BY: JESSICA BEUKER In Japan, 126 million people occupy a very small land area, making it one of the most densely urbanized countries in the world. It’s a crowded place for the people who live there, and leaves very little…
Featured
California’s prisoners are fighting wildfires for reduced prison sentences
BY: THE PLAID ZEBRA The tree line recedes behind a scorched hillside; the smell of charred timber hanging above the burned-0ver land. For California’s professional firefighters, the smell might remind them that the state is drying up. But for the…
So there’s a bear and a wolf who have become best friends in the wild and it’s unbelievably majestic
BY: ROB HOFFMAN Never before has the wild produced a more unlikely or majestic friendship. Take the most powerful creatures in the woodland and turn them into hunting buddies and what do you get? A photographer’s wet-dream and international sensation…
While documenting the homeless, this photographer found her own father
BY: SHAY ANSARI Photographer, Diana Kim, was working on a project documenting the homeless when she discovered her own estranged father. In 2003, Kim began her project photographing homeless communities in Hawaii where she grew up. As a child, her…
This Is What Our Skyline Could Be In a World Without Any Light Pollution
BY: THE PLAID ZEBRA Stargazing has become quite the anomaly in an age of smelly fumes, smoggy cities and slow moving traffic jams. With a stroke of luck, I am surprised by shooting stars a couple nights out of the…
A new gang documentary is based on the blood bath of the real-life Warriors.
BY: M. TOMOSKI The Cross Bronx Expressway is a slow-moving six-lane wall of traffic that cuts right through the centre of the northern New York borough for which it was named. It was the brainchild of urban planner Robert Moses,…
Why having anxiety is a blessing in disguise
BY: BENEDICT SMITH I’ve often mulled over why I’m so keyed up. Is it a genetic misfiring? Clusterfucked logical processing? Ritualized naval-gazing? Internalized childhood bullying that’s crystallized into a repressed psychological wedgie? Do I need to pull myself together? If…
High rent is forcing Las Vegas families to take to the sewers
By: Jack M. Beneath the glitz and glamour of what is arguably some of the most expensive real estate in the world, beneath the playground of the high-rolling mega-rich gamblers who fly in for the weekend in their private jets,…
I climbed the world’s highest tropical glacier and witnessed Global Warming first hand
BY: ZAK BENNETT The lifeblood of Peru is evaporating before its people’s eyes. More than 77 million people get their drinking water and irrigation from the rivers fed by glacier runoff from the snow capped mountains of the Cordillera Blanca.…
I was halfway through airport security in Detroit when the LSD began to take hold
BY: M. TOMOSKI I was halfway to Detroit Metro when I realized that my plan had been poorly timed. The flight to New York was scheduled for 7:30AM and no amount of caffeine or water was going to stop the…
Ex-Wall Street banker wants to show you why factory farms will be remembered as genocide
BY: KAROUN CHAHINIAN The once mysterious murder kingdoms more commonly known as factory farms are now under a magnifying glass firmly held in front of the critical eye of the public. From growth hormones, to claustrophobic cages, to never seeing…
Why you should just say “fuck it” and hit the road while you still can
BY: JESSICA BEUKER Growing up I didn’t travel a lot. Sure, there was the odd family trip, which usually meant a two-hour car ride to a small Saskatchewan town or a weekend getaway at a cabin. These trips were fun…
Dutch company designs office-caravans to let you work on the road, off-the-grid, or in the wild
BY:MATTHEW CHIN In the Netherlands, a country with one of the highest workplace satisfaction rates in the world according to monster, one company plans to introduce natural scenery and nomadism to the office. Amsterdam-based KantoorKaravaan, which translates to Office Caravan,…
Bulletproof, fireproof, environmentally friendly homes are being made from plastic bottles
BY: JESSICA BEUKER The streets of downtown Toronto are vibrant and busy at all times of the day. During the day business women rapidly click their heels and talk a mile a minute into their cellphones. Students hustle off to…
25 activists are biking across America to fight persecution of meditation in China
BY: JESSICA BEUKER I find it difficult to imagine a world where my core beliefs are subject to persecution. A world where I have to walk on egg shells every single day. Where I can’t freely say what I think…
Bestival is an island paradise of hippies, nudists and lucid dreams (Video)
BY: CONNOR BRIAN, TYLER FYFE, ROB HOFFMAN AND MELISSA GONZALEZ If Salvador Dali and Dr. Seuss had a child born out of wedlock, it would have been conceived at Bestival. On the Toronto Islands, a nature sanctuary and nude beach…
Tinker’s Bubble is a sustainable forest community living almost entirely off the wilderness
BY: MATTHEW CHIN On the southern part of the United Kingdom, tucked away in the thick of a 40-acre woodland in Somerset, England, lies a tiny community that thrives in the wilderness. The community began in 1994 when Michael Zaer…
Going on a road trip increases your creativity, lowers stress, and makes you a better person
BY: MATTHEW CHIN Going on a good old fashioned road trip is a surefire way to increase spontaneity, lower stress and inspire creativity, which lasts after you return from the trip. It encourages you to explore an otherwise overlooked part…
Dutch citizens sued their government for not taking action against climate change and won
BY: ZOE MELNYK After years of disappointment in their government’s environmental policies, 886 Dutch citizens, following the lead of the sustainability foundation Urgenda, took their government to court in order to demand a better treatment of the environment and to…
Fast fashion companies treat human lives the same way we treat their cheap consumables
BY: LAURA ROJAS I walk through Toronto’s Yonge and Dundas at least once a week, obscured by the shadow of towering H&M billboards showing beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes, a large “2 for $10” sign reeling every passerby inside.…