Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Each Sunday, the editors of every site—from LAist to Londonist—choose their most interesting article, a list which is compiled into the network-wide feature Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse. Gothamist found that an explosive set off outside the Times Square army recruiting center may be similar to five past bombings in New York City.Seattlest worried when severed right feet and bottles of rat poison started washing......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Each Sunday, the editors of every site—from LAist to Londonist—choose their most interesting article, a list which is compiled into the network-wide feature Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse. Phillyist explored an impending implosion and lived to tell the tale.Gothamist marveled at the city's new NYC-branded condom campaign––especially the use of a Toronto landmark in the advertising. (Also, fun fact: Gothamist turned five years old yesterday.)Tired......

Extreme cold alert! Be forewarned that this extreme cold is not extreme in the sense of "it is totally radical like Doritos and Mountain Dew," but rather extreme in the sense of "it can kill you if you stay out in it too long." Environment Canada will discuss the prospects of the extreme cold's effect on totally shredding slopes with your snowboard later today. Barack Obama thumps Hillary Clinton over the weekend, with impressively......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Each Sunday, the editors of every site—from LAist to Londonist—choose their most interesting article, a list which is compiled into the network-wide feature Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse. Gothamist was amazed after the Giants won the Super Bowl, the city went wild, and it witnessed a ticker-tape parade.Barack Obama drew 20,000+ ahead of Seattle’s Saturday caucus.Londonist had Super Tuesday too.Elusive guerrilla street artist Banksy revisited......

Unionized Toronto Star employees met at a downtown hotel yesterday and voted 96% in favour of a strike, or as the Star itself might say, "Star Employees Vote To Strike At Hotel." In another sign of potential economic trouble on the horizon, the benchmark TSX stock index dropped 623 points in two days. While most issues declined, analysts declared themselves bullish on several sectors, including rural real estate, bottled water, and firearms. The San......

What to do if you are alone tomorrow, either because you don't celebrate Christmas, or because there's no one around to celebrate with: Spend your day curled up with the almost-human warmth of your laptop, watching the WPIX Yule Log and listening to "Blue Christmas" (the Bright Eyes version), both on endless loops that resemble depression spirals more and more with each whiskey-and-tears cocktail that passes down your throat, which, come to think of......

Liberals turf scandal-ridden MP. Blair Wilson (West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast) would just like everybody to know that he is very sorry that he impugned the Liberal Party's name with his electoral spending mishaps, although not quite so sorry that he's resigning as a member of Parliament. City capital budget for next year unveiled. A large increase in necessary infrastructure spending is the highlight of the budget, which we still can't pay for and which most voters......

Sure, the Toronto FC may have lost Saturday's game 4-1––hell, they may have lost 75% of this season's games––but this clip of the soccer team's fans on the Washington DC Metro (which we discovered thanks to DCist) is kind of sweet in a "loud sports fans yelling French" way. Plus, Toronto fans are totally "the gem of the league"! If only subway enthusiasm could be somehow be harnessed and channeled into on-field talent, then......

For the first time in 31 years, our loonie has overtaken the American dollar in value. Symbolically speaking, Torontoist feels this does not make any sense. Think about it—our diving aquatic bird versus their cherry tree-chopping George Washington? It must be something in our water, unless there are secret numerological powers inherent in hendecagons and hendecagrams. Illustration by Kevin McBride.......

A lot happens in and around Toronto, but we can only write about so much in a week. Here's the best of the rest, in a new weekly feature we're calling Superfluist. Superfluist will appear every Friday night. First a monkey escaped. Then, elephants did. And now, a bear has! Animals are apparently not big fans of being captive. Weird, right?The semi-famous Enrique Inglesias was at MuchMusic.This weekend (starting tomorrow morning at 11 a.m.) is......

Sales of hybrid cars like the Prius are booming not only because drivers wish to spend less on gas and reduce their emissions, but because they want everyone to know they're driving a hybrid. Today the Ontario government proposed a plan that might add an additional layer of smugness to your vehicle: a conspicuous green license plate. If a vehicle met certain specifications of a to-be-determined rating system, the Province would issue the special......

Yesterday, thousands of University of Toronto students took to the front campus to protest the University's policy of allowing graduating students to bring no more than two guests to their Convocation ceremony. Their attempt at revolution fell short, and the policy stands. No, actually, the above is a shot from the trailers for the Don Cheadle vehicle Talk To Me, arriving in theatres today. Based on the context, we would guess it's supposed to......

Though it is a rare sighting in Toronto, the luminous body pictured on the left is not Joel Black’s UFO. It’s a chandelier by award-winning glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. Originally from Tacoma, Washington, Chihuly is a highly prolific artist known for massive architectural installations, some of which exceed nine metres in length. Chihuly’s works are found in over 200 museum exhibitions around the world including in the Distillery District’s Sandra Ainsley Gallery, where his motley......

Toronto legend Edwin "Honest Ed" Mirvish has died. He was 92. The philanthropic businessman was a crucial part of Toronto's reputation as a world-renowned theatre centre, and had been mostly out of the public eye after contracting a severe case of pneumonia in 2003 and experiencing deteriorating health ever since. Mirvish died at St. Michael's Hospital at 1:30 a.m. Mirvish was born in Virginia on July 25, 1914 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His introduction to......

Downtown Toronto experienced a hotel boom during the first half of the 1970s as modern skyscrapers and buildings like the new City Hall changed the face of the core. Among those that made their debut: the Sheraton Centre (1972), the Holiday Inn on Chestnut (1972), the Chelsea (1975), the Harbour Castle (1975) and, opening its doors 32-years ago this week, the Hotel Toronto. Western International Hotels traced its roots to the early 1930s, when......

This week, the already-awesome Dufferin Grove Park is absolutely ablaze with awesomeness, with tendrils of wicked cool billowing through its leafy canopies and filling the lungs and hearts of theatre aficionados everywhere. The Cooking Fire Theatre Festival, which runs from June 20-24, is a presentation of five short plays, accompanied by a spectacular organic meal and infused with a spirit of collaboration and comraderie from start to finish. This is not your ordinary trip......

Late last week, the CRTC ordered CTVglobemedia to sell off the five Citytv properties it acquired in its purchase of CHUM Ltd., because CTV already operates over-the-air stations in those markets (Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg). This morning it was announced that Rogers Media would be purchasing those stations for $375 million, because it's apparently not a problem for them to have more than one over-the-air station in a given market. This afternoon,......

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us. Austinist has a chat with the ever-fashionable Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, and managed to catch some local fashionistas making......

Ladyfest began in Olympia, Washington – the hometown of the riot grrrl movement – in 2000, and the feminist festival, featuring music, art and workshops, has since spread across the globe. 2007 will mark the sixth consecutive year for Ladyfest Ottawa, and the first time since 2004 that Ladyfest has taken place in Toronto. According to Ladyfest Toronto’s mandate, it aims to “work locally to support and inspire emerging women artists and improve the......

Now boarding at Platform 1: The Toronto Raptors Bandwagon. Please form a line to the right, and have your tickets ready. Prepare for a bumpy ride, this trip is standing room only. For the first time in five years, the Toronto Raptors are going to the NBA playoffs. And if making the playoffs wasn't enough for Chris Bosh, on Monday he was also named the Eastern Conference Player of the Week. Despite the loss......

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

Toronto city council has approved a new design for the city's street-name signs. The city replaces roughly 2,000 to 2,500 signs each year anyway, so the new design will be phased-in gradually. Fortunately, it looks like this may not be as large a waste of taxpayer funds as one might expect. Federal Court Justice Carolyn Layden-Stevenson ordered the release of Toronto terrorism suspect Mahmoud Jaballah. Jabllah was held for more than five years without......

Yesterday, in a last-ditch attempt to guilt Liberals into supporting the extension of two controversial "anti-terror" laws, Stephen Harper trotted out for the media two Canadian women who lost family members in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. In case we had forgotten what 9/11 looked like, CTV Newsnet, as part of its reportage on the matter, helpfully replayed images from that day—complete with the chyron seen above and at right. Last summer......

So last night was the Oscars: Ellen DeGeneres was surprisingly enjoyable; there were not many upsets except perhaps The Departed for Best Picture (really?); Canada only won one award, Best Animated Short for The Danish Poet; Gwyneth Paltrow resembled a giant prawn. And not in a good way. Yesterday, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty went to Washington to persuade the U.S. to delay the new passport requirement for border crossings. McGuinty promised info-rich driver's licenses and......

If you're a fan of Guster, the very excellent, very melodic, and, as this picture aptly demonstrates, somewhat quirky band from Boston, you'd know that they pretty much never ever play a concert in Canada. Despite their more than modest success (they've, like, totally been on the O.C. twice, and they're a staple of US college radio), the closest they've come to anything Canadian lately is playing with the Barenaked Ladies...in a United States tour.......

Between fake terrorist alerts and scandals big and small, this just might be the Best Best of the -ists ever. We're exhausted just thinking about it. First up, SFist, who saw their little 'ole site be the center of what was a nice little scandal (even getting their editor on TV) only to find their scandal dwarfed by the even bigger scandal caused by their Mayor boffing one of his aides' wife. We're not just......

Raptors fans have had to suffer a lot of humiliation over the last few years: There was the Vince Carter trade debacle, there was the night that Kobe Bryant dropped 81 points, and there was the 1-15 start last season that had ESPN speculating that the Raptors might be one of the worst teams in NBA history. But, the absolute low-point for the franchise came on the afternoon of October 16, 2005 in a pre-season......

Microsoft's brilliant marketing installation, an 1800sqft ice house in Dundas Square, tells you precisely what will happen when you install Vista: your computer will freeze. Perhaps the Redmond, Washington-based software company believed Canadians, who all live in igloos, would feel right at home in their icy digs. We kid, but when three University of Toronto students saw the house that Gates built, they immediately thought "house party". SSRI and N3554 of Überave, known for......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

Update on the stolen Taras Shevchenko statue story: its head has turned up at a smelter in Burlington, and one person has been arrested. With luck, all the assholes who stole the statue will get caught now that there's a lead. With more luck, the statue is recoverable. Stephen Harper's aides are quietly having meetings with major environmental groups in order to come up with a new environmental policy. More specifically, they're hoping to......