February 17, 1997

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Media

The new Cosmo girl

In a makeshift, ground-floor office tucked behind the august marble lobby of the Hearst Building in midtown Manhattan, glamor is in distinctly short supply. In a space barely big enough to qualify as Madonna’s walk-in closet, 20 people are jammed into 10 temporary cubicles, among them the 40-year-old Canadian who has just taken on one of the highest-profile magazine jobs on the continent: making over a genuine American icon, that perennial sex kitten, the Cosmo girl. By MARCI MCDONALD14 min

MONEY/COVER

SOME 'RECOVERY'!

Sure, Jeff Telford expected that the budget-cutters would snip away his job. What else could he think when, for two months, his employer had been offering free courses in career switching, financial planning and résumé writing? Even so, after six years, Telford found it wrenching to open his Ontario government layoff notice in late November. By MARY JANIGAN13 min

WORLD

A trade in criminals

B inns Road is in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Jamaica. “There have been over 40 murders in the past six weeks here,” says Msgr. Richard Albert, an Irish-American priest from the Bronx who has spent 20 years ministering to Kingston’s inner-city poor. By MAUREEN SHERIDAN, NOMI MORRIS7 min

Canada

King of Alberta

It was a different world back in 1993. The Alberta government announced that year that it had run $3.4 billion into the red— its eighth deficit in a row. Across the country, public concern about the level of public debt was mounting. But only a few governments were taking cautious steps towards deficit elimination, balancing modest spending cuts with tax increases. By MARY NEMETH6 min

Business

Gunning for gold

Gregory Chorny steps into the warmth of a Toronto restaurant on a hideously blizzardy day, sheds his black cashmere Giorgio Armani overcoat, and settles into a long examination of a sweeping Micheneresque saga in which he has been handed a small part. By JENNIFER WELLS6 min

COVER

READY, SET, GROW

rt DeFehr is at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which he has attended for each of the past five years. A lot of big thinking goes on in Davos, and DeFehr likes to be a part of it, picking up trends, ideas, currency movements, economic prognostications. By JENNIFER WELLS6 min

FILMS

Hard-luck heroes

For sheer escapism, it is hard to beat Hollywood movies. They take us to places that simply do not exist—worlds where the daily tedium is interrupted by alien invasion, a dinosaur rampage or a scenic drive up an erupting volcano. But for North Americans saturated with their own culture and its cataclysmic fantasies, foreign films afford a different kind of escape—into the emotional reality that lies beyond the headlines of what is neatly labelled “world” news. By Brian D. Johnson5 min

February 101997