Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently engaged in a federal by-election campaign. This weekly column is an attempt to offer a behind the scenes glimpse into what it’s like to be that mysterious Other: a politician. There is, of course, no multi-partisan training manual for new candidates on how one is to behave during [...]

Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently engaged in a federal by-election campaign. This weekly column is an attempt to offer a behind the scenes glimpse into what it’s like to be that mysterious Other: a politician. Now that three out of four major party campaigns have offices up and running, our focus has turned [...]

Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently engaged in a federal by-election campaign. This weekly column is an attempt to offer a “behind the scenes” glimpse into what it’s like to be that mysterious Other: a politician. A strange thing is happening here in Toronto Centre: Barack Obama seems to have become a candidate. Not [...]

Torontoist Environment Editor Chris Tindal is currently engaged in a federal by-election campaign. This weekly column is an attempt to offer a “behind the scenes” glimpse into what it’s like to be that mysterious Other: a politician. Right before Christmas (and just days before the deadline) the prime minister finally called a by-election for the [...]

We’re going to take a break from our usual Torontoist style in this post because the passing of John Harkness, the film critic for Now magazine since its inception in 1981, is something that has particular importance for me. As the writer of Torontoist’s weekly “Film Friday” column, which, as you know, very often quotes [...]

This Friday, November 16, we (Newmindspace) will be hosting our very first lightsaber battle! This summer at Burning Man, we witnessed a 10,000-person lightsaber battle put on by a camp called Watto’s Junkyard, easily the largest lightsaber battle since the Jedi Civil War. However, with our limited resources, we realized that without a large donation [...]

With a little over twelve hours to go until this year’s Capture the Flag, Lori and I are feeling anxious and excited. Not entirely sure the 3,000 glowsticks we’ve purchased will be enough, not confident that we will be able to handle the crowd, and not certain that the game will go smoothly at all, [...]

“It’s hard to beat the system / when we’re standing at a distance / so we keep waiting / waiting on the world to change.” - JOHN MAYER How Do You Get To Massey Hall? I don’t know, I only came close. I can at least tell you that practice has nothing to do with [...]

Photo by Hamish Grant. Customer loyalty is a hard thing for a company to get, but once they’ve got it, it takes a hell of a lot of bad work to lose. With Amato Pizza, I was one of the people who happily ate from the pizza place in spite of the protests against it [...]

This was Toronto’s downtown at 10:30 a.m. yesterday, as seen from Lakeshore Boulevard near the Canadian Exhibition Grounds. Air Quality Ontario’s Air Quality Index measured a daytime high of 54, which put Toronto’s air well into the “Poor” category. The day before, the AQI hit 59. What to do? I ran errands on my bike [...]

Hi, My Name is Chris, and I’m a Politician I have a confession to make. I’m not like you. I’m not a normal, well-intentioned, benefit-of-the-doubt receiving human. Of course, I don’t actually believe that. I phrase it that way because when I was first nominated as a candidate for the last federal election, that’s how [...]

On the way to the sold-out Bunch Family Salon at The Arts and Letters Club last Saturday, my eight year old son looks into the window of our subway car and sees an alternate universe; it’s just us, but backwards. After he asks me to call him by his inverse reality name, “ttenraG,” he ponders [...]