As the 2021 Canadian federal election campaign comes to a close, parties are winding down their online canvassing for election day. In the months to come, there will be many post mortems and analysis of what worked and what didn’t this time around.
National campaigns in the digital age leave behind a wealth of data, and each party will parse through their donation rolls, ad traffic, and engagement metrics. Much of these numbers will be kept behind closed doors, yet the internet offers regular people an array of tools to glean interesting insights without the need of the party disclosure.
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Years ago in graduate school, one of my literature seminars was treated to a peculiar presentation. The course was Energy and the Environment, and our professor decided to invite a climate activist friend of his to help connect our high minded material to the real world.
Only a few weeks had passed since Elon Musk had unveiled Tesla’s Model 3 to the world, and electric vehicles were experiencing a major moment. Thanks to Elon, we were soon to witness the end of the internal combustion engine and thus a major breakthrough in the fight against climate change. Still feeling the…
As I read through Carlos Lozada’s journey through the major titles of the ‘Trump Era’ in What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump, one book stood out to me: Angela Nagle’s 2017 book Kill All Normies. Amongst the diatribes of RussiaGate and Rust Belt anthropological studies, Nagle chose to explore the nascent role of the 2016 culture wars and their connection to late aughts Internet culture. As someone who was a teenager during those years, I was intrigued. The result? …
The MicroStrategy CEO has a checkered past and complex motives. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to him.
If you’ve been following the crypto space since the beginning of the latest 2020 bull run, you’ve no doubt encountered Michael Saylor. The bombastic, square jawed tech CEO has appeared on virtually every crypto and gold-focused news outlet in the last 12 months, and has quickly become one of Bitcoin’s most well known influencers.
It’s easy to see why. Beyond the fact that Saylor holds the title as the first major institutional investor of Bitcoin (more on that later), he brings a…
Now that we have finally entered what will (hopefully) be called the ‘post Trump era,’ I decided to take the time to read the seminal work of what closed out the ‘pre’ Trump era, Hillary Clinton’s election post-mortem, What Happened.
What Happened is the first book by Clinton that I’ve ever read, so that may have influenced my impression of it. Perhaps my hopes were too high, but in general I was greatly disappointed by it. What Happened is not bad by any measure, but considering the author and the subject matter, it didn’t come close to my expectations.
First…
Barring significant additions, Bill C-12 will fail at its mission to bring Canada’s to net zero by 2050.
November 2020 marks a momentous month in the Canadian fight against climate change. The Canadian parliament has officially tabled what will be the country’s most ambitious climate change law to date, Bill C-12. If passed, the bill would force all future federal governments to set legally binding emissions targets aimed at getting Canada to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The law is a necessary step, but in classically Canadian fashion, it’s lofty, abstract, and short on all the crucial details…
Remember the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head during the debate last night? So fun! Have you followed the official Fly Twitter account yet? Nice to have a little break from the seriousness of our current moment, huh?
It’s really not nice, actually. You only have a few good hours to frame and highlight the events of a debate, and almost all of the key moments of what happened last night, which was albeitless lively than the first Presidential standoff a week ago, were lost in a sea of fly memes. It’s not funny, it’s insulting.
September 2019 has seen a flurry of climate change activism. Major youth-led marches have taken place around the world demanding climate action, with media attention culminating with Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s address to the UN General Assembly in New York.
Thunberg was on hand several days later at the Montreal climate march, where she had the unprecedented opportunity to speak with Justin Trudeau face to face.
There is much that’s been said about Thunberg’s role as climate activist, but here I want to discuss the other activist involved: Justin Trudeau. His status as Prime Minister of Canada and leading figure…
Do you remember the cryptocurrency mania of late 2017? When for a few weeks, it felt like the whole world was talking about ‘Bitcoin’? I do.
Between January and December of 2017, the then latent cryptocurrency experienced an explosion in value, rising from $900 USD per coin to just over $20,000. It was not the first Bitcoin bull run, but it was the first time that it caught the attention of the public. That year Bitcoin became a cultural phenomenon, drawing in billions of dollars of investment from regular people discovering it for the first time.
First time I bought…
Don’t believe the hype. Youtube fans can be fickle, but James Charles has weathered the storm of his Tati Westbrook feud, and months from now this controversy will be a blip in the radar.
Over the past month, Youtube has witnessed one of its biggest feuds in years. The community has been rocked by two of its most prominent figures, James Charles and Tati Westbrook, viciously attacking each other. Millions of subscribers have changed hands, while dozens of prominent influencers, from Jeffree Star to PewDiePie, have chimed in.
Now that the fight has been brought back from the boiling point…
