Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

A shooting in a Montreal Jewish grocery store. A high-speed pursuit ending in gunfire in Calgary. An MP targeted in Saskatchewan. What links them isn't ideology, it's the moment after, when the internet fills the silence with certainty. Matt Gurney, writer and analyst at The Line, has spent a career covering political violence and says the old frameworks are breaking down. For decades, counterterr...

Sixty thousand people in red at a Canada World Cup soccer match will do something to you, even if you're normally a late arriver who avoids crowds. Bob Addison, co-host of the Uncle Bob's Bits segment, was there, and he's still processing what national pride actually feels like when it's coming at you like a tsunami. The stadium experience leads somewhere unexpected: a list of notes Bob is prepari...

Most people have no idea what they're spending until the statement arrives. Cash fixes that — which is exactly why almost nobody uses it anymore. Shane and the team open the week with a conversation about what happens when you can't find your debit card, can't make change, and can't explain why your balance is lower than it should be. Ryan O'Donnell's cash experiment in Mexico turns into a g...

AI-generated content has gotten good enough that most people scrolling past it have no idea — and tech and DIY expert Andy Baryer argues the brands using it secretly are taking a risk that transparent ones aren't. Andy traces how influencer marketing gave way to AI content creation, why the NDAs brands are requiring are a red flag, and what the Sports Illustrated AI writer scandal tells us a...

Bank fees, ATM limits, and a marketplace transaction that required three separate e-transfers to produce four hundred dollars in cash. The cashless future has a cost, and it's not always obvious until you need actual bills in your hand. Shane and Ryan dig into what cash access actually looks like for Canadians who don't live near a branch, can't drive to one, or just got hit with a hundred dollar...

Three police officers down across three provinces on the same Monday. Lesley Kelly and Jimmy Zoubris open the week by acknowledging what that costs before the panel moves into the policy questions that follow. Bill C-14 gives police more tools to deal with car theft, gang violence, and repeat offenders — but Kelly's question is the right one: will the resources actually be there to use them?...

Music industry commentator Eric Alper on the death of Clive Davis at 94 — the man whose roster reads like the history of recorded music and whose ear for a hit never stopped working, no matter the decade. Davis didn't just sign artists. He picked the songs, the co-writers, the photographers, the look. He spotted Whitney Houston in a New York club before anyone knew her name and spent years s...

Robinhood just closed its Canadian entry through the acquisition of two major crypto exchanges — and personal finance educator Dr. Preet Banerjee has some thoughts on what follows a platform with dozens of millions in SEC fines and a business model that profits from your trading activity, not your returns. Dr. Preet Banerjee connects the dots between zero-commission trading, social media inv...

Automotive columnist Lorraine Sommerfeld breaks down what your car already knows about you and why the politicians now panicking about Chinese vehicles are decades late to a problem that's been sitting in every driveway for years. The harder question isn't whether Chinese-made cars belong at the US border. It's whether anyone is holding any carmaker accountable for what your vehicle records, sells...

What do you say to a father you can't sit beside this Father's Day? This segment is one answer: a letter read live on air, tracing one lesson, just be one step better, through a rebuilt house, years of growing up, and the staples still being pulled out of old stairs. It's also a pointer to the Wind Phone, a real-world tradition built around a phone booth where people go to speak to loved ones who...

Canada just slapped a ten percent tariff on canned vegetables and left the US off the list, and the reasoning behind that exclusion says more about how trade rules actually work than most headlines let on. The conversation runs from a Father's Day bike theft to the brutal on-field injury that ended Guatemala's World Cup match against Canada, before landing on the real test: a full list of bills pa...

A pub in Vancouver burns through two hundred extra kegs in one night because Australian fans showed up to celebrate a World Cup win, and somehow the bar staff still call them well behaved. That's the kind of story sitting in this Friday roundup, the ones that don't matter and still won't leave your head once you've heard them. From there it's Washington's reflection pool, repainted instead of prop...

Going into a fifth Toy Story movie with low expectations turns out to be a losing bet, and movie critic Steve Stebbing explains why this one earns its place in the franchise on emotional weight alone. The story leans into screens replacing physical toys in kids' imaginations, and a surprising side plot involving a lost shipment of action figures steals just as much attention as Buzz and Woody do t...

Show me your friends and a clinical psychologist can read the state of a relationship before either partner says a word. Dr. Laurie Betito breaks down why emotions and attitudes spread through a friend group the same way they do anywhere else, meaning constant exposure to friends who treat cheating or divorce as normal can quietly chip away at how someone views their own partnership over time. A g...

Kids notice more than parents think, and new research from McGill University shows that when children see parental honesty and behaviour fall out of alignment, their moral reasoning shifts in measurable ways. Emilie Bélanger, PhD student at the School of Applied Child Psychology, brings findings that hit close to home for anyone who has ever faked a smile over a gift they hated with a child...

Showing up every day feels like it should count for something, but master certified coach Rachel Levy explains why a manager hears that as nothing more than doing the job. The real lever in any raise conversation is impact, and most people have never learned how to talk about their own. Rachel breaks down why the story has to be told constantly, not saved for a once-a-year review nobody remembers...

Everybody who built an MP3 library remembers the tools. Winamp, Napster, the slow crawl of dial-up giving way to broadband fast enough to actually steal music in bulk. This one walks through 1999, the year Napster broke open, and 2001, the year it got shut down for it, with torrents picking up right where it left off. What replaced it didn't exactly clean up its act first. Spotify spent its early...

Music industry commentator Eric Alper on the two years that permanently rewired how the world hears music, and why the streaming subscription you pay today traces directly back to a college kid's side project in 1999. Before Napster, hearing a specific song meant buying an entire album or catching it on the radio. Within months of launch, millions of people were trading files from their bedrooms,...

Food professor Sylvain Charlebois on why Canadian grocery prices are so high, what a Lidl store in Cork, Ireland reveals about what we're actually paying for, and why Ottawa's new Competition Bureau food study is long overdue but unlikely to deliver easy answers. Charlebois was calling in from inside a Lidl in Ireland when the conversation happened, pricing out a kilo of mozzarella at the equivale...

Twenty million users in year one. Eighty million at the peak. Then a lawsuit took Napster down in about six months. This one walks through how a platform built by Sean Fanning in June 1999 grew that fast and fell that hard. Metallica chose to be the band everyone resented, betting that looking greedy in public was worth it if the industry finally took piracy seriously. Prince chose silence instead...

Instead of cutting the gas tax, Alberta sent residents a flat hundred dollar cheque, and the math broke almost immediately. Journalist Rob Breakenridge explains why electric vehicle owners, who pay nothing at the pumps, are getting the exact same payout as everyone filling up every week, and why that detail is fuelling most of the backlash. The bigger question of who funds road repairs as gas vehi...

Twenty-five years after Napster got shut down, the company that replaced it built its own empire on a strikingly similar shortcut. Tech expert Carmi Levy breaks down how Napster's 80 million users forced the music industry's hand, and how Spotify quietly repeated the same playbook before settling into the legal giant it is today. It's the kind of pattern that shows up again every time a new techno...

Falls aren't accidents. Aging and balance science now shows exactly why older adults are more vulnerable — and the answer is inside the brain. Dr. Samantha Yammine breaks down new research that mapped which brain regions control balance and what changes as we age. Younger brains handle most balance automatically, without a second thought. Older brains have to consciously recruit the thinking...

Writer and historian Ed Conroy on what Napster actually opened up for music fans beyond the free, and why the resentment and entitlement it created have never left the way we think about paying for music. For Ed, the real revolution wasn't the price. It was Aladdin's cave: live recordings, unreleased albums, European EP editions, things a music obsessive could spend a lifetime hunting and never fi...

Film critic Richard Crouse on the auction that is about to put Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, Rocky's boots, the Wicked Witch's hat, and John Lennon's handwritten lyrics up for sale, and why the stories behind these objects are worth more than the objects themselves. The Stuff That Actually Existed Heritage Auctions' Entertainment Signature Auction runs July 13th through 17th, and the prices tell yo...