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(Image: Naomi Harris)
When you live in a city of perpetual sports losers, the appearance of a winner is disconcerting. It’s like a warm spell in January: you’re happy about it, but you know it’s not gonna last. So when the 20-year-old tennis player Milos Raonic arrived on the scene at the Australian Open in January, we were skeptical; we cheered him on, but tentatively.
(Image: Remie Geoffroi)
Midday in Mumbai, the streets are choked with bicycle-riding couriers carrying lunch in tiffins—stackable, reusable stainless steel containers. Mumbai is nothing like lunchtime in Toronto, when cubicle drones descend into food courts and stand in line for lumpy servings of salty carbs and icky meats drizzled with vaguely ethnic sauces. Luckily for the Bay Street hordes, Seema Pabari, a former paint buyer for Lowe’s, launched a lunch delivery service called Tiffinday. Entrées are about $11 each, and everything is vegan. The menu includes curried chana and puffy bhatura bread, a lentil-stuffed dosa served with coconut chutney, and vegetable-studded basmati rice with a side of pickled lemons. Users order online by 3 p.m. the day before, and meals are prepped by 11 a.m. the next morning. Pabari sends out 150 meals a week and is aiming for 100 a day, at which point she’ll open a satellite kitchen at Yonge and Eg. “I’m going head-to-head with the food courts,” Pabari says, determined to bestow executives of both genders the culinary benefits of having an old-fashioned Indian wife.
(Image: Steve Mann)
Much more conveniently located than a galaxy far, far away, a small tech company called InteraXon on Queen West is developing products that will allow you to control your iPad with your mind. InteraXon uses software originally created by the legendary U of T engineer Steve Mann, who was dubbed “the world’s first cyborg” because of his ingenious wearable computer devices. The company’s thought-controlled computing technology translates brainwaves into digital signals recognizable by a computer—be it in a video game, automobile or robot butler. In other words, the brain’s electrical activity, which you can supposedly learn to manipulate just like any muscle, is converted by an interface into binary code. InteraXon’s first public splash was a demo during the 2010 Winter Olympics that allowed headset-equipped visitors in Vancouver to mentally control light shows at the CN Tower, Parliament Hill and Niagara Falls. The company promises more radical breakthroughs in the next couple of years, including an unobtrusive, wearable home-monitoring system that will predict epilepsy seizures and notify doctors and family.
(Image: Peter Arkle)
Sister Elaine MacInnes is an 87-year-old Roman Catholic nun who is also a practising Zen master. While working in the Philippines during the Marcos regime, she led meditation sessions in jails, helping political prisoners endure the trauma of incarceration and torture. When she returned to Toronto, she decided to try it here. Her non-profit group, Freeing the Human Spirit, has since taught thousands of inmates to meditate and practise yoga, and currently offers regular classes taught by volunteers in 23 correctional facilities across the country.
(Image: Remie Geoffroi)
The assets of the Lightbox, the new home of the Toronto International Film Festival, are many: the intelligent movie selection, the three comfy theatres (the two on the uppermost level are merely all right), the high-tech projectors, and, for post-movie debates, the tasteful bar with a bird’s-eye view of couples strolling on King West. The long-standing relationship between a good movie experience and excellent snack food is not lost on the people who run the snack bar, either. The popcorn is topped with real butter, the coffee is fresh, the staff are genuinely perky. The gooey jewel in the concession stand’s crown is a throwback: Hershey’s Milk Duds, the little wads of candy that, perhaps thanks to a dentist-led conspiracy, are now as rare as a new Terrence Malick movie. For the uninitiated, Milk Duds are chocolate-covered blobs of awesomely thick caramel that glues itself to your molars and requires ages of pleasurably frustrating sucking and tongue action to dislodge. If movie-going had a taste, that’d be it.
(Image: Floortje/iStock)
When Jon Dwyer, the 27-year-old CEO of Energy Innovation, was shopping around for a place to house his first industrial-scale biodiesel refinery, he didn’t think he’d end up smack in the middle of Toronto’s waterfront. But a meeting with Invest Toronto—the agency David Miller created to attract business to the city—convinced him that the port lands just off Cherry Beach were the ideal spot for his fledgling company. The biodiesel industry, it turns out, is all about logistics: if your rent is too high, or you’re not close enough to your suppliers and customers, your biodiesel won’t be cost-effective or environmentally friendly.
(Image: Jared Raab)
John O’Regan, the 25-year-old bespectacled frontman of the post-punk band the D’Urbervilles, enjoyed some modest success among indie music fans but not enough to let him quit his day job as a cashier at Value Village. Then he bought an acid-wash jean jacket, borrowed a pair of his mom’s tights and asked his cousin to douse him with rainbow eyeshadow. Presto chango—faster than you can say Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a glam-rock star was born.
(Image: James Lourenço)
Toronto’s ravines have long been a hospitable home for wildlife. Now we’re seeing all manner of strange beast roaming our city: peregrine falcons roost atop downtown towers; chinook salmon jump the weir only steps from the Old Mill subway station as they make their way to the headwaters of the Humber; and coyote and fox counts continue to climb, as does the city’s Virginia possum population. The elusive white squirrel—or squirrels, no one knows for sure—of Trinity Bellwoods Park is thought by some to bring good fortune and lauded with a namesake café. Across town in the Beach, visitors to a garage sale were recently surprised to see a white-tailed deer trotting down the street.
(Image: Remie Geoffroi)
The TDSB knows something about complex problems—it’s facing more than a few, including a budget deficit, declining enrolments and crumbling infrastructure. The board’s latest challenge is to convince public school students to think less like automatons (learning by rote
and memorizing textbooks) and more like CEOs (picture Steve Jobs, not Bernie Ebbers). One solution is a new method of learning, dubbed i-Think. “Integrated Thinking,” the cornerstone of the much-lauded MBA program at U of T’s Rotman School of Management, came out of current dean Roger Martin’s analysis of top-performing corporate leaders, like Isadore Sharp and Moses Znaimer. The program pushes teamwork and cross-pollination of ideas. A Grade 12 environmental studies class might be asked to look at the ethical, economic and ecological dilemma of developing the oil sands—and instead of demanding single-answer, silver-bullet solutions, teachers encourage students to look at the issue from different angles, to argue for dissenting opinions, and to come up with a response that is as indefinite, challenging and fraught with compromises as anything in the real world.
(Image: Derek Shapton)
Autism has been blamed on satanic possession, vaccines and frosty moms, but scientists have known since the 1980s that genetics have something to do with it. What they didn’t know was exactly which genes are involved. Stephen Scherer, the director of the Centre for Applied Genomics at SickKids and co-leader of a multi-million-dollar international study of autism genes, has brought us amazingly close to decoding the complicated disorder.
(Images: George Pimentel)
(Image: Alyson Tame)
It wasn’t so long ago that the only beer available in Toronto was flavourless and the colour of straw. Now we’re spoiled for choice: many of southern Ontario’s 33 craft brewers are producing tasty creations like coffee porters, pumpkin ales and raspberry beers, and testing one-off casks laced with such ingredients as chocolate, mint leaves and peaches. Peter Chiodo, an Etobicoke native and a strange brew obsessive, now runs Barrie’s Flying Monkeys brewery (it’s named after the winged creatures in The Wizard of Oz). His latest gambit is to produce the world’s strongest beer. In 2009, he designed the unique “hoppapotamus,” a device that actively infuses hops —the little cones that impart bitter, sometimes fruity flavour—and uses a process called “pulse fermentation” to feed yeast more sugar so the spores produce more alcohol. Chiodo’s goal is to ferment a 62 per cent beer, stronger than the revered Scottish BrewDog’s 55 per cent End of the History ale. If he succeeds, he’ll redefine the condition known as beer goggles.
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