LATELY

Jeff Wall’s Hyper-Real Visions

Jeff Wall’s large-scale images are windows into the theatre of the everyday. In one, a man casually backflips in the middle of a legion hall. Another shows a crowd of partygoers smoking outside a moonlit nightclub. Yet another features a horseback rider hauling herself up from the ground while the horse who tossed her looks on indifferently. Wall’s images seem natural and organic, as if plucked from daily life. But the reality is that most of them were often meticulously staged. He often spent m...

Neighbourhood Crawl: What super foodie Suresh Doss loves about Scarborough

At 12 years old, Suresh Doss emigrated with his family from Colombo, Sri Lanka, putting down roots in Scarborough to be close to its Tamil community. In 2019, after a stint downtown, he and his wife, Esther, found out they were pregnant with their son, Nolan, and decided to buy a home in Birchcliffe-Cliffside to be closer to family. Doss has built a career championing overlooked neighbourhoods and mom-and-pop kitchens, and he’s happiest when introducing his son to new ingredients.

REVIEW: Fall for Dance North 2025 opens with rhythm and range

Last Wednesday at the Bluma Appel Theatre, the 11th edition of Fall for Dance North descended on the city with renewed energy. This year’s two-week festival — known for bringing emerging and established dancers from around the world to Toronto with how-could-you-not priced tickets — marks the first under new co-CEOs Robert Binet and Lily Sutherland. Their programming feels fresh and ambitious.

A new Vegas-style wedding chapel has opened in Baldwin Village

Hannah Stein has opened the doors to a place Toronto couples have been hankering for: a cheap and cheerful spot to tie the knot. Her new Vegas-style wedding chapel, Two of Hearts, is dripping in red and pink decor and retro heart motifs and feels like a Valentine’s Day fever dream. It’s just down the street from the AGO in Baldwin Village, and along with places like Love Shack Chapel, it’s one of the few venues in the city where lovers can book a zippy, kitschy and legally binding ceremony.

Review: Alan Doyle steers a joyful ship in 'Tell Tale Harbour'

Alan Doyle, the iconic frontman of the Newfoundland folk band Great Big Sea, didn’t need to sing one line to make it clear that he’d be the most beloved part of Tell Tale Harbour at Mirvish’s Royal Alexandra Theatre. At the opening matinee, I squeezed through the entryway packed with merch, including Doyle’s books and hoodies emblazoned with his name, and when the stage lights began to rise on the happy-go-lucky performer centre-stage, the audience could barely contain their Canadian kindness. T...

Toronto’s Michelin Guide was just updated. Here are all the new starred restaurants

The Michelin Guide rolled its 125-year-old tires into town last night with all the pomp of a red carpet gala. Its fourth Toronto awards ceremony brought the region’s glittering tally of restaurants in the book up to 106. While the 2024 awards broke ground for venturing beyond the downtown core, this year’s growth was slimmer, with only one new single-star inductee, one green star for sustainability and a returning favourite’s promotion to the two-star club.

The Great Unbuild

Mayne Island is a small outpost located between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland. At just 21 square kilometres, it has sandstone beaches, rolling orchards, old-growth trails and orcas that regularly swim through nearby Active Pass. Locals are obsessively eco-minded; here, raincatchers and solar panels are as common as fences and flower pots.In 2019, Vancouver couple Clinton Cuddington and Monica Berdin bought an ’80s family home and barn on the island overlooking the Navy Channel. Initiall...

Why the co-creator of Degrassi tried to stop screenings of the TIFF doc about the show

The world of Degrassi has no shortage of drama. But its latest behind-the-scenes plot twist has nothing to do with a zit-based disaster, a thong scandal or an exam-answers side hustle.On Monday, the show’s co-creator Linda Schuyler, who’s been with the Degrassi franchise for more than four decades, filed a lawsuit with the Ontario Superior Court in hopes of halting future screenings of Lisa Rideout’s documentary Degrassi: Whatever It Takes.

What went down at TIFF’s Variety cover party with Channing Tatum

Variety throws film festivals’ most exclusive parties with the biggest names, and Friday’s Toronto edition made good on the tradition, with A-listers including the magazine’s guests of honour and cover stars Channing Tatum and director Derek Cianfrance as well as Barbie Ferreira, Arian Moayed and Lena Góra in attendance.Held at Petros82, an upscale Greek restaurant that has been rebranded as RBC House for the duration of the festival, the two-hour event felt like a TGIF cocktail-hour...

Eight Years of School. Zero Job Offers.

Everyone’s saying it, and I’m living it. The most educated cohort in history is also the most chronically underemployed. It can take years for current grads to land a job in their field—and that’s if they’re lucky. I’m one of the displaced. I’m nearing 30 years old, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Montreal with my wife, and I’ve spent more than eight years in school all in order to break into the industry that I’m now, by every measure, more than qualified for.

Review: Two hybrid dance pieces close 2025 SummerWorks fest

Toronto’s annual SummerWorks Performance Festival tends to offer an endurance test for the imagination where you can tumble from one genre-bending performance into another as the city’s theatres become laboratories for the avant-garde. In its closing weekend, I saw two works that live side by side in my memory even as they differed in style and intention. Both explored memory, loss, and the body’s way of carrying history — one did so with devastating intimacy, the other with cerebral play.

Inside The Sorry Girls co-founder Kelsey MacDermaid's semi-secret city hall wedding with a backyard bash reveal

Kelsey MacDermaid, the 33-year-old co-founder of the YouTube channel The Sorry Girls, and Elliott Charbonneau, a 33-year-old business operations lead at a blockchain data company, met over Hinge and started dating during the particularly frigid February of 2021. After long late-night phone calls and alternating weekends at each other’s homes, Elliott moved into Kelsey’s place in September of 2022. They knew they were life partners, but with weddings being a hassle (and a steep expense), the pair...

The best places to eat and drink in Simcoe and Grey counties

82 Sykes St. N., Meaford, lovebird.beer1 This past spring, Alex Chramow and Emily Fonberg packed up Lovebird Brewing, their boutique Thornbury brewery, and moved it up the road to Meaford. The new location has two things the old one didn’t: a kitchen and a sit-down dining room. So they tapped chef Ryan Praskey (formerly of the Oxley and the Queen and Beaver), who now serves Acadian barbecue with East Coast kindness at Belle Marche (named after the Cape Breton area where his grand­parents live)....

Canada Needs a National Vaccination Registry

Measles is the most contagious virus on earth. It creates scenarios that could have been ripped from science fiction—for example, a woman walks into a room where someone coughed two hours earlier and catches a virus that could permanently damage her brain. As an immunologist, scientist and professor of medicine, my life’s work is understanding how vaccinations can prevent situations exactly like that one and protect health in the long term. You could say I’m the opposite of an anti-vaxxer.

“We had to live in a construction zone”: One Toronto family’s four-month insurance nightmare

Our house, a modest 105-year-old three-bedroom semi-detached at Yonge and Lawrence, has been through a lot—and so have we. My husband, Kourosh, and I bought it in 2019, about a year and a half after I had my first son, Givan, and while I was pregnant with my second son, Tiam. We signed up for property, car and life insurance with Co-operators at the same time.Over Family Day weekend this year, I noticed a yellow stain in the corner of our living room ceiling. At first, we didn’t think much of it.

Inside a double-wedding blowout in Canada and Brazil

Caroline Akisch, a 37-year-old freelance journalist (who writes frequently for Toronto Life), and Maurício Yin Vieira, a 34-year-old market researcher, met on Hinge in 2019. She was in Toronto and he was in Niagara, and after dating long-distance for a year, they moved into Caroline’s apartment as a temporary arrangement that became permanent when the pandemic hit. In August of 2024, Maurício proposed on a trip to Brazil...

The city may spend $350,000 a year on rat czars

Things we know about rats: they carry fleas and lice and were partly responsible for history’s deadliest plagues, they giggle inaudibly when tickled, they can carry twice their body weight in pizza, and there are a horrifying number of them in Toronto.With construction noise and vibration making rat nests inhospitable, warmer winters extending their breeding seasons and a buffet of curbside garbage available all summer long...

Inside a vibrant, summery wedding celebration at the Toronto Botanical Gardens

Melina Sabeti-Mehr, a 32-year-old arts programmer and curator, and Zach Van Horne, a 36-year-old social worker, met on a blind date in 2015. They had both recently gotten out of long-term relationships and decided to just be friends, but they soon developed feelings for each other. Eighteen months later, they moved in together. After nine years of dating, the couple got engaged at the Three Speed in Bloordale. A year later, in 2024, they got married at the Toronto Botanical Gardens, surrounded b...

The owner of this new takeout counter ate over 100 different breakfast sandwiches in the name of research

If there’s one thing Toronto loves more than a sandwich, it’s a breakfast sandwich. This past Father’s Day, Dad’s Breakfast and Coffee, a new takeout counter in the city’s west end, burst onto the city’s breakfast scene, cracking eggs and taking names. Co-owner Phil Akkawi, former owner of long-standing speakeasy the Libertine, and his two business partners dreamed of opening a breakfast-based business worthy of a standing ovation.
Load More