Pretty Heady Stuff

John Vaillant is the award-winning author of bestselling nonfiction books like The Golden Spruce and The Tiger. He’s written articles for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic and The Walrus. His latest book—Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast—is focused on how the conditions that human beings have created through the burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of capitalist developme...

Dru Oja Jay is an author, organizer and web developer who currently serves as Executive Director of CUTV and Publisher of The Breach. He’s also a co-founder of the Media Co-op and Friends of Public Services. He wrote a book with Nikolas Barry-Shaw called Paved with Good Intentions: Canada's Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism. James Steinhoff is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow...

Evan Newman is the Managing Director of Outside Music. Outside Music is an independent record label roster that includes a number of award-winning artists. It's one of the leading independent distributers in Canada. Some of the artists Outside Music has worked with include Jill Barber, The Weather Station, Rose Cousins, Aidan Knight, and Justin Rutledge. In 2019, Outside Music launched Next Door R...

Dr. Angele Alook is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. As a member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, her research has mainly focused on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She specializes in Indigenous feminisms, life course approaches, Indigenous research methodologies, cultural identity, and the sociology of...

Moira Weigel is a scholar and founding editor of Logic magazine. Originally trained in modern languages, including German and Mandarin Chinese, she now studies digital media in a global context. You might have heard of her first book, Labor of Love: the Invention of Dating, from 2016, which is about how modern dating co-evolved with consumer capitalism and other forms of gendered work. Her second...

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun holds the Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She’s also the Director of the Digital Democracies Institute there. The Digital Democracies Institute is a group of scholars and stakeholders from around the world who collaborate across disciplines to generate more democratic technologies and cultures. Wendy herself has studied bo...

Alexander Etkind joined the Department of International Relations at Central European University in 2022. He previously taught at the European University Institute in Florence, and at several other institutions. His research looks at the extreme challenges of global decarbonization and security in Eastern Europe. Much of his past writing is concerned with the question of memory, of European intell...

Natasha Lennard is a Contributing Writer for the Intercept, and her work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, Esquire, Vice, Salon, and the New Inquiry, among others. She teaches in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at The New School for Social Research and is the author of two books: Violence: Humans in Dark Times, co-edited with Brad Evans, and Being Numerous: Essa...

Sarah King is the Head of Greenpeace Canada's Oceans & Plastics campaign. Pushing for a plastics-free future by holding corporations accountable for the growing plastics pollution crisis, Sarah has worked to protect our oceans and ocean-dependent communities for over a decade. She studied in the Environmental Applied Science and Management programme at Toronto Metropolitan University, and has work...

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her new book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member...

Kim Fry is a co-founder and board member for Music Declares Emergency Canada along with her daughter Brighid Fry from the indie rock band Housewife. Music Declares Emergency is a group of artists, music industry professionals and organisations that are looking to create solidarity in declaring a climate and ecological emergency and demanding an immediate governmental response to preserve life on E...

Tanner Mirrlees (https://twitter.com/tmirrlees_) is the Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University. His current research focuses on topics in the political economy of communications such as war and media, work and labour in the creative and digital industries, and the links between far-right hate groups and social media platforms. He’s the author of...

El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She teaches in the department of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. She’s the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. Her work focuses on feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. In Rehearsals for Livi...

Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural and low-resource practice. Mukhopadhyay organises around issues related to extractivism, migrant rights, policing, public services and decolonizing global health within local and international networks and collectives. Alexis Shotwell is a Professor in Carleton University’s Departm...

Fab Filippo is an actor, screenwriter, and playwright. Most recently, he co-created, wrote, and directed the critically acclaimed comedy-drama “Sort Of,” for CBC and HBO Max. A winner of a slew of awards, Sort Of (https://gem.cbc.ca/media/sort-of/) is the main focus here, but Fab has also worked on a huge array of shows and films over the years, from his work writing and directing Save Me, to co-w...

Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, In Praise of Copying and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, which was just recently released from Duke University Press. I was really excited to speak with him about The Politics of Vibration because it’s a terrific, dense, complex book...

Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians. He’s the co-founder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in a lot of different places, mostly left publications like The Guardian and Jacobin. His most recent piece of writing, and the focus of this conversation, is a book called Internet for the People. It’s an incredibly engaging study of how the modern internet ca...

Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural for...

Monty Scott is a brilliant stand-up comedian from Scarborough, Ontario. His album The Abyss Stares Back was nominated for a Juno Award in 2019. And while it didn’t win Comedy Album of the Year, it still represents a real victory: Scott recorded it in part as a response to a near-death experience. We talk in this conversation about bouncing back, the lives and livelihoods of comedians in Canada, sp...

Sandra Battaglini is an actor, stand-up comedian and writer. She is also the founder of the Canadian Association of Stand-Up Comedians, an organization that represents comics in Canada and lobbies for them to be recognized as the brilliant, culturally significant artists that they are. I just wrote an article for The Breach that features Sandra, among other comedians, and looks at some of her effo...

Armond R. Towns is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research and teaching focuses on the relationship between media, communication, race, blackness, and history. He’s just released an amazing book called On Black Media Philosophy with University of California Press. And he’s also the cofounder and editor of the brand new journal Communica...

Janelle Niles is a stand-up comedian from Truro, Nova Scotia and the producer of Got Land?, an all-Indigenous comedy tour. The Got Land? show is an example of what greater solidarity could mean for the culture of comedy in Canada. The stated goal of the show is to “express solidarity with humour” as a way of gaining grassroots control over the sites of cultural production: the venues, shows, insti...

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through U...

Al Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician who has appeared on programs for CBC, MTV, and YTV. She’s also headlined standup comedy shows all over North America. A graduate of Second City’s Conservatory Program, Val also performed with improv troupe “Starwipe” for 8 years. Val is set to co-headline Just for Laughs Toronto with Allie Pearse in the Fall, has just finished filming a reality show...

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written several books, including: Geoengineering: the Gamble, But will the planet notice?, Climate Shock, which he co-authored with Martin Weitzman, and City, Country, Climate published in Germa...