A few weeks ago I was watching Trevor Noah interview Lupita Nyong’o about her role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when she made an otherwise throwaway comment I found quite striking:
“I grew up watching Star Wars. It was a part of my life. It came on TV on public holidays, so I thought of Star Wars as time off of school.”
If you’ve never read the NYRB, you’ve never read anything like it. It is profoundly, purposefully earnest, rigorous with itself, and in the best sense of the term, naive.
Sorry, everyone else, but when Canadians apologize to you it’s not an expression of deference. Unlike “eh”, which means to Canadians what it means to everyone else—it’s an invitation to polite disagreement, the opposite of the British “don’t they?” or “aren’t they?”—the Canadian “sorry” means something more like “Ah jeez, I’ve got to deal with this idiot?” (Say it in a Fargo accent to get the full effect.)
This is important in part because it means the benefit to the individual artist and her family will outweigh the relative cost to general tax revenue. It also means that all of her money goes right back into businesses in the local community, since she clearly isn’t making enough money to save or travel. Also, with the security the exemption provides, a highly-skilled artist can devote more of her time to her high-value work, doing more good to the Canadian economy than she would wasting her time at a low-skilled job in order to make ends meet.