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In August 2009, Richard Nash, the former publisher of Soft Skull Press, wrote an insomnia-inspired blog post about a new book called Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture. [...]

A good measure of a happening city is its contribution to the world of ideas. A confluence of factors has recently made Toronto an innovation generator: a critical mass of [...]

ON A WARM NIGHT IN MID-JUNE, a Latin club on Dundas West called Lula Lounge played host to the final episode of City Idol. The event had little in common […]

CREATURES OF LEISURE Almost every night of the week, the tavern of the century-old Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W., 416-531-4635) hosts a loud and lively karaoke crowd. You'll hear […]

IMAGINE PUNK ROCK CIRCA 1977 AND you'll probably retrieve a burned-into-the-synapses image of a nihilistic teenager with a safety-pinned army jacket, ripped jeans and coloured hair, who's poised to spit [...]

In 1989, a development consortium approached the village of Queensville, Ontario (population 700) with a proposal to convert it into a burgeoning community of 30,000. Central to the expansion was [...]

STEVE MARTIN REMAINS best known for his comedy--be it as an Academy Awards co-host, Tina Fey's one-time love interest on 30 Rock, doting boyfriend to Meryl Streep in It's Complicated [...]

I LOVE YOUR LAUGH, by Jessica Holmes, $30. IN JANUARY 2009, exactly two years after Vanity Fair claimed women aren't as funny as men, Tina Fey got revenge by appearing [...]

Last November, an unscrupulous British eBay merchant named Amir Tofangsazan (who happens to have a serious foot fetish-more on that in a moment) sold Thomas Sawyer a broken laptop and [...]

Sick of your colleagues listening in on your phone conversations? The traditional method of preventing eavesdropping in the workplace is to build dampers and baffles into cubicle walls. But now [...]

A traditional autopsy begins with a deep Y-shaped incision in the chest. Next, the skin is peeled back to expose the rib cage, which must be sawed open with a [...]

This April, a fire-hydrant-size apparatus called a thermoacoustic freezer made its debut at a Ben & Jerry's in Manhattan. The event was a relatively quiet affair, which was no small [...]

Our faith in photography has been forever compromised by computer programs like Photoshop that doctor images with a relatively high degree of ease and verisimilitude. When you come across a [...]

Labatt 50 beer is believed by Quebecers to be their own and also believed by Ontario consumers to be theirs. It is an established brand and the beer quality popular with both francophones and anglophones.

Marketers are increasingly calling upon academics who study signals, symbols and signs In 1957, French intellectual Roland Barthes published Mythologies, a series of essays that mused upon the underlying narrative [...]

Vancouver, home to Greenpeace, grow-ops and Wreck Beach, is a world of its own. Glorifying this 'otherness' is the scrappy, lefty, fortnightly indie newpaper THE REPUBLIC OF EAST VANCOUVER. East [...]

WEB You know that old chestnut about imitation and flattery, well, WWW.SASKABUSH.COM is sincerely obsessed with that Swiftian juggernaut known as The Onion. Saskabush.com isn't quite as polished as its [...]

Digging through the white trash bin has never been a priority for sociologists. Few academics see value in peering beyond the mascara or peeling off those painted-on jeans. But there [...]

Riot Grrrl, like grunge or punk before it, denatured under the mainstream media spotlight that turned a political movement into a fashion statement. But the core idea of creating a [...]

One man's quest to change the life of every single person CONRAD MARTIN, A FIFTY-YEAR-OLD divorcee, carpeting consultant, inventor, and entrepreneur, can recall the precise eureka moment at which he […]

KINGDOM OF TAL0SSA THE INAUGURATION OF THE NEW prime minister--the country's 25th--takes place by phone. In a ceremony that displays its own brand of pomp and circumstance, the new PM, [...]

High art creates barriers, both ideological and economic while pop art trades in the currency of accessibility. Aided by the advent of the low-cost colour photocopier, Vancouver artist JASON MCLEAN [...]

Concision is the intellectual straitjacket that ensures very little grey (or grey matter) seeps into the black-and-white swathes of broadcast news. It's the sort of thing that drives lentil-eating leftists [...]

If The Walrus were a person, and someone set you up on a blind date with him (this magazine is definitely male), you'd have plenty to be excited about. Your [...]

As a youngster in Winnipeg, Gerald Schwartz lived in a modest house with his socialist grandmother, but the renovations on his current Rosedale digs are anything but proletarian. The project, […]

Grass, flowers and weeds die off in September, and when mouse ground cover disappears, those beady little eyes start looking enviously at your humble abode. Next thing you know, you're […]