

In the 1970s, fed up with government bureaucracy, the Princeton University physicist and space advocate Gerard K. O’Neill became convinced that free enterprise was the key to extending humanity’s presence beyond Earth.

Now, as a flurry of newly formed companies unveil plans to mine the moon and asteroids, and a non-profit foundation seeks to launch humans to Mars, Dr. O’Neill’s entrepreneurial vision as well as a big dose of Silicon Valley wealth looms large behind it all.

“It’s the expansion of the economic sphere outward to where the resources are,” said Bob Richards, co-founder and CEO of Moon Express, a Bay Area company that seeks to place the first privately financed lander on the moon.

Mr. Richards left Canada in 2009, discouraged by a lack of momentum in a space industry reliant on government contracts, but still dreaming about the Apollo moon landings that inspired his interest in space. After spending time among California’s venture capitalists, he realized he had arrived at the right place at the right time.

“I found the tribe that can do this and I never left,” said Mr. Richards, who spoke in Toronto on Thursday at a conference on commercial space development.

Prominent among Mr. Richards’s tribe are some of the region’s high-tech billionaires, enthusiastic fans of space exploration whose financial clout is like a blast of oxygen to the flickering torch of the post-Apollo generation. Mr. Richards, who launched Moon Express in 2010, counts former Microsoft executive Naveen Jain among his partners. Another recently formed company, Planetary Resources of Seattle, which seeks to extract the mineral wealth of near-Earth asteroids, is backed in part by Eric Schmidt Jr. and Larry Page of Google.

Industry watchers say the trend was already evident a few years ago with the capital that wealthy investors like Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos poured into ventures looking to ferry tourists into low Earth orbit. But the real watershed moment may have come last May, when PayPal founder Elon Musk, who heads the aerospace company Space X, saw his Dragon capsule become the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station.

“These guys get it,” said Rick Tumlinson of Deep Space Industries, a Houston based company that in January unveiled its own plans to develop asteroids commercially.

The difference between SpaceX and the latest round of ventures is that while flights to low Earth orbit are supported by a U.S. administration that is looking to private contractors to step into the gap created by the retirement of the space shuttles, the business case for commercial activity in deep space has yet to be put to the test. This is why the backing of the tech titans who made a profitable industry out of the Internet has become crucial to the next wave of space development.

“These are people who can walk the walk, from a business perspective,” Mr. Tumlinson said, adding: “We are selling a vision, but unless we can support it with a viable business case, no one is going to work with us.”

There is no shortage of skeptics who point to the high cost of missions to the moon and asteroids, which so far have been mounted only by government space agencies, and cast doubt on a profitable return. Mr. Richards and others counter that a revolution in space technology, some of it developed for military purposes and now working its way into the commercial sphere, has changed the equation. Once jump-started by an initial boost of private funding, they say, a fledgling space resource economy will become self-sustaining.

If so, scientists are among those who could stand to gain, by hitching low-cost rides for their instruments on the wave of survey craft and moon landers that is expected to start fanning out to distant targets over the next decade.

“The main benefit will be cheaper and more frequent access to space,” said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also advises Planetary Resources. As to whether the industry has reached a turning point on the road to an O’Neillean future,“We’ll have to see,” Prof. Seager said. “But if there’s a will, there’s a way. And if there is brain power, and capital.”

Source: Globe & Mail

Leonard Cohen and son Adam both draw nominations for their work

Carly Rae Jepsen, the Mission, B.C., singer who had a breakout hit withCall Me Maybe last summer, has a leading five nominations for Juno Awards, it was announced today.

The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences lavished love on pop stars Jepsen and Justin Bieber, including nods for artist of the year and Juno Fan Choice Award.

But there were also multiple nominations for Leonard Cohen, Céline Dion and bands such as Metric, Hedley and Marianas Trench.

For artist of the year, the top award, Cohen, Bieber and Jepsen are in the running. So is adult contemporary singer Johnny Reid and electronic artist Deadmau5.

Jepsen, who came to international attention when Bieber tweeted about her video for Call Me Maybe to his legions of fans, also has nominations for single of the year and best pop album and best album for Kiss, the album she recorded with Bieber’s label.

Bieber has four nominations and is competing with her for best album and best pop album for his Believe.

His son, Adam Cohen, has earned his first Juno nomination — best contemporary album for Like a Man.

The rock album category recognizes several veterans of the rock scene, including Rush with Clockwork Angels and the Tragically Hip for Now for Plan A. Also nominated are last year’s Juno darlings The Sheepdogs for their self-titled album, newly reunited band Big Wreck forAlbatross and Billy Talent for Dead Silence.

The awards gala is set for April 21 in Regina, with 11-time Juno winner Michael Bublé as host. Bublé also has a nomination for the Fan Choice Award.

Jepsen, Marianas Trench and Billy Talent are among the performers announced for the gala.

Last year’s big winners were singers Feist and Dan Mangan, and Saskatoon band the Sheepdogs.

Globe and Mail public health reporter André Picard, who has already won numerous awards and accolades throughout his illustrious career as a journalist, can now add one more honour to his name: recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Medal.

Picard learned he was a recipient of the medal after coming back from a conference and discovering it on his desk. It was “a complete surprise. And a pleasant one,” he said by e-mail.

“It’s very flattering to get this kind of recognition, especially for doing something I love – writing about health.”

Picard, who has been a journalist with the Globe since 1987, is one of the top health writers in Canada and has carved a reputation as a noted public policy expert. Throughout his career, he has written on everything from the sustainability of the health-care system to the need for a national mental health strategy to developments in medical science.

In 2011, Picard won the Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism and in 2010, a National Newspaper Award as Canada’s top columnist. In 1993, he received the Michener Award for outstanding public service in journalism for his coverage of the tainted blood crisis. He has received many other accolades from other groups and organizations.

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal is awarded to Canadians who have made significant contributions and achievements, and to recognize service to the community and country. It was created in commemoration of the Queen’s ascension to the throne on Feb. 6, 1952. A total of 60,000 medals have been given to deserving Canadians over the past year.

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In his first major initiative since returning to Canada, former media baron Conrad Black, 68, is set to co-host a Canadian “magazine talk show” with former CBC Radio head Denise Donlon.

Dubbed “The Zoomer,” the show is produced by Moses Znaimer’s ZoomerMedia , and will debut on the conglomerate’s Vision TV channel.

“The current plan is 26 episodes to start,” wrote ZoomerMedia spokeswoman Leanne Wright in an email to the Post.

“Lord Have Mercy, Black is Back!” reads promotional material for the program, which is currently being shopped around at the annual conference of the National Association of Television Program Executives in Miami Beach.

“A distributor is still in discussion,” wrote Ms. Wright.

“In every episode Lord Black will conduct a feature interview with some of the world’s Greats, and close with an editorial,” reads an official ad, which explicitly warns T.V. executives not to ignore aging audiences of “Alpha Boomers.”

“’Talk Black’ segments will feature his views on issues that really get under his skin — ageism, pension reform, the U.S. justice system, prison reform, gun control and the world’s financial crisis.”

Co-host Denise Donlon, the former executive director of CBC Radio, will round out the show with a “Zoomer Roundtable” where panelists will discuss Baby Boomer-centric issues while being “enlivened by humour, cooking and live performances.”

The announcement comes nine months after Lord Black was released from a Florida penitentiary, where he served 42 months for convictions of fraud and obstruction of justice related to his business dealings at thehelm of newspaper giant Hollinger Inc.

Since returning to his home in Toronto’s Bridle Path neighbourhood, Lord Black has made only a handful of public appearances, including a June speech to Toronto’s Empire Club and a May interview with CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge.

At the time, Lord Black said his comeback was already underway, although he added intended to stay coy on major Canadian political issues since he was in the country on a one-year residency permit.

Although born in Montreal, Lord Black gave up his Canadian citizenship in 2001 in order to accept a peerage at the British House of Lords.

“Since I am not technically a citizen, it’s not my place to come in here on a temporary resident permit and get up on a soap box and harangue the government,” he told Mr. Mansbridge.

WATCH A SIZZLE REEL FOR THE SHOW

In October, to promote his book Conrad Black – a Matter of Principle, Lord Black travelled to the U.K. for what was ultimately remembered for its whirlwind of testy interviews with British T.V.

“You’re a priggish, gullible, British, fool who takes seriously this ghastly American justice system that any saneEnglish person knows is an outrage,” he told BBC news anchor Jeremy Paxman in an exchange in which Mr. Paxman referred to Lord Black as a “criminal.”

Lord Black similarly told Sky News’ Adam Boulton “stop being a jackass” after the interviewer inferred that the former media baron was “kicked out of America.”

In his role on The Zoomer, Lord Black promises to be “one of the sharpest and highest-profile minds and mouths on television today,” according to ZoomerMedia materials.

Co-host Denise Donlon 56, rose through the ranks at MuchMusic, another Moses Znaimer property, eventually becoming its vice president and general manager in 1997.

She was the head of Sony Music Canada from 2000 to 2004 and appointed the executive director of CBC Radio in 2008, although she was pushed out only three years later in what the public broadcaster called “management restructuring.”

Source: The National Post

In a Toronto film studio, illustrator Liisa Sorsa is carefully drawing the femur and the tibia on a three-metre-long white board. “That okay with you?” she asks Mike Evans, the family doctor who is standing at her elbow, overseeing the creation of a public-health video about what patients should expect from joint-replacement surgery. She has already rendered his bespectacled face and gap-toothed smile on the white board. In fact, she and director/producer Nick de Pencier have turned her version of Evans’s cheerful face into something of an Internet sensation.

De Pencier’s and Evans’s first public-health video posted on YouTube, entitled 23 and a Half Hours,has gone viral. The original version has received more than three million hits since it was released 14 months ago. It is reaching hundreds of thousands more in French, Spanish and Italian, while the Arabic-language version launched in June was the fifth most-watched video that week and has now reached almost two million views.

Featuring a chatty talk from Evans, illustrated by cheery whiteboard illustrations drawn before our eyes, the nine-minute video offers a miracle cure that slices through rates of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and depression: half an hour of walking. Its sly and suspenseful buildup to a piece of commonsensical information, coupled with its intimate, friendly tone, stops viewers in their tracks and makes them rethink their day.

Making a peer-to-peer hit out of a lengthy public-service announcement, 23 and a Half Hours is also turning on their heads both Internet wisdom about viral videos, and the model of earnest public-health advertisements that preach rather than entertain.

Partly through luck, partly because of Evans’s public-health philosophy, the filmmaker and the doctor have discovered a truism of dissemination on the Internet – that users trust information they share with peers rather than information that comes to them from above. They are now putting it to use as they release videos on more topics, including acne, stress, insomnia, concussion and the efficacy of New Years’ resolutions, all now getting tens of thousands of views on the Dr. Mike Evans YouTube channel.

The idea for the original video came to Evans as he thought about how to break down the silos that exist in medicine. “People say I need a cancer screen, I have to eat fibre, I have to lower my cholesterol,” Evans said, explaining his holistic approach. “So I asked: What is one thing you can do? I sat in a room for two weeks and did the research.”

What he came up with was a small amount of gentle, daily exercise. The public has responded to this simple message (backed by various studies cited in the video) in the millions, refuting received wisdom that no one will watch a YouTube video longer than three minutes.

“The success took us by surprise and we had to go back and forensically figure it out,” Evans says of their first video.

“It talks about how not to die: That has a big constituency out there,” de Pencier adds, with the same subtle humour that comes through in the original video.

Evans and de Pencier, a noted cinematographer and documentary producer whose recent credits include Manufactured Landscapes and Act of God, are family friends who have known each other since earliest childhood. Their collaboration comes out of many cups of coffee spent discussing how they could adapt Evans’s ideas about public-health education to de Pencier’s medium. Evans, who sees himself as a curator of health information for patients in the age of Dr. Google, had worked with Sorsa on some comic books about cancer care. He and de Pencier had discovered white-board animations on the Internet (they perfected the technique, shooting Sorsa drawing, and then speeding up the image by 3,000 per cent). All they needed was the right health topic, so Evans hit the books and found his miracle cure.

“We did an interesting call to action,” Evans reflects. “Can you limit your sleeping and sitting to 23 and a half hours a day?” Their funding for the original 23 and a Half Hours came from the Li Ka Shing Healthcare Education Centre at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, where Evans works. More recently, he and de Pencier have tapped organizations such as as the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to fund a video about quitting smoking, while the Holland Orthopedic and Arthritis Centre is a partner on the one about joint replacement.

The paradox for Evans and de Pencier is that health organizations want to disseminate information about very specific diseases or problems, while the film producers want to focus on broader topics.

“I can get money for atrial fibrillation, but there is no society that is going to fund one on stress, acne or insomnia,” Evans said, explaining the producers funded those videos themselves. They have melanoma and inflammatory bowel disease on their lineup and have been approached about doing autism, but it is taking some work to put together a group of partners who will support a weight-loss project.

A YouTube video offering a half-hour rule for weight loss could easily attract millions of hits; a video on the joints is more likely to get tens of thousands.

“This will be used by a certain person in a certain situation. It’s more prescriptive,” Evans says of the day’s work on joint replacement. “We talk about things going viral. This is more likely to go bacterial.”

Source: Globe & Mail

The Quebec government says it will proceed with so-called “dying with dignity” legislation aimed at allowing doctors to help some terminally ill patients end their lives.

A provincial panel of legal experts studying medically assisted end-of-life procedures released its recommendations Tuesday, suggesting Quebec could bypass the Canadian Criminal Code — which prohibits assisted suicide — and allow doctors to help some people who wish to die at a time of their own choosing.

The panel concludes that when a terminally ill patient is receiving palliative treatment and can demonstrate with lucidity the desire to end his or her life, helping that patient carry out that wish should be considered part of the continuum of care.

“Every person should be able to make their own choice according to their values and according to their experience, their life, at the end of their life,” said Jean-Paul Ménard, who led the legal panel.

Ménard said the decision on whether to comply with a patient’s request would be left to doctors to judge, on a case by case basis.

“The doctor will always be free … in this kind of process,” he said, adding that if a physician refused to help a terminally ill patient die, that patient would be free to seek help from another doctor.

Federal government backs status quo

The federal government has made it clear it is unwilling to change the law, announcing last summer that it would appeal a June ruling by British Columbia’s Supreme Court, which partially struck down the ban on assisted suicide.

Judge Lynn Smith’s ruling said the Criminal Code section that targets anyone who “aids or abets a person to commit suicide” should not apply to doctors honouring the wish of a terminally ill patient.

Gloria Taylor, the B.C. woman who brought the suit before the court,died in October, but the B.C. Civil Liberties Association is carrying on her legal fight.

Quebec will proceed on its own, minister says

Véronique Hivon, Quebec’s social services minister, said the 400-page report by the Ménard committee concludes the province is on solid legal ground in proceeding with its legislation and does not need Ottawa’s co-operation to move forward.

“The constitutional basis is clear,” said Hivon. “We are really in a field of regulating end-of-life care — and adding the possibility for somebody to have access to medical aid in dying.”

While still in opposition, Hivon served on a multi-party task force comprised of nine MNAs, who spent two years travelling around the province holding public hearings and studying end-of-life issues.

The task force’s landmark Quebec report in 2012 recommended that doctors be allowed to help terminally ill patients die, in exceptional circumstances, if that is their wish.

‘Scary precedent,’ opponent says

Opponents fear changing the law could be the start of a slippery slope that would see some people killed without their explicit consent or people suffering from depression or other psychological pain helped to die, even though they are not terminally ill.

“There are scary precedents,” said Georges Buscemi, the president of the Quebec Life Coalition, referring to the recent case of 45-year-old deaf twins in Belgium who chose to die by lethal injection on Dec. 14, after learning they were going blind.

“Give it a few years, and you’ll have cases like these twins,” said Buscemi. “The floodgates open.”

Source: CBC.ca

And, oh yeah, she’s 16 years old.

In five short years, the wunderkind from Oak Park, Illinois, has gone from self-proclaimed nerd to full-blown media mogul, using her platform to champion important teen girl causes ranging from How to Bitchface — a step-by-step primer to “reacting to varying levels of stupidity” (see her demonstrate on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon“) to organizing a Get Well Soon card drive for Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl activist who was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen.

Rookie launched in Fall 2011 and broke 1 million page views in under a week. Since then, the site has explored monthly themes like obsession, drama, play and paradise. Right now, it’s mythology. Or, as Gevinson explains in the editor’s letter: “lies, exaggerations, legends, the works.”

To kick off each theme, Gevinson creates a mood board using fashion photos, film stills and album art as inspiration. Then she and the site’s 50 contributors — including fellow teens and more than a handful of celebrities — go about interpreting her vision through articles, interviews, photos, playlists and illustrations. To accommodate kids’ schedules, Rookie updates three times a day: after school, around dinner and before bed.

Before she was named one of Huffington Post’s most amazing young people of 2012, Gevinson spoke with CNN about the power of teenage girls, making angst romantic and the one secret Jon Hamm must never find out.

CNN: Can you take us back to when you were 11 and why you started your blog Style Rookie?

Tavi Gevinson: I don’t really remember what was going through my head like a month ago, but I think I was just super-bored with what I was wearing and kind of getting into fashion. My friend’s older sister had a fashion blog and sent me links to something she liked and told me which magazines she liked. Fashion intersects a lot with art and film and music and that was appealing to me. I read a bunch of fashion blogs and wanted to be part of the community. I was just used to using the Internet because of the time that I’m growing up in, so I just sort of started it.

CNN: Why do you think the site became so popular?

Gevinson: I think, at first, my age. Whether people liked that factor or not, that was what got attention. I guess if it was only my age, then I probably wouldn’t still have the audience to start something like Rookie, but I think at first it was a shocker that someone so young was using the Internet publicly for some reason. I never imagined it would be seen outside of these other girls and young women who were also playing dress-up and making collages of movies they liked.

CNN: What is it like to be a part of that community now that Rookie has taken off?

Gevinson: This past summer we took a Rookie road trip for the book and we stopped in 16 cities. We had events with our readers where we got to meet all of them and they got to meet each other. At Space 15 Twenty in Los Angeles, there was this installation that was supposed to be a teenage bedroom, so we asked girls to bring us souvenirs from their rooms. I was just going through the five boxes I shipped home from L.A., thinking I would put it all in storage and make a time capsule, but going through it all, I’m like, I have to have that in my room. It’s just so special. I have one girl’s journal. I love “Sweet Valley High”-type stuff and I was looking for gossip or drama. Her journal was like, “I went shopping with mom and watched ‘Harold and Maude,’” and I was like, “Wait! This is even better!” It was really fun reading this girl’s diary and reading all of the feelings she had about watching “Rosemary’s Baby” for the first time.

CNN: You also have mingled with designers, editors, artists, celebrities and other industry types. Of all the people you’ve gotten to meet, who has been the greatest hero to date?

Gevinson: Taylor Swift. Her new album is so good. She was absolutely just smart and funny and kind and genuine when I met her. At the end, I very nervously was like, “Your music means a lot to me!” And she was of course totally kind about it because at this point anyone who says they don’t like her music is kind of lying.

CNN: For someone whose cultural references eclipse your average 16-year-old’s, it’s endearing that you say someone so current and mainstream and teenager-y.

Gevinson: Sometimes Rookie is written about like, “Finally! Something for alternative girls” and I’m like, “No!” Obviously it’s not for everyone, but I used to think that there are cheerleaders and there are art kids. And then I realized that’s really silly and sometimes you feel like a cheerleader and sometimes you feel like an art kid, and there’s a part of everyone that feels lonely or like an outcast. The idea that feeling confident and feeling misunderstood are mutually exclusive really bugs me. So a lot of what Rookie is about is just showing that you can be both and you can like whatever you want. In short, yes, I love Taylor Swift. I love One Direction and stuff like that. Sometimes you want something really serious that makes you feel emotional and makes you think, and sometimes you do just want a pop song. What I love about Taylor Swift is that she offers both.

CNN: In addition to writing by women like Zooey Deschanel andLena Dunham, you have Paul Rudd, Joss Whedon and other cool men contributing to Rookie…

Gevinson: …Many of whom do not have a target audience of teenage girls, so it’s very generous of them.

CNN: But they’re beloved by teenage girls.

Gevinson: Yes, they are. That’s what they don’t know. Jon Hamm made an ”Ask a Grown Man” video for us, where we have grown men like him answer questions girls send in for our advice section of the site.

At the end of his video, he was like, “Watch ‘Mad Men.’ No! You’re too young to watch ‘Mad Men’ –watch ‘The Hunger Games.’” And all of the comments were like, “I’m 16 and I watch ‘Mad Men.’” He has no clue that the only people who watch “Mad Men” are teenage girls, but if you tell him it’ll just break his heart.

CNN: You also tried to get President Obama to be a Grown Man.

Gevinson: Yes, but we took that campaign on at the wrong time. He had a few other things on his plate (in September 2012). I wanted him to win and if he had lost, I would have had it in my brain like, those five extra minutes we stole for Rookie would have made the difference. … But, we might pick that back up now that the presidential election is over. He was always on our wish list, but then people felt really passionate about it so the teenage girls of the Internet joined forces.

CNN: That’s a powerful group.

Gevinson: I mean, if you’ve seen the Justin Bieber documentary, you know.

CNN: Yes, but what in particular resonated with you?

Gevinson: I have a lot of feelings about it; that could be a whole interview on its own. I just watched the Joan Rivers documentary and I thought that might be up to it. I watched Katy Perry’s movie. It made me really emotional and made me want to see her live. I think Justin Bieber’s story is so … forgive me for wording it like this … unique to our time. That movie is like a three-hour-long bar mitzvah montage. You know how when you go to a bar mitzvah, which I’m sure you do all the time, and they show a video of the kid through the years and it’s really flattering because it’s his bar mitzvah, so, obviously? That’s what that movie felt like. It was called a documentary, but it was produced by him.

I am a Justin Bieber fan, but I am also so fascinated by how weird pop music can be and how manipulated it can be, so I enjoy thinking about that side of it too. I feel bad for him. I could never imagine growing up that way. When someone starts something like that so young, you have to wonder…

CNN: You’ve encountered a certain level of fame at a young age. What effect do you think it’s had on you?

Gevinson: The scariest thing about receiving praise at a young age is the fear of burning out or losing it, or proving people right that you were just a novelty. Obviously, I can see mistakes in things that I’ve done or said and can see flaws in things I’ve made, but that’s just part of growing.

The fear of being like, oh no, I made something people like, how do I follow it up? I’m more comfortable with that than feeling like nothing has gone right. I haven’t been puppeteered or anything so I don’t feel like I lost anything. My dad answers my press e-mails and stuff like that, but I got into this myself.

I am sitting in my room right now and I go to public high school. I leave every month or so for a few days and then I come home and I have to do my homework. At the same time, I don’t mean to say I live a completely normal life because I have to do math homework.

Even if you do have a balance between career and school and friends and all of that, you still have to think about things that are different from what other people your age are thinking about and I just don’t buy it when someone says that one cancels out the other.

You might be on your phone at school and see something written about you and you might feel weird about it and you can’t talk to anybody about it because it’s disgusting to talk about how you received attention at a young age for a blog, of all things. I try and keep my room and school a safe space where I can truly feel like I’m not performing for anyone or I don’t have anything to prove to anyone.

CNN: It still seems like you have something valuable to offer other kids by talking about it. Your peers would probably like to learn how to deal with negative comments online and more generally how to both embrace and transcend the emotional chaos of being a teen.

Gevinson: I’m really good at making teen angst romantic. I’m really good at dealing with heartbreak and things like that, and making it into this whole experience. But there’s no way to make someone-on-the-Internet-said-something-mean-about-me into romantic angst where you can listen to music and cry or whatever. That’s just really pathetic. So I just try and think about these worries in their simplest form: Feeling misunderstood and feeling afraid. Being afraid to change because who you’ve been is so well-documented is essentially a normal fear about growing up. Social interactions are completely mortifying and embarrassment is in store for you, and in a year you’ll hate whoever you are now and everything anyway. Just knowing all that helps too.

Source: CNN.com

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra is taking crowdsourcing to a new level with its much-hyped electro-acoustic project with American composer Tod Machover.

A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City will have its premiere on March 9, 2013, at the TSO’s New Creations Festival. For the project, Machover is asking Torontonians to collaborate with him in writing a work for, by and about their city. The latest phase of that collaboration is a music app, launched today, that enables the public to contribute to the composition of A Toronto Symphony.

“One of the things I have always loved about Toronto,” said Machover during a phone interview with CBC Classical, “is how you’ve got every possible kind of person and kind of culture. It’s all there. But it all coexists — everybody and every community — in a very beautiful and peaceful way. What intrigues me is how this kind of complexity and order manage to coexist in Toronto better than just about any place I know.”

Machover’s idea is to capture the essence of Toronto in a collaborative work that uses sound gathered, possibly manipulated, and submitted by the citizens of Toronto. How, you ask?

“We launched the project in June, and there have been two simultaneous processes all along: one has been my own process of thinking about how to design this collaborative piece and how to make a framework for it; the other part has been to think about how to invite the public in.”

Machover decided to divide the content into three categories: yours, mine and ours.

“For ‘yours,’ I started sending out requests in June for people to send me sounds of Toronto. What is the most typical sound? What’s the sound that defines your neighbourhood? What’s the first sound you hear in the morning? We invited people to go out and record these sounds and send them to us.”

For the second category, “mine,” Machover sent his own composed elements of the piece, either phrases, chords or entire sections, to certain communities and asked, “Give me an opinion or think of this as raw material, and do something with it.” For instance, musicians of the TSO worked with Machover in this way to create the entire first section of the piece.

The third category, “ours,” is the latest phase. Machover makes sections of the work available to the public, and asks them to help him finish them using a new interactive music app.

“This should be a lot of fun because it’s an opportunity to use a totally new interface,” Machover said. “I’m sending out a partially finished finale, about a 30-second burst of material, and I’m hoping that together with the community, we’ll make it into a three-minute movement. A variety of building blocks [in the music app] will help us extend and develop the finale. And the nice thing is that it’s all done with a very beautiful graphic.”

See for yourself. CLICK HERE to try Machover’s music app and be part of A Toronto Symphony.