In 2022, youth unemployment rates hit a record low. By 2025, 437,000 people aged 15 to 24 were unemployed and looking for work, up 57 percent from 290,000 in 2022. Today, Canada's unemployment rate is at 6.5 percent, up 0.1 percent from Aug 2026. The Canadian economy lost 68,000 jobs in September, 48,000 of those lost among youth aged 15-24. Young people remained unemployed the longest, with teenagers hit hardest.

This wasn’t happening in the shadowed back alleys of the internet, but right under its streetlights, roots above ground and unmasked. All we had to do to find it was look. So why, as a society, weren’t we looking?

As I ran alongside the riverbank on a clear, crisp fall afternoon in my new city, following a dirt path through a canopy of trees just beginning to turn colour, I should have felt relaxed. Instead, the moment when I normally let go, letting the music from my headphones seep into my consciousness and my mind drift and clear, didn’t come.

There’s a quote from the late French philosopher Simone Weil that’s been reverberating in my head ever since reading the harrowing CNN article: “To exclude human beings […] thrusting them down to the state of social outcasts […] this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the universe. […] We all have a share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If only we could understand, it should wring tears of blood from us.” (We

A man makes his way through a crowded bar. He sees a small space, and a two-second window to squeeze through it. He places a hand on a man’s shoulder to pass behind him, and soon after, a hand on the small of a woman’s back to pass by her. An intimate act, taken quietly in front of many, he assumed a familiarity that was never earned. This is where it starts. Moments like these are where it starts to show its face.

In March 2026, CNN reported findings after a months-long investigation into a website and chat space that instructed men on how to drug and secretly sexually assault their wives and partners (Fact Check, Yahoo News, and MSN). It quickly became dubbed the “online rape academy.” Since then, the internet has erupted in backlash, outrage, and defensiveness regarding the exact number of men involved—thousands, regardless of debate.

As part of a college women’s studies seminar, a quote from The Robber Bride was frequently discussed. In it, Margaret Atwood addresses the concept of the male gaze, writing: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” For many of us in the class, the idea of constantly surveilling ourselves to meet men’s expectations was unsettling.

At 8:37 a.m. local time, as my mother slept just minutes away from her alarm, she drowned in the Gorkha district of Nepal, along the Nepal-Tibet border. As ice and rock collapsed from a glacier high in the Himalayas, water surged downstream via the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi, and Trishuli rivers, sweeping her home away with chunks of bridge, building, and road.

A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now.

In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, there’s a twenty-page chapter where the characters disappear from the stage. Time passes in the 1920s, and we witness their summer home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, begin its return to the Earth. That same decade, outside the world of novels but a sure-footed setting for one, a small red brick house was built up the hill from Kempenfelt Bay. A century later, it will be forked from the ground—expropriated for a freeway expansion in a sm

To every young person who feels like your body is failing you—no matter how hard your mind fights: I see you. I was you. I aged out of foster care with no parents to call, no safety net, and a body that had stopped telling me when I was hungry, thirsty, or even where I was in space. For a decade, I lived with trauma and an eating disorder. I was good at surviving through my intellect. I could think my way through almost any problem—I didn’t realize how steeply my body was fai

How are grief, isolation, and loneliness distinct but also braided together in friendships? And what do those distinctions/braiding look like specifically for disabled folks?

Growing up, I often wondered about my family’s history. The tales of lost generations and ancestors seemed to reside behind a screen of mist. I liked to ask my parents about their youth, what my hometown was like back then, and compare it with the history I’d learned myself. Sometimes the two accounts stand in stark contrast. Other times, they’re a mirror. Either way, these tales always had a mythical quality, as if they belonged in an otherworldly space and time.

This kind of incisive discourse has permeated the public sphere and digital landscape since the pandemic. Initially, like many of my peers, I lapped it up eagerly, adopted each new phrase and the sentiments behind it, and embraced apps for friendship and weekly dinners. They delivered on their promise to introduce me to friendly faces and proved to be solid options for moving to a different city or entering a new life stage: University, postgraduate, and working life.

Deploying mass surveillance tactics, using intimidation and upgraded weapons, and isolating vulnerable people to specifically enact brutality on them is somehow never considered the inciting incident.

Doug Ford’s changes to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) came into effect on Aug. 1: The maximum portion of provincial funding provided as non-repayable grants dropped from 85 percent to 25 percent. The remaining 75 percent (or more) is now distributed as repayable loans. But there hasn’t just been a change to OSAP; the seven-year tuition freeze for publicly assisted colleges and universities has also ended.