Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Trump Iran war speech ran tonight and Matt Gurney's first observation was this: when a president goes on national television in primetime to reassure his own base that gas prices will come down and this is not going to be another Iraq, that is not a sign that things are going the way they had hoped. What does it mean that Iran is doing exactly what every credible military analyst said they would d...

International Whiskey Day lands on a Friday this year and World Theatre Day is today too, which means you can go to the theatre and drink whisky and technically be celebrating two things at once. Ryan O'Donnell would like it noted that International Smashburger Day is also a real calendar entry and that smashburgers are categorically different from regular burgers, a position he holds with the con...

Canadian whisky has been reaching past its reputation and most people have not noticed yet. Stephen Beaumont says Canada is currently the most exciting whisky market on the planet, beating Ireland for that title, and the evidence runs from Crown Royal's new single malt to Lot 40's cherry wood and dark oak finishes to a hundred percent rye whisky being made right now in Windsor. What does it feel l...

Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau's English-only statement after two pilots died had a problem that had nothing to do with language. It had to do with order. The names should have come first. Andrew Caddell says the criticism of Rousseau is fair and the timing of the politicians who piled on was tasteless. Both things can be true. What is it like to realize a CEO has been through this exact situatio...

Space movies like Project Hail Mary do not come around often and the box office proved it. The biggest opening day for an original film in years. Sold out on the first weekend before some people could get tickets. So here is the list of what holds up while you wait for your seat. The Martian is the obvious starting point because Andy Weir wrote both books. It won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy, wh...

What to watch this weekend starts with Morgan Freeman narrating a visually stunning dinosaur documentary on Netflix called The Dinosaurs. Ryan O'Donnell has confirmed he would listen to Morgan Freeman narrate essentially anything, which is a reasonable position to hold, and this one is actually great. The Murdochs is the other recommendation and it is a different kind of prehistoric creature entir...

Money and relationships break down the same way every time: two people who never had the conversation discover they are not on the same page and by then it has been years. Dr. Laurie Betito says talking about money carries the same taboo as talking about sex and most couples treat it the same way, by avoiding it until they cannot. The Boat He Bought Without Asking A man bought a boat. Did not ment...

AI agents on your computer are already here and the checkbox most people ignore is the one that decides whether it touches one folder or everything you own. Mohit Rajhans has been watching this from the inside and his concern is not that the technology is bad. It is that the safety infrastructure around it is nowhere close to ready. What does it mean that there is no customer service to call when...

Declining mental health in Canada has a specific number attached to it now. Statistics Canada measured how many people reported feeling happy and interested in life. In 2015 it was 78 percent. By 2024 it had fallen to 61 percent. That is not a small shift. One in five Canadians was struggling with emotional health a decade ago. Now it is two in five. What does it feel like to realize that the thin...

Staged car collisions in Canada are up 400 percent and the friendly wave is one of the most common setups. Someone stops. They wave you out of the parking spot or through the intersection. You pull forward because a human being told you it was safe. Their partner hits you. And because you entered a live lane of traffic, it is on you. What does it feel like to realize a gesture you have used your w...

Grocery store refund stories have a threshold moment and this one involves potato peelings. Tony cooked the potato. Then he checked the receipt. The price was wrong. He had no potato left, only the peelings, so he took the peelings back to the store as evidence and came home with 90 cents. The workers are still talking about it. There is something about a 90 cent principle that either makes comple...

Maple washing is what happens when a grocery store uses the maple leaf to raise prices on a product that is not Canadian. Dr. Sylvain Charlebois has seen it in person: oranges labeled as Canadian, manager apologizes, next day the same shelf has the same oranges correctly labeled as Egyptian and priced 15 percent lower. That is not a mistake. That is the whole point. What does it feel like to reali...

Meal kit delivery versus groceries is a math problem until you go back through the weeks and find the ordering-in receipts. Three meals plus lunch supplies for $200 at the grocery store. Every ingredient used. Zero delivery orders that week. Clean. Then the honest comparison: on meal kit weeks, once or twice a week, about $30 each time, because the food was wrapped in paper bags and somehow invisi...

1995 Canada had a finance minister who went on Canada AM and took unscreened phone calls from Canadians about his budget cuts. Paul Martin sat there and answered them. Jean Chrétien was on CBC making a personal plea for national unity with the Quebec sovereignty referendum approaching. Canadian peacekeepers were in Bosnia. That was the political backdrop of one single year. Forrest Gump was...

Alberta referendum votes on October 19th are drawing a line that will be hard to ignore once it is drawn. Immigration. Constitutional reform. Separation on the table. Rob Breakenridge interviewed Danielle Smith this week and the question sitting underneath all of it was whether Alberta's allies in this conversation exist in other provinces, and whether those provinces know it yet. The Keystone XL...

Tragically Hip music has a way of arriving late for some people. Not because the songs changed but because the listener did. Ryan O'Donnell grew up hearing his dad scream the lyrics at house parties and filed it under parents' music until 2020, when he downloaded a couple of songs and went, oh wait. That is a specific kind of conversion. Gord Downey on CBC talked about being in your body, knowing...

Tragically Hip Saturday Night Live 1995 started with Gord Downie walking out and saying the wrong first lyric. Instead of fabulously rich he said tragically hip because he could hear Dan Aykroyd introducing them in his head. The band had smoked weed before going on. Jake Gold was watching from the wings. Nobody planned it and it stuck forever. What does it feel like to look back on a single year a...

Hollywood leading men are disappearing and Ed Conroy has a specific way of putting it: when Clooney and DiCaprio and Pitt are gone, where is the new Paul Newman? Brad Pitt was voted Sexiest Man Alive in 1995. Ed Conroy's point is that he could probably win it again right now, and that is not a compliment to anyone younger. What does it feel like to look around a culture you grew up inside and real...

Movie theater comeback stories do not usually start with a $500,000 Canadian horror film made by people nobody has heard of yet. This one does, and Richard Crouse hosted the premiere. The Theaters Were Not the Problem Undertone cost $500,000 and has passed $15 million at the box office in two weeks. That is 30 times its budget, no recognizable actors, and a premise built around what you hear rathe...

Gambling on yourself is the one bet most people will not take. A slot machine run by a casino with odds set against you? Fine. A sports app with a two-second deposit and no closing time? Apparently also fine. But when the outcome depends on your own effort and the odds are actually in your favour, the bet suddenly feels too risky. Ryan O'Donnell knows he would lose everything if he downloaded a be...

Sports betting in Canada is now in the broadcast, embedded in the commentary before the game even starts. Jamie Ellerton takes out a hundred dollars, wins it back, and walks. Lindsay Broadhead will not start at all. Neither of them is who the industry is building for, and that gap is the whole problem. The Lottery Was Always Gambling Provinces are running deficits and drunk on the revenue that mak...

Hannah Montana turns 20 this year, and the kids who came home from school and put it on are now the doctors, the managers, the people running things. Katelyn Thomas was 12 when it started. She is now a reporter, a mom, and she will absolutely be showing it to her son. What does it feel like to come home from a hard day at school, sit down, and watch a show where a girl in a blonde wig was somehow...

By the Power of Grayskull versus the Biggest Pop Star in the World. Generational TV shows tell you everything about who raised a generation and how. In 1985, it was the Smurfs hiding from Gargamel and He-Man holding a sword aloft. In 2006, it was Hannah Montana pulling 200 million viewers worldwide and a Jonas Brothers crossover episode that drew almost 11 million in the US alone. Same after-schoo...

Whistleblower versus leaker is not just a legal category. It is the question of who gets to decide what the public is allowed to know, and whether the people drawing that line can be trusted to draw it in the right place. Dr. Lee Kuhnle says they often cannot, and that is precisely why whistleblowers exist. There is a specific thing that happened to Julian Assange worth sitting with. He did not st...

OpenAI Sora shut down after a couple of months, Disney pulled a billion-dollar deal, and Greg Fish has been saying for almost a year that this was coming. Not because AI is useless, but because the gap between what Sora was claiming to be and what it actually was had nowhere else to go. There is a specific thing that happens when probabilistic technology tries to be deterministic through sheer rep...