One of the crumbliest of the many old chestnuts rotting away in Canadian art discourse is that all Canadian art is ultimately about the landscape that surrounds us. This is of course true (that’s how antique ideas last) and also very much not true, especially in an era when the digital presence of art and […] More »

Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then […] More »

Amy was sexually assaulted three years ago, and we matched on Tinder in June. Even though I’m a journalist and a stranger she met online, I’m one of the only people she’s ever told her story to. It started when Amy, who lives in Yellowknife, agreed to go for coffee with a man named Paul. […] More »

Hana Shafi’s Instagram feed is a burst of bright colours and thick lines interspersed with the occasional selfie. The Toronto-based artist, who goes by Frizz Kid, posts images of her digital art almost every day. From the playful—an anthropomorphic pizza slice placed around the words “Thick as hell”—to the serious—a person, closed-eyed with purple hair, […] More »

The new issue of People magazine has both celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade on its cover. Sadly, the magazine is the only weekly tabloid to give both stars the cover treatment, with other magazines featuring only Bourdain. When Spade and Bourdain died by suicide, just days apart, tributes and tweets celebrated the […] More »

“Your address?” she asks. We’re talking on the telephone. “Post Office Box 3, McCallum, Newfoundland, A0H 2J0,” I reply. “Would you like me to spell McCallum for you?” “I need your street address, sir.” “I’m sorry, I don’t have one.” “I need the street name and number on the building you want us to send […] More »

On stage, a group of classical musicians dressed in formal evening wear hold their string, brass, and woodwind instruments. Making their final preparations before playing, they check their tuning, adjust their seats, and arrange sheet music on the stands in front of them. A pianist sits to one side, and a drummer near the back. […] More »

Individual news organizations tweet upwards of 100 times per day—a content diet even the most obsessive tweeter can’t digest. Instead, we pick out small bites, our personal interest and bias helping us choose what tweets we see and which accounts aren’t worth a follow. With each retweet and mention, Twitter’s algorithm goes to work, shaping […] More »

Russell Peters’s much awaited return to television was finally satiated with the CTV show The Indian Detective, which aired last December. The sitcom has been five years in the making, and it’s a first for Peters, a Canadian stand-up comedian who began his career in Toronto. It tells the story of Doug D’Mello (played by […] More »

Time bends on The Bachelor. For one thing, its passage is parsed in weeks, as if love’s progress was some form of gestation hitting developmental milestones, scaling up from lima bean to lemon to dragon fruit. And within this episodic unfurling, contestants suffer the effects of time turned lopsided. Bachelor time is like chewing gum: it […] More »

I spend a lot of time parsing the language of Silicon Valley, that heady mix of technobabble and pseudoeconomics where many words are used to say very little. It’s a lexicon designed by “visionary” business types (though they prefer to be called “entrepreneurs” now) and the middle managers they hire, saying words filled with pomp, […] More »