Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Meal planning does not require a full day. Alyssa B says 10 minutes of planning at the start of the week, knowing what you are making and who is eating, is enough to change how you eat from Monday to Friday. The alternative is what most people already know: it is 5:30, dinner is at 6:30, nothing is prepped, and the easiest thing in reach wins. Alyssa B says that easiest thing is almost always ultr...

Restaurant closures in Canada are happening faster than forecast. Dr. Sylvain Charlebois projected a drop from 89,000 to 85,000 restaurants in 2026 and says the numbers coming from the sector confirm it is already underway. The shift is driven by price sensitivity. A burger and fries at a quick service restaurant now runs around $20. The average household used to put 40 percent of its food budget...

Canada in 2005 looked familiar in ways that are hard to ignore: a minority government, a floor crossing, and a prime minister under real pressure. George W. Bush was in the White House with a war on. Harry Potter was everywhere, including in the hands of people who bought it weeks too early from a store that almost certainly regretted the decision. And the internet? Blazing fast, until you compare...

Alberta voters list data on 2.9 million people was allegedly obtained by a separatist-linked group, and the cleanup is far from finished. The Centurion Project built an app using the list. Elections Alberta traces leaks by seeding fake names into every copy it distributes. That system has now produced nearly 600 cease-and-desist letters, exposed a former premier's home address in a public demonstr...

The Canadian War Museum spent most of its existence in borrowed spaces. Dr. Andrew Burtch says the collection deserved better long before it got it. Before the 2005 building at LeBreton Flats, the museum occupied a run-down building where the National Gallery now stands, then moved to the old Dominion Archives on Sussex Drive while major artifacts sat in a former streetcar facility. The current bu...

WKRP in Cincinnati, the fictional radio station from the classic CBS sitcom, is now a real station in Cincinnati, playing the same adult hits format the show's characters once pretended to broadcast. Also real: a 38-year-old man from Sylvan Lake, Alberta, who drove 35 minutes to Red Deer for a burger, called 911 when a technical issue stopped staff from serving him, refused a breathalyzer when pol...

In 2005 pop culture, you logged on, checked your email, and turned the computer off at the end of the day. Ed Conroy knows exactly when that era ended, and what ended it. YouTube launched that year, and before it, video on the internet was postage-stamp-sized and buffering constantly. The Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince leaked from a bookstore in Coquitlam, British Columbia, about 20 copies...

Tragically Chip ice cream is real, it is maple whiskey with dark chocolate chunks and black cherry ripple, and it comes from a Tragically Hip collaboration with Kawartha Dairy landing June 22nd with proceeds going to the Breakfast Club of Canada. WKRP Is Back, Your Old House Is Haunting You, and the Hip Have Ice Cream Three real radio stations in Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, and Dayton, Ohio hav...

Self-checkout ethics are more complicated than most people admit, and the conversation starts with a twenty-year-old monster truck confession. Ryan O'Donnell took a toy called Flash Fire from his friend Brady's birthday party at approximately age six. He felt immediately guilty, never played with it, moved it from Calgary to Ontario and back to Calgary, reconnected with Brady in high school, and s...

Alberta separatism is in the news. Jamie Ellerton and Lindsay Broadhead both question how much of it is Albertans and how much of it is being fed from outside the country. Lindsay Broadhead puts a number on baseline opposition: eight to thirteen percent of the population will be against something regardless of what it is. Her point is that separatism has always existed in some form. What is differ...

Ted Turner passed away at 87. Bill Brioux says he was a yachtsman who won the America's Cup, a broadcaster who turned small TV stations into a media empire, and a conservationist who ended up owning more than two million acres and 45,000 bison. The MGM library purchase in the eighties was the move that made everything else possible. He paid $1.5 billion, kept all the films, and used that content t...

Self-checkout theft is not one conversation. The listener texts make that clear. A Brampton man allegedly swapped $97 baby formula for items priced under a dollar at four stores within an hour. Nearly $1,000 in product. Seven fraud charges. That is one version of the story. Another listener types that they enter the non-organic produce code when buying organic because it is always cheaper. Another...

Conspiracy theories feel new because we encounter them in the moment. Dr. Lee Kuhnle says most of them are not new at all. The COVID and 5G network conspiracy had a near-identical version with H1N1 and 4G, and before that SARS and 3G. Vaccine protest signs from 1880s Lester, England, documented in Heidi J. Larson's book Stuck, carried the same arguments heard in 2020 and 2022: ulterior motives, ru...

AI medicine comes in two versions and most people are using the wrong one when they are sick at midnight. Specialist AI in oncology, antibiotic resistance research, and pandemic prevention is genuinely promising. Greg Fish writes about all of it. The problem is that general chatbot AI, the kind you open on your phone when you feel terrible and your doctor's office is closed, operates completely di...

K economy Canada is not a prediction. Tony Chapman says it is the current state, and the middle is disappearing faster than most people are willing to acknowledge. The K is the shape of it: upper bar thriving, lower bar surviving, the centre pulling apart. Tony Chapman puts numbers behind it: twenty percent of Canadians control sixty-seven percent of the country's wealth, and within that top twent...

Tax planning Canada requires one uncomfortable truth to land first: CRA operates on a reverse onus. You have to prove them wrong, not the other way around. Evelyn Jacks says most people miss that, and most people also miss that when CRA comes, they typically audit two to three years at once. The neighbour who has been doing something for years without getting caught is not proof it is fine. It is...

Good News Tuesday has a theory behind it: talk about good news and you find more of it. Cinco de Mayo on a Taco Tuesday is already a good start. Three strangers walking past a house in Merrickville stopped, walked up the driveway, introduced themselves, and welcomed a new neighbor before continuing on their way. A Great Dane named Harlow weighed in at 145 pounds at the vet for routine flea and tic...

Mental health week lands in early May for a reason. Pete Bombacci says suicide rates are highest in the spring, not at Christmas, and the social pressure that comes with warming temperatures is one of the leading contributors most people do not know about. The fix Pete Bombacci keeps coming back to is the invite. Not the response, the invite. Someone who is chronically lonely or struggling may not...

Canada's trade surplus is real and Matt Gurney will take it. He just wants to be honest about what it is: a bounce from external conditions, not a sign that the structural problems are solved. The economy is showing resilience where it could be shrinking. By international standards, Canadians pay a significant amount of tax. Matt Gurney says the honest look at what that tax is producing, infrastru...

NHL draft lottery day handed Toronto the number one pick and a decision to make, all on the same afternoon. The Maple Leafs are expected to select Gavin McKenna with the top pick. That news arrives alongside reports from The Score that Auston Matthews is not sure he will return to Toronto and wants to see meaningful roster improvements through trades and free agency before committing. One story pu...

Motorcycle fuel economy is not something most people think about. Ryan O'Donnell did, and the numbers surprised him. Motorcycles average between 30 and 60 miles per gallon. Some models reach 100 MPG. A Honda Civic from 2023 to 2026 sits between 30 and 40 MPG. A Harley Davidson on Reddit data runs roughly 120 miles on a tank at about 50 MPG, which puts a fill-up somewhere under $20. The fuel econom...

Greenwashing is not always deliberate. John Pabon says it ranges from fossil fuel companies outright lying to corporations that over-claim and governments and celebrities performing concern they do not actually have. The most effective example he offers is the carbon footprint calculator. British Petroleum, working with a PR firm around 2002 or 2003, popularized it not as a tool for improving thei...

Ask Jeeves shut down May 1st. Kris Abel says it was built around the same idea that AI is now executing, asking questions and getting answers, but it ran out of runway before the technology caught up to the concept. That is the context for the rest of the week's tech news, which involved humanoid robots showing up in two very different places. At the Met Gala hotel setup for Alexander Wang, photog...

The education system has been optimizing for grades for a long time. Dr. Perry Adler says AI just made the shortcut obvious. His framework is clear: critical thinking is the ability to slow down, consider multiple angles, apply logic and reasoning, and work through a problem rather than around it. Social media and AI both accelerate in the opposite direction. A student who prompts AI for an essay...

Costco date night did not start as a plan. It started at 8:27pm when it was too late to go home and cook dinner. Bob Addison and his wife got their smoked meat sandwich order in three minutes before the food court closed. Two sandwiches, one refillable drink shared between them, employee lockers along the back wall doubling as lumbar support. Bob Addison, a man who prefers direct eye contact acros...