blog

Jack Layton: Downtown Canadian


August 26th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Flags across the country are being lowered for a guy from downtown Toronto. What on earth is wrong with Canada?

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the toronto standard

There’s a word for this: Uncompetence


July 13th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

There is a difference between incompetence and uncompetence. Incompetence is when people make bad decisions. Uncompetence is when people start to suspect that competence is something the elites do, and think to themselves, “I should perhaps do something else.” Welcome, everyone, to Toronto. Here in Toronto, the citizenry are being treated to a three-ring circus [...]

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blog

Toronto is not Vancouver


June 17th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Think the hockey riots in Vancouver were the west-coast equivalent of the G20? You’re wrong – and here’s why.

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the toronto standard

Castles in the sand


April 26th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

It was down by the waterfront that Doug Ford had a Ford Notion. Surveying the Port Lands, still a bleak sight despite years of diligent toil to renew them, the mayor’s older brother, right-hand man, and occasional mouthpiece decided that neighbourhood-building was taking too long, and the time had come to do something different instead. Something fun…

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the globe and mail

The real “social media election” begins after the polls close


April 18th, 2011 | No Comments

So, has social media fixed everything yet? It’s election time, and if ever there was a time to fix everything, this is it.

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the toronto standard

Transit City’s dead. Long live transit!


April 10th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Transit City is dead. Years of work, and at least $49 million in local consultations, environmental assessments, engineering work and broken contracts have gone down the drain. But is the result all bad? Heresy alert: Maybe not.

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the globe and mail

What’s the answer for question sites?


April 4th, 2011 | No Comments

Question-and-answer sites have a long heritage, but the quest to perfect the model keeps yielding lemons. Some, like Yahoo, are great big sour ones. Others are small and maybe even sweet, but restricted in scale and not terrifically lucrative. Right now, though, two services are competing to reinvent the model.

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the globe and mail

How new life found Pine Point


March 15th, 2011 | No Comments

Pine Point didn’t vanish, exactly. You can’t demolish a community without leaving debris, debris of many sorts, and it turns out that that debris has been preserved in a most poignant and remarkable way.

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blog

David Miller’s Toronto


November 30th, 2010 | 16 Comments »

There’s an awful lot David Miller didn’t do personally. So why was life in his Toronto so worthwhile?

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the globe and mail

Hate Twitter? Here’s why


July 7th, 2010 | 2 Comments »

For a service with hundreds of millions of users, plenty of people seem to actively dislike Twitter. And its defenders should take note: the haters have some good reasons to feel the way they do.

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Well hello!

I'm a Toronto-based writer and editor, with a focus on technology, culture, urban affairs, business and politics.

My eBook, "The Gift of Ford" – an essay on Toronto's mayor, and the city's future - is now available through Random House of Canada's new Hazlitt imprint.

A frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail, my work has also appeared in many of Canada's top publications, including The Walrus, the Toronto Star, Report on Business Magazine, Toronto Life, and Spacing Magazine.

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