Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Humanoid robots in 2026 just ran a half marathon faster than the human world record for the same distance. Last year one robot finished in two hours and forty minutes. This year Lightning, built by a smartphone company, did it in fifty minutes. The human record was fifty-two. Forty percent of the three hundred robots on the course ran without a technician or controller anywhere nearby.   That...

Making friends after 50 sounds like something that quietly stops being possible. Then Shane moved to a small town, started going out on weekends, and keeps meeting people he actually likes. Turns out the barrier was never the age.   What does it feel like to realize the headphones were the wall the whole time? Ryan went to urgent care with no intention of talking to anyone. A stranger asked o...

DIY home upgrades have a way of starting with something you forgot you owned. Andy Baryer found a monitor so old it had no HDMI port. It's now a streaming TV. The garden runs on a timer. The front door has a panic button. None of it required a contractor.   May Long Weekend Can Wait (The Tomatoes Are Already Outside) Andy hates watering. So he built a system that waters everything on a timer...

Ad creep in sports has officially eaten the event. Four hours of WrestleMania. Eighty-two minutes of wrestling. If you paid $500 for a seat in Las Vegas this weekend, the ads ran on the Jumbotron above you anyway.   Imagine paying for the sport and getting the commercial break instead. That is not a hypothetical. One wrestler arrived in a full Mortal Kombat costume. Another match was brought...

High above the ground, communication isn’t optional—it’s survival. So why are pilots sometimes joking on the very frequency designed for emergencies? John Tory Jr. breaks down what’s actually happening on aviation’s “guard frequency,” the channel monitored by pilots, air traffic control, and search and rescue. While it’s meant for urgent distress cal...

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has turned a 53-kilometre waterway into the most consequential question in global energy. One to three ships are transiting it daily. It used to be 130.   Imagine the gap between knowing something can happen and watching it happen in real time. Western governments have war-gamed the Strait closing for 125 years. The assumption was always that Iran would fall first....

Financial anxiety hits different when every headline feels like evidence that it's all out of your hands. But the part that's actually in your hands is bigger than the market right now, and it's got nothing to do with what happens in Washington or on Wall Street. There's a version of this where the stock market is the problem. And then there's the version where you're 80 movies and 30 books into t...

Hockey loyalties collide, but that’s just the warm-up. This conversation moves from playoff passion to something far more personal—why making friends as an adult feels unexpectedly hard. Jimmy Zubris and Lesley Kelly bring sharp perspective and lived experience, balancing rivalry with real talk. From the energy of Montreal during a Canadiens run to the surprising role social media play...

Cheating on tests used to have a clear definition. A binder on the floor in fourth grade, pages turned with two feet, and Dorothy across the aisle who saw the whole thing. That one had an obvious answer. The pandemic version is harder. What does it feel like to watch someone in a waiting room with a test on one tab and ChatGPT on the other, and realize you cannot actually tell if it's wrong? She w...

The Canadian grocery rebate hits accounts this week and the gas tax comes off the pump. September is when one of those reverses, and the gap between now and then is exactly the size of a summer road trip. Good politics and maybe not the best economics can describe the same decision at the same time. A bigger deficit creates greater inflation, and greater inflation keeps mortgage rates where nobody...

Welfare check calls go unanswered for a lot of reasons. In Ohio, the reason was a 91-year-old in her bedroom trying to beat her record. Police radioed it in. Nobody thought to ask which game. In Toronto, Drake filed the permits, got the approvals, sent 48 hours of notice to residents, and detonated something large enough to put a fireball on Instagram. The neighborhood near the 2008 Downsview prop...

Disney Infinity Vision is the new premium format launching the same weekend as Avengers Doomsday. The full announcement is laser projection and premium audio. No other specifications have been confirmed. Dune Part III has the IMAX contract. What does it feel like to be the biggest franchise in the world and show up to the most important opening weekend in years without the best screen in the build...

PDA in relationships is where two completely different upbringings end up in the same parking lot. One person reaches. The other one doesn't. And somehow that ten seconds does more damage than anything else that happened that day. What does it mean when a couple making everyone around them uncomfortable is doing it on purpose? Dr. Laurie says some people in that situation are exhibitionists who sp...

Kids using AI to get answers at school. Cheating, or just faster at figuring it out than the adults who wrote the rules? The guardrails are gone, and nobody agrees on who puts them back. There's a thing about the encyclopedia Britannica. Some kids had one at home. Some had to go to the library. Teachers said only cite approved sources. The kid with the encyclopedia just had more, quietly, without...

What the moon can teach us is the part of our own story we cannot find anywhere down here, because this planet erased it. Every earthquake, every ocean, every million years of weather. The very forces keeping us alive have been destroying the oldest rocks on the surface since before life existed. The first 500 million years of Earth's history, the period when life was first trying to hold on, is s...

New car prices in Canada are up almost 60% in six years, and Lorraine Sommerfeld says that number didn't just change what people can afford. It changed how they feel about cars. Walking through a lot used to mean dreaming. Now it mostly means calculating. What does it feel like when something you used to love turns into an appliance decision? Line up every sedan on the market and throw a sheet ove...

Pokemon throwback Thursday 1998 starts with a confession. The spelling on the show document said P-O-K-E-M-A-N. It has said that since 1998. Pokemon means pocket monsters. Mon means monster. For twenty-seven years, the pronunciation has been pocket dudes. Just guys chilling. What does it feel like to find out that the thing you ignored for your entire adult life is the highest grossing media franc...

MuchMusic is gone long enough now that people are finally understanding what it was. That is Bill Welychka's theory and ten years of book signings have confirmed it. You need distance from something before you can really feel the weight of it. The distance is here. So are the people lining up to say so. What does it feel like to have interviewed Mick Jagger and David Bowie and Iggy Pop and still b...

Surveillance pricing grocery stores are not a future problem. Tests in the United States put 20 people in the same room buying the same product at the same time and found they paid different prices. Not because of a sale. Because of who they were digitally. What does it feel like to realize the price you see on a shelf might not be the price the person next to you sees? Not because of a coupon or...

1998 throwback Thursday lands on a year that felt safe and new at the exact same time. The Discman was still in your bag. Blockbuster still had a line on Friday night. Gas was 50 cents a litre. And Google went from being called BackRub to Google and quietly started changing everything before anyone noticed. What does it feel like to look back at a year where you were living in one world and the ne...

Canadian NHL playoffs are here and the Oilers have been handed the simplest possible test going in. One point. Against the worst team in the entire league. The fact that Rob Breakenridge is nervous about it is either a bad sign or an honest one. Possibly both. What does it feel like to watch a country spend years talking about bold energy thinking and then watch every oil company quietly point sou...

Pokemon card game competitive play has a world championship, a global tournament circuit, and kids making tens of thousands of dollars. Most adults still think it is a cartoon with some stuffies attached. Both of those things are true at the same time. What is it like to grow up being the kid at the card store every Saturday morning and realize twenty years later that was the beginning of a career...

Fashion labels teenagers claim as identity had to arrive from somewhere, and Bob Addison watched it happen in real time. One kid in Trail, BC came back from Portland in 1976 with the first Nikes anyone in that schoolyard had ever seen. They got the name wrong for seven years. They got everything else right. There is something recognizable about a teenager who has narrowed the entire colour spectru...

1998 nostalgia hits differently once someone points out that it was actually the last safe year. Google arrived. Email became something everyone had. Cell phones showed up in pockets that had never held one before. And none of the bad stuff had taken hold yet. Every website looked different. Loading one felt like going somewhere. What does it feel like to look back at a year that was genuinely exc...

New album release day driving deaths tracked in a Harvard study are linked to the ten biggest album drops between 2017 and 2022. Traffic fatalities rose nearly 15 percent on those days. The culprit was not weather. Not alcohol. Unlocking the phone. Scrolling the tracklist. Finding the song. A researcher drove into oncoming traffic reading a text about a new release and started counting. The answer...