Except for pockets of rich in the west and poor in the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver was home to middle class folks in the 1970s. But fast forward to 2010 and a starkly different city emerges. The middle class shrunk to 53 per cent from 71 per cent, more people are rich or poor, neighbourhoods…

Reuters We know that homeownership is no longer the panacea it once was. But what if you still want it anyway? I keep reading about how homeownership is out in the new economy. It’s now a liability, not an ambition. It’s an anachronism in an age when nothing remains permanent anymore, when no one…

Photograph by the Canadian Press/Troy FleeceRoughriders head coach Kent Austin hoists the Grey Cup in November 2007. On November 25, my wife and I, my three children, and their spouses will be at the Rogers Centre watching the Grey Cup game. For several years now, our family has held its annual…

News Desk November 21, 2012 Last Thursday night, Le Poisson Rouge, a concert venue in lower Manhattan, hosted “The People’s Bailout,” a night of music and comedy performances to benefit an initiative called the Rolling Jubilee. The Rolling Jubilee, a project of Strike Debt, itself an arm of Occupy…

P79 14 November 2012 Back in the halcyon days when baby-boomers trotted up the property market gaily, buying wharf apartments for next to nothing and selling them to build townhouses in undesirable streets off King’s Road with the 2,000 per cent return they’d made on their investment, the months it…

We humans are great at creating tools with unforeseen consequences. For instance, when we invented the wheel, we had no way of knowing we were also laying the foundations for the TV show Top Gear. Did our forebears pause to consider the impact that prolonged exposure to Richard Hammond might have on…

Along the Cape Cod National Seashore stands a tall, wooden post. Rising up about 20 feet from the sand, it is unremarkable save its curious existence on this beach. Those who visit it call it the Silents’ Pole, and though it bears no inscription, there is a story behind this post. For most people,…

Marijuana is legal in the great state of Washington. To find out how this new law will impact the pot industry in British Columbia, I spoke with a person whose livelihood is dependent on the drug trade — namely, a drug dealer. The drug dealer will remain anonymous for reasons too obvious to…

Robin Sloan is the kind of writer/thinker you want to take out for a beer and ply with questions. About writing. About reading. About life. His novel with the glow-in-dark cover, came out in October, though it actually started years ago as a short story on his website. Of course, the seeds for it…

At Broad Street, near the tip of Lower Manhattan, the situation is far from normal. Many streets in the area are closed off and packed with trucks, equipment, and generators. Manhole covers are open everywhere. Verizon’s Broad Street central office, which routes local phone, DSL, and FiOS data,…

Federal Liberal leadership contender Justin Trudeau will be in the oilpatch Tuesday. In advance, he wrote this article laying out his views on trade with China : I opened my campaign last month with the argument that, if the Liberal Party is to become a positive force for change in Canada, we need…

If you’ve spent any time discussing or reading about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I guarantee you’ve heard some variation of this statement: OMG, Jews think any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic! In the interests of this post, I’m going to assume that the people who express such sentiments…

Leif Parsons The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. If irony is the ethos of our age — and it is — then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living. The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia…

News broke last night that embattled NHL commissioner Gary Bettman suggested a two-week moratorium from lockout negotiations with the NHLPA. The reason? Things had just become too heated. I guess that’s what happens when you cancel six weeks of games and Thanksgiving is looming — maybe there’s a…

Opinion EVER since I quit hanging out in Baltimore dive bars, the only place where I still regularly find myself in hostile confrontations with my fellow man is Amtrak’s Quiet Car. The Quiet Car, in case you don’t know, is usually the first car in Amtrak’s coach section, right behind business class.…

Clayton Christensen has an interesting article in the New York Times, pointing out that no matter which candidate wins the presidency tomorrow, the economy will still be on life support, and will remain so for the foreseeable future, with no real turnaround or presidential remedy in sight. The…

WHATEVER happens on Election Day, Americans will keep asking the same question: When will this economy get better? In many ways, the answer won’t depend on who wins on Tuesday. Anyone who says otherwise is overstating the power of the American president. But if the president doesn’t have the power…

How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection Three members of Obama's tech team, from left to right: Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, and Mark Trammell (Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil). The Obama campaign's technologists were tense…

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Photo With his speed and good judgment on the bases, Mike Trout increased his contribution to the Angels' offense.Credit Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press On Thursday, the American League will announce the recipient of its Most Valuable Player award. The winner is likely to be Miguel Cabrera, the…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 by Yang Jisheng, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian Farrar, Straus…

Josef Hanus / Shutterstock.com The segregation between the rich and poor is clearer than ever. The 21st century is shaping up to be the century of the city. But global cities are not only becoming increasingly-important economic forces of the world economy. They are also becoming increasingly…

Writers are not often great lovers but pathological inventors of explanations. Sex induces a kind of cowardice in them, a fear of experimentation, of being vulnerable, of stepping naked onto the stage to examine all the presumptions that pass without question when everyone still has their pants on.…

A new initiative is re-energising the Occupy movement. Called the Rolling Jubilee, it is a plan to use money from donations to buy distressed consumer debt from lenders at a marked down price, just as debt collection agencies normally would. But instead of hounding debtors for payments, it will…

Remember all that noise about 3D-printed guns? And then the subsequent panicked government attempts to censor and regulate the downloads of files that take a huge, expensive effort to turn into breakable physical objects? F.A.T. artist Kyle McDonald has a few things to say about that. I believe that…

Why the beauty industry is booming Plain bottles with clinical labels are part of the secret Bartleby The parable of the supermarket self-checkout How imperfect technologies spread Schumpeter Innovations in energy and finance are further inflating the AI bubble How to bust bottlenecks The race for…

Look at this map, and notice that deep, deep in the Republican South, there's a thin blue band stretching from the Carolinas through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. These are the counties that went for Obama in the last election. A blue crescent in a sea of red. These same counties went mostly…

Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees using a pump train to get water out of the L train tunnel under the East River.Credit...Patrick Cashin/Metropolitan Transportation Authority Inside a sprawling Manhattan command center, a board that detects subway activity by sensor had gone quiet. No…

Subscribe Latest Current Issue Past Issues Events About Store Donate Press return to see results. cmd / ctrl + k to open and close. Subscribe Latest Current Issue Past Issues Events About Store Donate Web Exclusives Gimme More Thea Riofrancos January 20, 2026 Is the energy transition a hoax? Salt…

Award-winning political satire The Thick Of It comes to an end on BBC2 on Saturday. The show, which made foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker a household name first appeared on BBC4 seven years ago. Here we look back on the origins of the show, its big-screen spin-off, and how it became part of…

The subject of this post may be rather obscure, particularly for those of you who are not from the United States, or do not pay attention to American political media. I hope you’ll excuse me, though, because I think it’s important to examine some of the ways that claims on behalf of the corporate…

Philip Roth, the US novelist widely regarded as America's best hope of ending a 20 year drought without a winner of the Nobel prize for literature, has said that he is calling it a day. The writer announced his retirement in a little-noticed interview with a French magazine and said that Nemesis,…

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