SHIFTHEADS: Canada’s Small Towns Often Have One Grocery Store. That's Not an Accident

Grocery competition in Canada is vanishing from your town before you ever realize it's gone. The grocer down the street didn't just win your business. They bought the land next door to make sure nobody else ever could. When you drive through rural Canada and see only one option for food, that's not…

NEW - Half of Those Players Probably Didn't Want to Be There

The US Canada hockey rivalry just landed in uncomfortable territory, and you felt it watching that clip. You saw the laugh. You saw the AI video of Brady Tkachuk appearing to insult Canadians, fake and taken down. But statistically, based on the last election, about half those players probably didn…

Shiftheads - Colombia Got Less Violent After Escobar Died. It Also Now Ships Four Times More Cocaine

The Pablo Escobar and El Mencho comparison lands differently once you hear the Colombia data. Violence dropped significantly after Escobar was killed in 1993. That is true. Colombia's cocaine exports are now four or five times higher than they were at the time. Also true, and it complicates the who…

You Keep Every Handwritten Letter. You Delete Every Email

Handwritten letters sitting in a drawer right now, you know exactly which ones they are. You have not thrown a single one out. Your inbox from the same period is gone. Ryan's army-enlisted friend couldn't take a phone into five months of training, suggested writing letters instead, and Ryan realize…

NEW - Electric Circus Shouldn't Have Happened (That's Why It Worked)

Canadian TV nostalgia for Electric Circus hits different when you realize nobody in charge thought it should work. You got an invite, you paid your own way to Toronto, you showed up at those garage doors on Queen Street, and the camera found you. No filter. No preview. No control. The budget was es…

Your Favourite Show Is Already Booking Your Next Vacation Rental

Movie tourism just turned your watchlist into a travel bucket list. You can rent the actual cottage from Heated Rivalry on Airbnb right now for $248.10 a night in Muskoka, and that price is almost certainly 10 times lower than it should be. Downton Abbey's filming location became one of Britain's t…

The Letter You Keep Meaning to Write

Letters to your kids about who they are before you have to leave them. You've probably thought about it. Maybe you started. Sunny Dhillon started writing his because a racist incident at a playground in Ottawa scared his daughter in kindergarten, and he knew exactly what she was about to carry. Wh…

NEW - First the Calculator, and now AI Is Doing the Work. That's Exactly the Problem

AI and job satisfaction are moving in opposite directions and most workplaces haven't noticed yet. You finish the day having produced more than you ever could alone. You also finish it without the feeling that you did anything. A Harvard research study called the Progress Principle found that peopl…

Your Tech Keeps Breaking On Purpose

Buggy software frustrates you, and the people who shipped it felt the same way when they sent it. You open your new laptop and a folder flickers, disappears, comes back wrong. You do the update and something that worked yesterday stops working. This isn't your device aging out. This is a decision s…

Shiftheads - The CIA Made a Sex Tape and Decided Nobody Would Believe It

CIA secret operations history has a documented file titled Happy Days. It's 1959. Indonesia. The CIA wants to discredit a foreign leader named Sukarno, so they find a lookalike, film a fake sex tape, screen it internally, and conclude that nobody will believe it. The operation that was too unbeliev…