Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

May the 4th landed on a Friday this year and Ryan O'Donnell spent it exactly the way you would expect: three films deep by the time the show aired, running them as background noise the way most people run music. Writing a Star Wars segment, Ryan O'Donnell put down the number 20 and paused. Twenty years of watching the films, reading the books, following the franchise. He was 23 when the new movies...

Spring gardening has a temperature threshold Andy Baryer treats as non-negotiable: nighttime lows need to reach 10 degrees Celsius before tomatoes, peppers, or squash go in the ground. When to Plant and How to Harden Metro Vancouver hit 25 degrees and Andy Baryer transplanted everything, knowing it was a stretch. He explains hardening off, the gradual outdoor exposure process that prevents seedlin...

Summer travel planning in 2026 requires a different checklist than it used to, and Barry Choi has gone through it. Flight cancellations tied to jet fuel concerns are real, but Barry Choi says airlines are cutting unprofitable domestic routes well in advance, not scrambling. Any disruption that affects your booking will come with a refund. His standing advice right now is to book everything refunda...

SMS blasters are industrial-grade cybercrime tools manufactured and sold specifically to compromise phones at scale. Rob Beggs says one is enough to take out the real cell towers in a parking lot and replace them without anyone noticing. The text that arrives on your phone looks legitimate because to your phone it is legitimate. The number appears correct. The sender appears to be the CRA or your...

Everyone has a thing. The question is when to show it to someone new, and Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch do not entirely agree on the answer. Tony Tedesco's framework is signal, not data: hint at the thing without diving into every detail, and let emotional safety build before the full reveal. He makes the case that if your weird actually scares someone off, you have saved yourself a lot of time. The...

Star Wars Day lands on a Friday and Ryan O'Donnell has a theory he has been sitting with since he was a kid. The best peanut butter and jelly sandwich is your recipe. You could have an objectively better sandwich with fancier ingredients and it still would not be your favorite. Ryan O'Donnell applies the same logic to Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back is the better film. Revenge of the Sith is his fa...

Federal public servant wages are at the centre of a fight that Andrew Caddell says tells you something about where the government's priorities actually are. A New Governor General and a Wage War Mark Carney is expected to announce a new Governor General, and Andrew Caddell, a former foreign affairs official, runs through the names most likely to be considered, including Louise Arbour and Louise Fr...

Tax refund season has a predictable problem: the money gets spent mentally before it ever arrives. Jessica Moorhouse says writing it down before it lands changes the outcome. Her ratio is 80 to 90 percent toward something responsible and 10 to 20 percent toward something just for you. Jessica Moorhouse calls the alternative frugality fatigue: budget too strictly for too long and you will eventuall...

The corn flake was an accident. Tony Chapman says what Kellogg's built from that accident was one of the most effective kid marketing systems ever put on a grocery store shelf. Cereal was shelved at grocery cart height on purpose. The toy inside was more exciting than the cereal itself. Tony Chapman says pester power, a kid bugging a parent until the box came home, was the engine behind the whole...

BC gas prices have been above $2 a litre for a long time. Ryan Price says watching Ontario treat $1.75 as a crisis has been an experience. Victoria sits at $2.12 for regular gasoline, a number Ryan Price says reflects federal, provincial, and regional government taxes stacked on top of each other. When the federal government cut its excise tax, BC's other levels of government declined to follow. R...

The Strait of Hormuz carried 20 million barrels of oil per day before the war. Ian Wereley says that number is down 95%, and the knock-on effects are landing everywhere from hospital supply rooms to farm fields. The strait moves more than crude oil. Ian Wereley tracks the full picture: natural gas, refined petrochemicals, a significant share of the world's helium supply, plastics, and the fertiliz...

May 1st is the start of summer movie season and Steve Stebbing says the lineup is already delivering. Three Movies, One Very Strong Warning Devil Wears Prada 2 reunites Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci and Steve Stebbing says it justifies every year of the wait. The Miranda Priestly character has more depth than the original and the journalism-in-collapse storyline gives...

Love bombing is not about the gifts or the attention. Dr. Laurie Betito says it is about the motive and the pattern behind them. Someone coming on fast with intense affection, constant praise, promises, and grand gestures early in a relationship can feel like exactly what you wanted. Dr. Laurie Betito says that is the point. The goal in toxic cases is to lower your defenses quickly, create depende...

A McGill University study on young people aged 17 to 23 and their relationship with AI stopped Mohit Rajhans cold. He says the adults in the room have been having the wrong conversation. The study is not showing a generation eager to take AI as far as it can go. Mohit Rajhans says what is coming through is ambivalence rooted in distrust. Young people watched social media companies design addictive...

Heart cancer is so rare it shows up in less than 1% of autopsies. Cancer cells pass through the heart constantly. Dr. Samantha Yammine says scientists have finally found a clue about why it almost never takes hold there. A study published in Science compared mouse hearts that could beat with hearts that could not. When both were injected with cancer cells, the non-beating hearts developed tumours...

Vitals is a solo show running May 2 to 10 at Factory Theatre in Toronto, and Dr. Janet McMordie says the question at the centre of it is one medicine does not answer well enough. The show follows Anna, a paramedic whose life reaches a breaking point, and what happens when someone finally offers her permission to not be okay. Dr. Janet McMordie did a ride-along with Peel Regional Paramedics to prep...

Comfort movies are not about quality. They are about the feeling you already know is coming before you press play. The hosts break down what actually makes a movie feel like a warm hug: the director who casts the same people every time, the duo that shows up together so often they feel like old friends, the franchise that has the same energy no matter what the plot says. Tarantino, Sandler, Cloone...

Terry Fox dipped his prosthetic leg into the Atlantic Ocean in St. John's on April 12, 1980, and started running. What followed changed Canada in ways that are still being measured. The hosts put that moment inside a year that looked a lot like this one: global inflation, fuel shortages, Iran in the news, a political climate nobody felt good about. Pierre Trudeau was returning to power. Jimmy Cart...

Grocery prices have not dropped. But Dr. Sylvain Charlebois says Canadians have stopped being caught off guard by them, and that shift matters. The panic that defined grocery shopping four years ago has given way to something different. Dr. Sylvain Charlebois says new numbers from his team show consumers are adapting. They arrive at the store knowing what things should cost. That homework is produ...

Seasonal allergies affect up to 20% of the population. Moshe Ben-Shoshan says a lot of people who think they have them do not, and the difference between an allergy and an intolerance changes everything about how you treat it. True allergies are immune system reactions to proteins, typically pollens that shift through the seasons: birch and elder in spring, grass through summer, ragweed into fall....

Alberta's voter registry data for 2.9 million people has reportedly been accessed by a separatist organization, and the RCMP has opened an investigation. Rob Breakenridge says it shows what groups are willing to do as a potential separation vote approaches. The data was used to build a targeting app aimed at specific voters and demographics. Rob Breakenridge also flags anonymous YouTube accounts g...

Terry Fox was 21 years old when he wrote the letter that started the Marathon of Hope. Fred Fox says cancer had already changed his brother completely by then. Before his diagnosis at 18, Fred Fox says he would not have described Terry the way the letter reads. Chemo and watching others go through it shifted something. Everything Terry did after was about other people. When their mom called the id...

Borrowing to invest sounds smart until the market drops and the bank wants its money back immediately. Financial planner Anita Bruinsma draws a hard line on margin investing: borrow against your portfolio to buy more investments, and a sudden market decline triggers a margin call that can force you to sell stocks that are already down. She says it is a strategy she does not even bring up with clie...

Terry Fox is still in Canadian classrooms, still in the currency debate, still the name that comes up when Canada talks about who it actually is. Ed Conroy anchors the moment in time: 1980, a Canada punch-drunk from the 1970s, facing a real chance of losing Quebec, and then one young man with cancer who ran into the middle of all of it and made the country stop. Ed Conroy's real question isn't abo...

Devil Wears Prada 2 opens the summer season at theatres this weekend, and the timing is not an accident. Why the Michael Jackson Estate Is Just Getting Started The Jackson biopic made $97 million at the North American box office, then triggered a 95% spike in his catalogue streams the same weekend. Richard Crouse connects the recovery arc to the Elvis and Bob Dylan biopic effect and says the estat...