For the second consecutive weekend, protests around the world have mobilized en masse whilst police and government forces continue to crack down on dissenters. October 24th saw nearly a million demonstrators walking the streets of France. Protests in Italy, Serbia, Albania, and more all eclipsed hundreds of thousands, followed by sweeping mass arrests and tens of thousands of riot police deployed.

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?

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.

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.

Youth are increasingly faced with climate anxiety and strong opinions about wars they aren’t signing up for, yet will inherit. The environmental cost of war shows that these two issues are interconnected and that this data is not being provided to them.

And at the peak of FIFA 2026, there’s an undeniable sense of unity and community ritual as bars draw crowds that spill out onto the street. Everyone seems to be in a flurry of doom and uncertainty. For a few months, they believe that their team—and by extension themselves, the underdog—can win in a world that feels like a magnet for loss.

In 1869, the Canadian Immigration Act discriminated against immigrants on the grounds of class and disability. The federal government enacted further measures to restrict Chinese immigration, including a head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. Additional racial and national restrictions were introduced after the First World War: Under a revised Immigration Act in 1919, the government excluded specific groups from entering the country.

Young people are constantly criticized for being “too disconnected” from politics. Headlines often describe Generation Z as apathetic, distracted, or uninterested in civic engagement. Older generations frequently argue that young people spend more time scrolling through social media than paying attention to elections, policy, or democratic participation. Yet, this narrative ignores a much more important question: Why do so many young people feel disconnected from politics in

Half of Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) riders don’t feel safe using the system. At least, that’s the impression you might get scrolling through Councillor Brad Bradford’s (Beaches—East York) social media. He has made transit safety a major pillar of his mayoral campaign, arguing for increased regulation. His latest motion to place police officers at every station on Line 1 was approved in March.

Ahead of the FIFA world cup, Toronto officials have unveiled a new $12.5-million police command centre—the ‘centrepiece’ of the city’s security plans for the FIFA World Cup (CBC). Other ornamentations of this new city arrangement ahead of the World Cup include a counter-terrorism unit, stationed with semi-automatic rifles at ‘key locations,’ though they don’t point to any specific ‘threat’ spurring this new wave of enforcement.