I wise person I know once said if you drop into almost any city council meeting anywhere, you find corruption. The decline in local journalism means stuff like that just doesn’t get investigated.

Peak of pink tree season in Vancouver today.

Today my intern from 15 years ago is getting married, and I get to do the toast. Over the years he became one of my dearest friends and read at my wedding, ages ago.

While publishing won’t love you back, the people in it sometimes will. ❤️

I wish all public media services and the governments who oversee them could afford to look less at running things because of the way they’ve always been, and more at what is possible. Legislation takes time and getting public buy-in takes time. But it seems we don’t have the conversations.

Public service media: funding and governance options The BBC’s Charter is up for renewal in 2027. To coincide with the start of the renewal process in late 2025, the British Academy commissioned this collection of 12 policy briefs to help inform decisio...

@emma-wilkie.bsky.social and I talk about this in our 2025 paper published by the British Academy, “Public Media Funding and Governance: The Case in Canada.” www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications...

Canadians will find it ironic that if the BBC had the same tax-based funding model as Canada’s @cbcradiocanada.bsky.social, it would cost much less per citizen to run it.
The BBC is funded through a license fee model, based on TV ownership.

Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.

React and contribute to collective reflection: AI and Age Assurance A journey to discover to share your point of view.

Are you a Canadian aged 17 –23? Your voice matters in shaping AI & age assurance policy.

Following our fourth #GenZAI Forum in Halifax, you can now share your perspective through Make.org's civic dialogue platform here: tinyurl.com/yyzny4mn

If you want to “waste” 30 mins looking up all the songs in this thread to see if you like them, I recommend!

That’s such a good album. I hadn’t thought of it in years, now playing.

An AI company set out to fix news deserts. Instead, it copied local journalists’ work - Poynter Nota shut down its news sites after Axios and Poynter found dozens of plagiarized quotes, phrases and photos

Nota News - sold as solving the ‘news deserts’ problem with AI - stories for $10 each! - was in fact stealing and regurgitating work from local journalists and it seems *other newsroom clients* using its tools. Excellent reporting @angelanfu.bsky.social for Poynter www.poynter.org/ethics-trust...

Can’t take the tinned fish girlies seriously until they start taking pickled herring seriously

I get rid of all movie tie-in covers. Hate them. Except this one. I laugh every time I look at it.

I like the random inset of the smaller honse.

Other search engines (like Chrome) let you disable the AI summary but until today I only knew of one laborious way to go around it in Safari (<More < Web in the search bar).

You learn something new every day!

A student just clued me in to the fact that in Safari you can add the search term “-AI” to get classic Google search results instead of an AI summary.

I have so many questions about this story, including how these 7 dogs escaped and what they were doing in the van in the first place. But everyone seems very confident that it was the corgi who was in charge. www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

The Maris Review, vol 97 This week's theme is homecomings What I read this week The Fountain by Casey Scieszka For transparency: Casey is a member of my writing group. That said, she joined when this novel was pretty much...

"Finding generous readers are what makes the whole book publishing enterprise worth it in the first place. We cannot allow such generous readers to become skeptical that authors and/or publishers are trying to trick them. They are the lifeblood of this business!"

💯 @maris.bsky.social (1/2)

Ottawa’s Transit Gong Show | The Walrus How the capital city’s dream of a world-class transit system became a nightmare

I love Brett Popplewell’s story about it thewalrus.ca/ottawas-tran...

The failure of Ottawa’s transit system and the tacit allowing of same is one of the weirdest stories about Canada I have heard, I think, over the last 10 years.

Basically, take the amount of money you think your favorite author gets, halve it, and then halve it again, and you have a number that's probably a lot closer to their actual earnings from writing.

"But I don't think they make that much!"

Halve that. Halve it again.

Security guard charged following Dollarama altercation in Winnipeg A security guard was charged Monday after using brass knuckles during an altercation at a Winnipeg Dollarama on Saturday.

The Retail Council of Canada says a “cause for action” is needed after an altercation between an Indigenous man and a security guard at a Dollarama in Winnipeg, which ended in the security guard beating the man with brass knuckles.

Opinion | You Can’t Shame People Into Vaccinating Their Kids. I Should Know.

“When I hear stories about children getting sick from measles, I feel angry. But not at the parents. I’m frustrated at those knowingly spreading false and misleading claims, and profiting from it.” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/o...

i'm a big fan of magazines, investigative reporting, and longform, all of which requires staff and institutions, but the really really dire thing that indie media can't replace? the fucking wire services

I want to be 16 again! Watching Harold and Maude when death was an abstract concept and still funny.

I thought about this for a day and came back for more: I like how they are anti-establishment. They haven’t had to compromise their principles (they haven’t yet actually done anything in life, but let’s set that aside for a moment.) They’re a reflection of what real human values should be.

This is on Monday and all are welcome!

I feel like they perfectly understand the meaning of life. If only they didn’t break so many phone screens.

It’s really good to have a 13-16yo in your life.

The Half-Life of Writing Rule Why do some projects take forever?

I wrote about why magazine writers file late, why so many book manuscripts need extensions, and why we all basically feel like we're taking too long to do stuff that should be easy. open.substack.com/pub/peoplewh...