And see ya later, all you subscription services in my little empire — The day has been coming for a while now. One week after eliminating the last two social media platforms left standing in my world — Facebook and LinkedIn — I have said so long to my Spotify Premium subscription. I have a feeling I will miss it about as much…

Favourite Band / Artist Edition: More Questions That Want Answers — A month ago, I published an article on The Riff that gently suggested that if you say you are into music, when I ask you, “Oh really, what do you like?” you can’t just answer, “A bit of everything.” It’s my firm conviction, loosely held, that you need to have…

Then Here are Ten Questions You Should Have Ready Answers to — We don’t have to like the same music, just like we don’t have to read the same books. Can we agree that it’s important to have opinions, though? If you tell me you are into music, I will take that at face value. And then I will ask you a…

It’s not always easy to tell who’s all there and who isn’t — I live in the downtown of a city that likes to think it’s big, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not. I commute to work out in the suburbs, which takes about an hour each way. It’s a hike, but I don’t mind. In fact, I’ve gotten used…

If their hearts are in the right place, is it too much to ask for their brains to be there too? — Well there they are, two of the leading philosophical giants of our time, spreading themselves across social media in an effort to drum up the masses for the cause one more time. Or rather, the latest time. There will surely be more times to come. Oprah and The Rock, needing…

Surely, the best part of any year — I’m a teacher, so I had a lot of time on my hands until recently. In between moving apartments, entertaining friends passing through town, spending time with people I care about and getting outside as much as possible, I was blessed with an embarrassment of time in which to write…

I was good at this, once upon a time — Like several things in life, it turns out that swimming really is a lot like riding a bike. That is, if your bike has you stretched out horizontally, floating and trying to remember the finer points of how to make — as efficiently as possible — a land animal into…

But somehow made it this far without — Like probably a lot of people around here, I have ideas. But there are plenty of days when that’s all they are, accruing as a set of disjointed notes either in my phone or the beginnings of something in my draft folder. I try to keep them in my head…

For many, it’s now a part of history — “Would you teach your students about 9/11? How would you do it? How would you approach what happened that day?” I recall, years ago now, when I was in Teachers’ College — alright fine, in 2002 — a debate centred around those very questions taking place at the start of…