Authenticity watch: the child-like child

A proud parent of a four-year-old, from a nauseating story about parents who tweet as their preschoolers: “Roan’s all about superheroes and Scooby Doo and running around in his jammies. He’s still maintaining his child-like innocence so it’s fun to portray that sometimes.”

Interesting example

Another day, another woe-is-Gen Y story. In all seriousness, Canada’s poor mechanisms of getting new graduates into the workforce are an ongoing problem. But this latest story on the front page of the Report on Business isn’t particularly compelling: Elizabeth Adams, 24, knows all about timing. She recently graduated with a fine arts degree andcontinue reading

Contagion risk (non-flu version)

Business reporters fell over each other today in an effort to categorize the impact of Dubai’s announcement that it was implementing a six-month “stand-still” on the debt of the real estate arm of its conglomerate Dubai World, essentially asking debtholders to hold onto bonds past maturity. Complicating the efforts of reporters to put the storycontinue reading

Perpetuating inequality

David Cay Johnston on why the government’s lack of interest in cracking down on Canadian users of tax havens is a problem: “If the current law does not give the government the investigative tools to find wealthy and sophisticated tax cheats, then those tools need to be provided. Otherwise, you have a de facto policycontinue reading

Ernie and Bert were always pretty racy

Infamous subway-riding 9-year-old’s mother Lenore Skenazy details her questionable viewing habits: We got the DVD set of Sesame Street from the early years. It shows kids just having fun in groups, playing on a vacant lot, playing on the playground and playing follow the leader. Before any of this is shown to you, there’s acontinue reading

Eight years on

This is how I felt that day: like something might come swooping down out of the sky at any time, that no place was safe, not the streets I walked along in my new high heels (heading out of the financial district: the streetcars were jammed, traffic at a standstill). When I walked along Bloorcontinue reading

Preposition watch

They’re endangered. From a BlogTO review of Te Aro: This newish Leslieville cafe may not have a ton of tables to plunk a laptop, but the beauty of the space more than makes up for it. What is so hard about turning it into English by adding “on which” before “plunk”, or even just “onto”continue reading

One-way battle in the spin wars

The Star lovingly recreates Bryant’s last night as a man not under suspicion, while in the meantime, Partisan Hobo notes: …there’s no PR firm to save the deceased man’s image. I don’t even know him, but I know he came from a broken home, that he is a visible minority, that he has a historycontinue reading

Blood on Bloor

Everything about the recent cyclist death on Bloor is upsetting and horrific. Take first the location: Bloor St. outside Sephora, between Bay and Queen’s Park Circle, a pair of blocks everyone has walked along at some point and that were, at quarter to ten on a summer night, far from empty. Take the absolute insanitycontinue reading