Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Artemis splashdown tonight is at 8:07 Eastern and there is something about that specific time being locked in for days that makes it feel like an appointment worth keeping. Parachutes open first. Then the capsule hits the water. The math behind all of it has been done and checked and trusted by people who know what they are doing. When was the last time something made you stop and gather around to...

Federal by-election Monday has three ridings up and Terrebonne is the one nobody is calling easy. Supporting Liberals there has historically been like wearing a Leafs jersey at the Bell Centre. Andrew Caddell is on the ground in Montreal at the Liberal policy convention and says the ground is telling him 10 to 1000 votes. He is calling 500 for the Liberals. Picture being in that room when Justin T...

Stories you absolutely did not need to know are arriving twenty minutes before Artemis splashdown and they are exactly the right warm-up. A small bird with a giant needle beak is filling Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan every single day. New Yorkers are showing up on purpose. The bird meeps. The North American Woodcock is grapefruit-sized, has been the subject of internet memes for decades, and th...

Your weekend streaming options just got a verdict. The Boys is going out swinging. Malcolm in the Middle came back. Darth Maul has eight episodes and a cliffhanger, and Steve Stebbing is not here to tell you they're all worth watching. Three shows, three very different verdicts. One is ending everything it built and doing it without a safety net, nobody safe from dying. One came back and, accordin...

Relationship breakup signs are rarely obvious, and the moment most people act on them is far later than they think. The average couple lives in distress for five to seven years before doing anything about it. By then, Dr. Laurie says, half of them are past the point of repair. The Seven-Year Trap Hope keeps couples in bad marriages longer than logic should allow. Ego keeps men in them longer than...

AI workplace redesign has a specific problem nobody is talking about clearly. Employees are using the tools. Managers are getting data. Those two things are not producing the same picture and the person in between has no idea the gap exists. Picture a folder labelled Christmas in a workplace archive containing files it has no business containing. It has been there for twenty years. Nobody question...

Living with chronic pain is something most people are doing quietly and calling something else. Nagging. Stiff. Just how it is. Desmond Williams did that for twelve years. He knew his condition was hereditary. His mother had already been diagnosed. He kept going to work at the warehouse anyway. The morning he couldn't get down the stairs was the moment. Not the decade of pain before it. Not the li...

Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down on July 21 2011 and the shuttle program ended with it. By that point the machine was irreplaceable, not because it was precious but because it had been repaired and adapted so many times that every component was one of a kind. The only thing left to do was glide it home with no engines and one shot at the runway. There is something worth sitting with in the fact...

Artemis II splashdown is scheduled for 8:07 Eastern, and the Orion capsule is cooking toward Earth fast enough that reentry is expected to produce a significant fireball through the atmosphere. Everything on NASA's tracker is showing green. Nobody wants to jinx it. On April 8th at 4 a.m., the Alan I. Carswell Observatory at York University pointed its telescope through part of a wall to capture th...

Maple syrup fraud just became the most Canadian scandal possible. Quebec has a strategic reserve, a single desk authentication system, and wholesale testing on every batch. Someone still managed to swap sugar cane syrup into maple syrup cans, put stickers over the logos, and sell them to grocers across the province at a discount. The grocers didn't ask questions. Steve Boudreaux is currently the m...

Throwback Thursday 2011 is the year everything was normal right up until it wasn't. The Space Shuttle Atlantis glided home in July with no engines and one shot at the runway and human spaceflight went quiet. The Arab Spring started reshaping the world. Houses cost $250,000. Harry Potter was in theatres. Stephen Harper and Barack Obama talked about Canada and the United States in complete sentences...

Marilyn Gladue floor crossing to the Liberals is the kind of news that made Rob Breakenridge wonder if he was thinking of the wrong person. Then wonder if it was a late April Fools joke. Then confirm it was real and sit with the fact that she had been denouncing other floor crossers just days before. What do you actually get out of crossing the floor? Not a cabinet post. Rob Breakenridge is clear...

Artemis crew splashdown is at 8:07 Eastern tomorrow and before they come home there is one thing worth sitting with. The Earthrise photograph from Apollo 8 in 1968 is probably one of the most important images ever taken. The astronaut who took it was Bill Anders. He died in 2024. Most people still couldn't tell you his name. That gap is the whole point. Right now Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Chris...

Athlete social media pressure has changed what it means to be a professional. It used to stop at the rink doors. Now there are dedicated accounts tracking every NHL player's follows and likes in real time, and Nazem Kadri's liked posts are being reported on. The game never ends. Brenley Shapiro has worked with athletes long enough to know the difference between pressure that sharpens performance a...

2011 was the last normal year. That's not nostalgia. That's what historians who study decades for a living actually call it. Go find concert footage from that year. Everyone is holding up a drink or a lighter. Nobody has a phone out. It looks like a different planet. By 2012 the majority of the world's population was addicted to smartphones and scrolling. Spotify launched in 2011 and finished off...

Movies getting longer is not a feeling. A researcher named Steven Follows checked the runtimes of 36,000 theatrically released films from 1980 to 2025. Average wide release length went from 106 minutes in the 1990s to 114 minutes today. Films with budgets over a hundred million dollars run even longer. Then add 20 to 30 minutes of pre-show ads and trailers that didn't used to exist. In the 1980s,...

Riz Ahmed's Hamlet sets Shakespeare's tragedy inside London's South Asian community, keeps the original language almost entirely intact, and puts the most famous soliloquy in theatre history inside a car cutting through London traffic. That choice alone earns two hours of your time. The story tracks the original closely. Uncle kills father, takes the business, marries the widow, and the ghost show...

Above and beyond customer service has gotten so rare that when it happens, people put it on the internet and send a stranger a hundred thousand dollars. A pizza delivery driver. A missing Diet Coke. Twenty-six days to retirement. That's the whole story and it went everywhere. Here's what the data actually says: three out of four people say a bad customer service interaction ruins their entire day....

Customer service above and beyond has a hundred-thousand-dollar price tag on it tonight, and so does crossing a conservative floor to the Liberals. Both decisions landed this week. Neither one is easy to explain. The Hundred Thousand Dollar Diet Coke Chris White at 20 Victoria in Toronto makes an evening feel like the most special thing you've done in months without announcing that's what he's doi...

Gas prices dropping thirteen cents a liter in one day is news. Diesel falling twenty-eight cents a liter is something Dan McTeague says he has genuinely never seen before. Friday is the day to fill up. The reason it's happening is also the reason it won't last. A two-week Strait of Hormuz ceasefire knocked eighteen to twenty dollars off a barrel of oil overnight. The market loved it. The supply si...

Customer service at a small business hits different when the number on the bottle goes straight to the guy who makes the product. No hold music. No chatbot. No ticket number. Just a person who picks up and knows the answer. The sauce is Life's a Peach by Stoke the Fire out of British Columbia. It was opened at Christmas and discovered, four months later, mid-meal to say refrigerate after opening....

Conspiracy theories don't start with a villain. They start with a feeling, the specific uncomfortable feeling that somebody must be in charge of how bad this all looks, because the alternative is that nobody is. Lee Kuhnle has spent over a decade on this and came in without an answer for once. Just a question. Violent crime is lower than it was in the 90s. Life expectancy is up. Infant mortality h...

Corporate jargon sounds like communication. Researchers built a test to find out if it actually is. Real mission statements went up against randomly generated business nonsense, assembled specifically to mean nothing, and participants had to rate the earnestness of each. Some people could not tell them apart. Those same people scored lower on reasoning, flexibility, and adaptability. When given bu...

Artemis mission engineers call the moon a stepping stone. Not a destination. A rehearsal for Mars, for Titan, for whatever comes after that. The question was never why go back. The question was always what you miss if you don't. There's a version of this story that ends with astronauts and photographs. There's another that ends with a generation of people who watched a launch, went to university,...

Space inspiration and doom scrolling are fighting for the same fifteen seconds of attention. One of them is winning right now, and it isn't the rocket. Tony Chapman noticed that and decided it was worth his time to do something about it. In Costa Rica, where Tony lives, there's almost no light pollution. Last year he stood outside and watched Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars line up across the sky. Put h...