We all have places in Toronto we like to show off to guests from out of town. In the summer, I take my visiting friends to Kensington Market or the Brick Works. If they have young kids, I take them to Centre Island. When it’s cold or rainy, I take them to the AGO. Now there’s a new destination on my list: Regent Park. The $1-billion transformation won’t be complete until 2019 (or thereabouts), but big swaths are already built. It’s not just a fascinating and unique experiment in mixed-use housing, it’s also a surprisingly fun place to hang out.
This year, in our fifth annual Reasons to Love Toronto package, we feature two buildings in the new Regent Park development—the ultra-modern, light-filled public pool (page 58) and the Daniels Spectrum cultural complex (page 72), which has, astonishingly, 10 performance spaces. The fact that the Regent Park revamp appears twice on our list is fitting: no municipal project quite as ambitious has happened in Toronto in my lifetime, and this is the year it has started to bloom.
Rob Ford has many fans. According to a poll conducted by Forum Research a couple of days after Sarah Thomson accused Ford of groping her, 43 per cent of Torontonians said they approved of the job he is doing as mayor. The pollster tried to explain Ford’s popularity to a Toronto Sun reporter. No bad press ever sticks to Ford, he said. “He’s made of Teflon.” I don’t think that’s exactly right. I suspect that Ford’s gaffes, his brushes with the law, his peculiar malapropisms and hysterical outbursts endear him to much of Toronto.
Shayne Hughes, the CEO of a California-based business consultancy called Learning as Leadership, recently put a moratorium on interoffice emails. He defended his experiment in Forbes magazine by explaining that he wanted to force his employees to communicate with each other in person. He’s the latest in a line of corporate leaders to encourage face-to-face interaction by prohibiting email. Over the last few years, executives at Intel, Deloitte and Veritas, among other companies, have all instituted versions of the same idea.
The perennially popular April issue, featuring our 31st annual Where to Eat Now package, is out today. Pick it up for 15 pages of top food trends, hot chefs and, of course, our list of the city’s 10 best new restaurants. 
In grade school, I was taught that Canada embraces multiculturalism, whereas the United States is a melting pot. The notion was drilled into me year after year: we celebrate our diversity and encourage the preservation of our ethnic heritage, whereas Americans assimilate. Boy, were my teachers wrong. Toronto is a melting pot if ever there was one. It’s true that this city hosts dozens of ethnic festivals every year, and that we like to trumpet our cultural differences, but we also assimilate within a couple of generations.
I myself have never had sex in public. As it turns out, I’m in the minority. An astonishing 65 per cent of Torontonians claim to have done it in public, according to our first ever survey of who’s doing what to whom. Where? Everywhere, apparently: the Casa Loma parking lot, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at U of T, and the Hockey Hall of Fame, to name just a few spots. In this special issue about sex, we reveal how, behind our buttoned-down exterior, we are exuberant sexual adventurers.
Do not ask Rosie DiManno about her weekend. On Saturday, the Internet took aim at 
In the past year, Toronto Life rated the city’s best new restaurants, talked to Rob Ford’s inner circle and examined crumbling condo towers. We got the lowdown on bidding wars, ranked the city’s VIPs and, of course, came up with a raft of reasons to love Toronto. Below, the full list of the year’s cover stories, and where to find them online.
