to medical school. it was assumed charles would follow. but as a 19-year-old senior at mcgill, the internationally renowned canadian university, he was bitten by a different bug -- political journalism. >> well, that was a little bit of campus intrigue. the editorship of the newspaper at mcgill was controlled by the student council. i'd been elected to the student council, and the paper was becoming unreadable. it was run by marxists, maoists. i mean, it was just -- it looked like it came out of the soviet union. you just couldn't read it. so we engineered a coup to fire the editor, and then we sort of realized, "well, what do we do now? we have to find an editor." so they looked around and they decided it was gonna be me. so i said, "wait, i've never worked on a paper." said, "eh, a detail." >> a poli-sci and economics major, he loved thinking and writing about all things political. he applied to medical school to please his family and got accepted to harvard, but he got