If you have attended any institute of higher learning, it is inevitable that you've endured a lecture with an overeager student ready to voice their opinion every five seconds. While full engagement in class stimulates healthy debate and knowledge exchange, some people take it to extreme lengths. Whether it be incessant stories about obscure 16th century musical instruments illustrated in a textbook, the opportunity to turn a discussion on grammar into a stump speech......

Behind the scenes, we at Torontoist are known to pedantically and tediously debate the use of em dashes—like these—and the proper form of an ellipsis (technically, "…" is more correct than "..." See? Tedious!). While we're fans of splitting grammatical hairs and clearly make our own share of errors from time to time, it's hardly as embarrassing as this conspicuous mistake printed in student agendas distributed to almost three hundred Toronto schools: as reported......

Photo by cl-s from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Sex was perhaps best summed-up by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the timeless cinematic touchstone Cruel Intentions when her character explains to Selma Blair's that "everybody does it, it's just that nobody talks about it." Here to remedy that very problem is the University of Toronto's own Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity, now the first institution in Canada to offer a graduate program in Sexual......

People work hard for their money, but don't make their money work hard for them. It's time to fix that. Economist whips your income into shape with smart, practical advice. Photo by wvs from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. While on vacation, Economist overheard a man talking about his experience at Purdue: "In America, you have to do four years of university. It's not cheap either. It's like $2,000 a year." The Economist almost choked on......

With today marking the first day back to school for most students in the city, we take this opportunity to let parents know who runs the institutions that will mould your children into upstanding young citizens...or at least the people who ran the show in Leaside 50 years ago. Founded in 1920, the Leaside Board of Education operated out of Leaside High School by the time today's ad appeared. Besides the high school, the......

Toronto gave scramble intersections their first shot on city streets in more than fifty years, as one launched yesterday at Yonge and Dundas. NOW had a video of it yesterday, Spacing's Wire will have a timelapse video shot by Sam Javanrouh later today (here's a preview), and we might have something extra-special on Torontoist this weekend. Never has legally crossing a street been so exciting. Good news for Toronto students! The twenty-three Toronto school......

Mayor David Miller has already named deputy city manager Joe Pennachetti as the favoured replacement for city manager Shirley Hoy, who tendered her resignation yesterday. Torontoist can't find anything funny about this story and is actively soliciting suggestions for jokes. Any contributions which include the phrase "stop calling me Shirley" will be automatically disqualified. Workers at the soon-to-be-closed GM truck plant in Oshawa are being offered a variety of incentives to ease them towards......

Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Flipping through your family's high school yearbooks can be an eye-opening experience. Besides seeing how your elders evolved through their awkward years, you gain an understanding of the environment that shaped them. The rebellious streak now expected of teenagers tends to be suppressed in yearbooks published before the 1970s except for in-jokes......

It's always nice when the place where students unload most of their OSAP money gives something back. Canada's Firkin Group of Pubs has started a clever-ish “Un-scholarship” fund/contest thinger that'll give away $25,000 annually to current post-secondary students and recent grads who have the best sob stories about their debt situation. The most pitiable schmucks will be voted on by the general public and sent on to final round judging! Weeeee. We're probably blowing......

Last we checked on a group who have now been dubbed the "Fight Fees 14," they were loudly chanting "Shame on you!" to police officers because they were slightly annoyed over increasing residence fees at New College. According to an online petition and press release, fourteen of the students are now facing criminal charges. After turning themselves in, the students were released under strict bail conditions that prevent them from associating, except in class......

Last Thursday, we wrote about OCAD's awkward new name—OCAD University—and asked readers to come up with some alternatives. The school, a university since 2006, wants to ditch its college reputation without, well, ditching the "C" in its acronym that stands for "College." Thankfully, some of you pitched in to help. Our favourite suggestions from readers were Svend's Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson–inspired "This Is Not A College"; deepsalia's "Ontario Centre for Art and Design," which preserves......

In what might not be the wisest move, OCAD—the Ontario College of Art and Design—wants to be called OCAD University. Yes: Ontario College of Art and Design University. Sort of. According to the Globe, the school's new appendage is the result of "creative brainstorming" throughout the school, and follows a branding expert's advice that the school's acronym "OCAD" not change (which would typically be the route to take when one of the words in......

Every year, U of T's student newspaper The Varsity publishes at least one joke issue, and every year in recent memory, it has managed to either seriously offend a few people, confuse a whole lot of people, or just not be funny. Enter the quest of AlwaysQuestion. There was, if you remember, a protest and sit-in over rising student fees, and a video accusing police of "police brutality." Then there was President David Naylor's......

Yesterday afternoon, a group named AlwaysQuestion organized a "day of action" protesting a fee increase for New College residence students at the University of Toronto. The day was to end with a sit-in at Simcoe Hall intended to garner the group a meeting with U of T President David Naylor, to get "the proposed fee increase removed from the University Affairs Board meeting," and to get fifteen minutes at that meeting for a "presentation......

Seriously? Photo by sevennine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.......

Image: Cicada Design/Diamond + Schmitt Architects If you seem to be noticing Ryerson everywhere these days, you're not imagining it. Though it's been around since 1948 and been granting degrees since 1971, it's only during the last few years that the university has embarked on a massive expansion plan and branding campaign, drastically raising its physical and academic profile. Devoid of any real charm for decades (save for the 1852 partial façade of the......

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com. Hi, I'm a stressed-out U. of T. student in the middle of midterms, and I'm always looking for good places to study. I'm sick of campus and tired of Starbucks, which is usually overcrowded (not to mention overrated, overpriced etc.). I know Futures has good food and it's open late, but it's too loud. I just want a friendly......

At the Interior Design Show this past weekend, British innovator-icon Tom Dixon lamented the impossibility of creative rebellion in today's art and design world. In the eighties, he said, postmodern design values were near-universal, and thus easy to subvert. In the oughties, however, the aesthetic is increasingly fractured, and there is no one standard to either strive for or strain against. If anything goes and nothing is new, how are today's students to design......

It is, right now, just after midnight. It is very, very, very cold outside. And Ryerson's Engineering Student Society is currently in the thirteenth hour of shoving a Volkswagen Beetle around their quad, with more than ten very, very cold hours left to go. Why would anyone sacrifice their warmth in -15° weather? This time around, the same zany kids who dye their bodies purple for fun (and engineering pride) are doing some crazy......

The final lineup for the benefit concert for the O'Keefe family has been announced. Organized by Andrew Copland—John O'Keefe's close friend and the Duke of Gloucester's head bartender—the concert aims both to honour John O'Keefe, who was killed walking home from the bar a month and a half ago, and to raise money for an education fund for John's son, Iain. This Sunday, March 2, the Mod Club will host a mix of Toronto......

Phase Two of the much-blogged Obay campaign is hitting the streets, having been "unveiled" in a press conference at Centennial College this morning. Linda Franklin, President & CEO of Colleges Ontario—the advocate for the province's 24 colleges of applied arts and technology—was there to divulge details of the "top secret" campaign. Shocker: it has to do with parental mind control.......

The above "Obey Spray" illustration is one of a series of Madvertisements (also featuring products such as "Empowermints" and conditions such as "Excessive Patriotism Disorder") by media tigress Carly Stasko, originally published in the January/February 2002 issue of This Magazine. Look familiar? Says Stasko of the "Obay" campaign for Ontario colleges, they're "so similar that I'm wondering if we just had the same idea or if they have riffed off of my original." (We......

Since fake pharmaceutical ads for a drug called "Obay" starting appearing across Ontario (and elsewhere) last week, everyone from street artist Frank Shepard Fairey (aka OBEY) to Scientologists to comedian Maggie Cassella has been fingered as the culprit behind them. Last Friday, three days after the ads seem to have launched, we traced them, with no small amount of confidence, to a substantially less dramatic source––Colleges Ontario, an advocacy organization representing twenty-four colleges across......

This, today's Globe and Mail editorial cartoon. The cartoon was published out of context below the Letters to the Editor in today's Globe. But it's very likely a reference to this news story (about which the Globe published a story in a sidebar on Saturday, but nothing in today's paper). Just like the math on the board, we didn't get it. Thanks to Kevin for the tip.......

Today we celebrate Ontario's first ever Family Day. Banks and government offices are closed, but many malls and stores are open for last-minute Family Day shopping. As reported by the Sun, the Fraser Institute released its 2008 rankings of Ontario elementary schools, with most schools in the GTA faring reasonably well. If you have stupid kids, you can use the report to find a lousy school to send them to so people won't blame......

At first we assumed it was Scientology. After all, who else has the money to produce and purchase space for such glossy anti-pharmaceutical ads, which have been popping up all over transit shelters and buses in Ontario and Montreal? Google wasn't much help, and their Blog Search just pointed us to other people as perplexed as we were. And poor spellers with domination fantasies. Searches of domain registrations weren't particularly fruitful, especially after the......

Today is a Valentine's Day that Kathleen Wynne will never forget. The Miss G___ Project is encouraging Ontario residents to contact the current Minister of Education today and politely demand that a Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) program be added to the Ontario Secondary School curriculum. The Miss G___ Project for Equity in Education has been fighting for three years for a WGS program in Ontario high schools. Kathleen Wynne called the project "the most......

Provincial Conservative leader John Tory, battling to stay employed in the face of disaffected fellow partiers who want to hold a leadership review next month, says in a letter on his website that he has travelled the province listening to members and coming up with ideas to address their concerns. The Tories are lucky; a leader who also had a job as an MPP probably wouldn't have time for stuff like that. Provincial education......

Behold what might eventually become of Sniderman's Corner: an attractive first rendering of the Ryerson Student Learning Centre. To be built at Yonge and Gould on the former sites of Sam The Record Man and the freshly-vacated Future Shop, the building represents Ryerson's desperately coveted access to the Yonge Street strip. To be designed by critical darlings KPMB Architects and Daoust Lestage, the institutionally glassy building will incorporate the historically designated Sam's marquee, which......

Being a high school student in Rexdale’s Jamestown community comes with its share of obstacles: at the time of this post, 55% don’t finish high school, and 44% of families are single-parent households with an average income of $22,000. Many are new to Canada, and strange labour laws can put immigrants with medical degrees in front of deep fryers instead of utilizing their proper skills. Many homes have more than one family living in......