When Eye published an article in August about how Toronto has no Gawker equivalent, and specifically faulted us for "all-consuming earnestness" and being unable to address the city's "gore," we didn't really have anything to say about it. Torontoist co-founder and NOW Online Editor Josh Errett does, though: in this week's issue of the already Torontoist-heavy mag, Errett cuts to the chase, chronicling the creation of Torontoist as proof positive that something like Gawker couldn't......

Torontoist has just been named by NOW staff as Toronto's best website and by NOW's readers as Toronto's best blog, all in this year's Best of T.O. feature. We couldn't be more delighted with the honour. Says NOW:Torontoist is often petulant and snarky, and seems uninterested in the world outside U of T (downtown campus only). Occasionally, its wall-of-text entries are dry and difficult to read, perhaps better suited to Wikipedia.Oh NOW, you do......

In the current issue of Toronto Life, Philip Preville attempts to argue for a big-box store in Leslieville. It's no easy task, but Preville's argument is pretty sound, resting on convenience (it'd be close to where people live), location (what else is going to go in its place?), cost (cheap!), and—oh yes—the environment (less driving = less pollution). Preville also says about the smartest thing we've yet heard about the development, which is that "instead......

Last week, Torontoist reported that the Alliance Atlantis–owned Cumberland Cinemas were going to be demolished to make room for a condo development, based on information from the Greater Yorkville Residents' Association (GYRA). In an effort to get some sort of initial confirmation before publishing last Tuesday's article, we tried to call Alliance Atlantis, but had no luck and decided to run the piece with the one source we had. Doing so was an error......

NOW is getting set to launch its new blog, NOW Daily, this week. Edited by former Torontoist editor/curmudgeon Josh Errett, it's promising "daily album reviews, a stable of online-only columnists, stage and live music recaps, breaking news and interviews. And, what with the wonders of the World Wide Web, a healthy amount of content will be interactive, like map mash-ups and reader reviews, and also multimedia, like playlists, podcasts and videos." About time. And also:......

Well, we've listed the films that are showing at this week's NXNE festival, but we haven't particularly shown any opinion about which you should go and see. Until now! Our pick, above all, is Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year in the Life of Andre Williams, which plays the NFB Cinema at 1:15 p.m. this Saturday. Tim Perlich at NOW complains, "[directors] Matthies and Todd are unable to put [Williams's] sad current state in proper......

Like it or not, big bad Rogers will be the exclusive provider of Apple's beautiful and magnificent and world-changing iPhone, and as each week goes by it's getting harder and harder to mitigate disgust for the former with adoration for the latter. It was nice, then, to find out that Bell turned their Norm MacDonald–voiced beaver into something truly great: a great big middle finger to Rogers (and Apple). Bell's ad in this week's NOW......

Read our Sprockets preview? Don’t have kids—or don’t care? Well, there’s… Not a great deal we can genuinely recommend instead, but there is some stuff. Obviously, the Images Festival continues, ending this Sunday night with the closing night gala Trading the Future at 7 p.m. Cinematheque Ontario is also running The Latest Wave: New Romanian Cinema, a retrospective of the latest hot films to come out of Romania to thundering critical acclaim and absolutely......

Couple of things going on with the films released this week. With Shutter, most interesting is that it’s based on a Thai horror film, but has been, in its Western remake, transplanted to Tokyo. Reasons? Well, either “all of Asia is basically the same thing, right?” or “people always think of scary pale girls with long black hair as being Japanese, anyway.” Okay, that’s not really that interesting (who cares about Asian horror films......

Forget Harlequin––the results from NOW's massive love and sex survey are now out. It's got all the usual features of the Love and Sex issue, like a front cover (at left) that'll make prudes just as mildly uncomfortable as the usual back American Apparel ad will, and tons of glorious, glorious data, this year from just under 6,000 respondents. Among the salient points from the forty questions: we are getting gayer ("sexual fluidity is on......

SEPT. 28, 2006: Torontoist publishes "Two Peas In A Pod," a poorly considered article making fun of Eye and Now for both deeming Nuit Blanche significant enough to feature on their covers the same week. JAN. 17, 2008: Eye Weekly publishes "Where does Toronto Life get all those great ideas?" a poorly considered article making fun of Toronto Life for also deeming the Zeidler family, Dave Meslin, Yonge Street, and Council's right wing significant......

NOW's yearly Best of Toronto issue is out, and amidst a slew of other winners (Cherry DiNovo is the Best MPP! CiRCA sweeps "Best Dance Club" and "Best club for an impromptu orgy"!), the alt weekly has named Spacing Toronto as the city's best blog. We're a bit jealous––we were Best Blog in 2005, and we'd definitely be up for winning again––but Spacing has been pretty awesome, consistently, since its formation. If anything, the......

So, what’s scarier: a zombie infestation or the melting of the polar ice caps? This is an urgent and legitimate question! And later this week, Toronto cineastes can compare and contrast, for just as the After Dark Festival winds down, the Planet in Focus International Environmental Film & Video Festival springs up. Running from October 24 to 28, Planet in Focus is the most acclaimed film festival of its environmentally-minded ilk. This year, to......

Another weekend of trade shows is upon us. The belle of the ball this year is the Green Living Show, but there are two other significant expos for which you should make room in your schedule: the Good Food Festival and the Yoga Show. This is the 15th year of the Good Food Festival at the International Centre on Airport Road. For $12 you can enjoy cooking demos, free samples and great prices on all......

If you picked up a copy of this week's Eye, you may have noticed that the text along the bottom of the cover claims that "It's official! Eye Weekly has the largest circulation of any urban weekly in Canada!*" Yipee! That asterisk leads to small text running up the side of the paper that reads "119,873 copies picked up each week. Verified Audit Circulation Interim Audit Report. April '06 - Sept. '06." The point......

Canadian rapper k-os has questionably hinted at a racist agenda at NOW Magazine after receiving a mediocre review. This week, NOW published a review of the new k-os album, "Atlantis: Hymns For Disco." Writer Jason Richards commented that the abundance of mainstream guests- including Sam Roberts and Buck 65 - "will only strengthen [k-os's] detractors' case that he's a crossover pop artist disguised as a true-school b-boy." Even so, Richards gave the album three N's......

Uh-oh. It seems that today's issues of Now Magazine and Eye Weekly have both run cover stories on the same event- the first time it's happened in, well, three weeks. But the double-coverage on Sept. 7 coincided with the Toronto International Film Festival (see here and here). Where as TIFF is said to be the most important film festival in the world, this time the publicist's wet dream is over... Nuit Blanche? Apparently it's......

We love Word on the Street but we always find there's way too much to do. So we've scoured the WOTS program and picked out the three things that you should try to hit up this Sunday at Queen's Park. Best of all, the whole event is free. 1) Margaret Atwood and the Long Pen (The Long Pen Tent, reading at 11am, signing all-day) Hear the grand dame of CanLit read from her new book.......

Well, you know, it can’t all be exciting glamorous press conferences for internationally famous film festivals where they reveal huge megastars are going to be attending, can it? Yeah, sometimes we have to cover the films that are coming out in cinemas now. And some weeks they’re all really boring. Invincible, for example. If we follow the ‘Snakes on a Plane’ style of naming, this would be called “Mark Wahlberg is an Unlikely Hero in......

With gas prices at hellishly high levels and lobbyists calling for government intervention in Ontario to lower prices, it seems that there's no better time for Who Killed the Electric Car?, an excellent documentary about the slow death of the EV1, General Motors' electric car. Quick backstory*: In 1990, The California Air Resources Board (CARB) targeted the source of California's pollution problem: auto exhaust. CARB created the Zero Emissions Mandate (ZEV), which required 2% of......

Does it seem a bit outrageous that NOW Magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year? That blurry photo? That is a 1997 cover featuring Radiohead. Perhaps this Torontoist thought it only came into existence when our escape from the suburbs was made possible by later curfews and a driver's license. Well, the festivities are afoot and the fashion department is taking it to the streets with NOW's Designer Challenge. Designers are being asked......

If you'd like to take thoroughly reading NOW Magazine's live show listings one step further, cautiously enter the Toronto section of Stillepost. The message board is frequented by musicians, promoters, and the like, so a head's up on upcoming shows can often be found. (Info on the Wolf Parade show on Aug. 5, for example, would've helped this person.) But the insider's scoop comes with its share of behind-the-scenes drama. The most recent is......

Hey Toronto! Today is the launch event for the first ever Humanitas Festival, "A festival of what was, is and could be Toronto". Starting at 6pm at the Cooler By The Lake Tent at the foot of Yonge Street, at the water’s edge, you can come on down and Join Mayor David Miller, City of Toronto Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, NOW Magazine’s Alice Klein and CBC Radio One 99.1 host Garvia Bailey......

Lately we've been hearing a lot about the seal hunt here in Toronto. Despite the fact that we're about as far removed, both geographically and culturally, from the ice floes as we can possible to be without leaving the country, the hunt and its busty celebrity detractors are splattered all over the pages of Now Magazine and Metro, among others. And that's okay - it's good to have an opinon about a very Canadian issue,......

Since we're not going to get a mounted award that we can hang in our storefront, we'll have to just tell you straight-up: NOW Magazine has named Torontoist the Best Blog in Toronto. Party on! The short description of our site, along with a nod to Spacing's Photoblog, is probably one of the nicest short descriptions ever written about us. Except, what is this about giving 'shout-outs' on the site? Whatever, it's still very nice.......

In the past week, much has been made about community building and social development as a means of preventing gang violence in troubled areas of the city. Mayor David Miller's reaction to gun violence - when pressured by media and mayoral wannabe's - was to circumvent progressive means of crime stopping and hire more police officers. And, for this, he's fallen out of favour with the progressive media outlets that've been trumpeting the social development......

Bare-foot person: "Hey Torontoist, where the hell are my shoes?" Us: "First off, don't use that tone with us. Second, your shoes are exactly where you left them: on top of the NOW Magazine box outside St. Clair Station.......

Today the city is oficially welcoming the Blue Flag program to a number of Toronto beaches, proving once and for all that Lake Ontario really is safe to swim in, honest. Apparently seven of Toronto's 14 beaches are safe to swim in and four of them will be given Blue Flags, the aquatic equivalent to the gold star you received for a job well done in grade four. Trust the doom and gloom types at......

If there was ever any confusion, NOW Magazine clears it up in this week's issue: Gentleman Reg is a local homo heartthrob. That's right. A bona-fide heartthrob of the homo variety. So when someone asks, "Who's this Gentleman Reg character?" You need only respond with three words: 'Local,' 'homo,' and 'heartthrob' (in that order). This question-answer scenerio may even come up this weekend, as G-Reg plays Alexander Parkette on Sunday at 6 pm. The heartthrob,......

Tyler Clarke Burke, Toronto's much-loved art-music-fashion icon, has recruited local collective-ish The Old Soul for her monthly Santa Cruz party tonight tomorrow night at Lee's Palace. For $8, you're basically paying a dollar per band member. Listen to a song from the Old Soul's album here. Also on the TCB front, buy the new Oneida CD in Canada (through Three Gut) and you can check her cover art. And, while on the Three Gut tip,......