On the opening track of Pink Martini's latest album, lead singer China Forbes croons, "Everywhere I go, I see a world designed for you and me"—and every time you spin the record, you hear songs from all over the world. This Saturday, one lone performance at Massey Hall will echo in a mass of different languages, sung in a million more exquisite styles. Says founder and artistic director Thomas M. Lauderdale of the unique......

It's one of the crapshoots of the daily commute. When you get to your bus stop with no bus or streetcar in sight, should you walk to the next stop and hope the bus catches up or just stay put and wait? According to the New Scientist, Harvard mathematician Scott Kominers has dedicated lighthearted academic study to this very question. His solution? "When both options seem reasonably attractive," he says, you should be lazy......

Provincial and federal elections in Canada are largely determined by quirks of geography. That is, the number of seats each party receives in the legislature is rather independent of the popular vote and has more to do with the way people of particular political leanings are concentrated (or not) within arbitrarily-drawn districts. This makes pre-election polling an interesting exercise in extrapolation; a particular percentage of popular support could translate into quite a range of......

In Craig Silverman’s most recent Globe Life blog entry, entitled "How to lose friends and make people hate you," (cute, but sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) he discusses a Harvard Business Review study about likeability in the workplace. According to the study, people won't want to work with you if you act smug, sarcastic, or bored or if you obsess over your own workload. Eh, this is boring. And we have ten million other important things......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

The Times Higher Education Supplement and Newsweek have both come out with long lists of the world's best universities. It's not much of a surprise, but the Ivy League figures prominently with Harvard and Yale in the top five for both lists. The British based THES ranks Oxford and Cambridge prominently while Newsweek relegates Oxford to eighth place. Canadian universities stack up well. U of T, at #18, is the best Canadian university on the......

Those of you putting off watching Mean Girls until those exorbitant movie rental prices come down ($4?! Ridiculous!!) can breathe a sigh of relief. A hot, fire-haired, pre-bulimic sigh of relief. Every year, the University of Toronto presents a free film in the back field of their downtown campus. Past films have included Good Will Hunting - presumably fitting for the U of T crowd since it traces the intellectual and emotional growth of a......

The Globe and the Star both report that Michael "The Smartest Prime Minister We Could Have" Ignatieff will be leaving the ivy covered walls of Harvard for the uh, slightly less ivy covered walls of the University of Toronto. Ignatieff, or Iggy as he's known to his close friends, is one of the names being thrown around as a potential future leader of the Liberal Party (next to such names as Bob Rae, Frank MacKenna......

- Rogers, having bought Fido, is now buying Sprint's parent company as well. Rogers calls the deal "another logical and healthy step in the natural consolidation of the Canadian communications market." TOist calls it a bummer. - Monte Solberg blackberries to his blog from the floor of Parliament. A play by play of those exciting non-confidence events: "They can't believe that their iron-grip on power and pocketnooks might be loosed. Kilgour just voted with the......

There's a new sheriff in town, and his name's Ujjal Dosanjh. The Canadian Health Minister says he won't let Internet pharmacies ship Canada's prescription drug supply to the U.S. Dosanjh and his newfound toughness comes as the United States still can't figure out their flu vaccine or soaring drug costs. The government is considering cracking down on doctors whose signatures allow the export of our drugs, Dosanjh said to CTV News. This comes on the......