Music industry commentator Eric Alper on the two years that permanently rewired how the world hears music, and why the streaming subscription you pay today traces directly back to a college kid’s side project in 1999. Before Napster, hearing a…
Food professor Sylvain Charlebois on why Canadian grocery prices are so high, what a Lidl store in Cork, Ireland reveals about what we’re actually paying for, and why Ottawa’s new Competition Bureau food study is long overdue but unlikely to…
Instead of cutting the gas tax, Alberta sent residents a flat hundred dollar cheque, and the math broke almost immediately. Journalist Rob Breakenridge explains why electric vehicle owners, who pay nothing at the pumps, are getting the exact same payout…
Twenty million users in year one. Eighty million at the peak. Then a lawsuit took Napster down in about six months. This one walks through how a platform built by Sean Fanning in June 1999 grew that fast and fell…
Twenty-five years after Napster got shut down, the company that replaced it built its own empire on a strikingly similar shortcut. Tech expert Carmi Levy breaks down how Napster’s 80 million users forced the music industry’s hand, and how Spotify…
Writer and historian Ed Conroy on what Napster actually opened up for music fans beyond the free, and why the resentment and entitlement it created have never left the way we think about paying for music. For Ed, the real…
Falls aren’t accidents. Aging and balance science now shows exactly why older adults are more vulnerable — and the answer is inside the brain. Dr. Samantha Yammine breaks down new research that mapped which brain regions control balance and what…
Film critic Richard Crouse on the auction that is about to put Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, Rocky’s boots, the Wicked Witch’s hat, and John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics up for sale, and why the stories behind these objects are worth more than…
The satanic panic of the 1980s turned rock music, Dungeons and Dragons, and Ouija boards into instruments of the devil. Tonight the target is He-Man, and the claim that a cartoon prince with a magic sword was secretly recruiting children…
Strategic communications veterans Jamie Ellerton and Lindsay Broadhead join to sort through the agreement to sign an agreement that may eventually become a peace deal in the Strait of Hormuz, and what any of it actually means for global energy…
Gas rewards expert Patrick Sojka of joins to map out which loyalty program and credit card combinations are actually worth the effort this summer, and why the system has gotten a lot more complicated than it used to be.…
The phrase old wives tale goes back to a play written in 1595. By 1611 the King James Bible was using it to dismiss the knowledge of older women. The irony is hard to miss, because the women being dismissed…
Medication safety gets a closer look as emergency physician Dr. Mitch Shulman breaks down why the liquid you use to take your pills can change how much of the medication actually reaches your bloodstream, and what most people have never…
Relationship columnist Jen Kirsch and commentator Tony Tedesco join date night to unpack why the people closest to us have the most power to hurt us, and what that actually reveals about the patterns we carry into every relationship. The…
Cyberpunk Survival Guide author Greg Fish breaks down the economics behind AI token pricing and why the free ride is ending faster than most businesses realise. Every AI request costs money, measured in tokens: the subdivisions of language a large…
