“I’m going back to where I bought my first house.” Giorgio Mammoliti wants to join probable next premier Doug Ford at Queen’s Park as MPP for Brampton East. (His last stint as an MPP was 23 years ago, when he was a member of the NDP.) With three other councillors running provincially and no serious mayoral challenger for fall, city politics risk taking a six-month slumber. But the jostling to fill those empty clamshell seats has already begun:

Cambridge Analytica is linked a little bit more to the Liberals. The Liberal party's recollection of pink-haired Facebook whistlleblower Christopher Wylie's work for them has evolved a bit. First he was a barely remembered teenage intern. Then there was talk that he had pitched his data-mining ideas to the party in 2009. Now it seems he signed a contract with the Liberals to oversee a pilot project in 2015.

Sidewalk Toronto wants you to see that there’s always sort of been surveillance on city streets. The first public consultation about Alphabet’s proposed development at Quayside drew several hundred people. At the same time, Sidewalk launched a website called OldTO, which maps over 30,000 images from the city archives. And yet, backlash about the company's future data plans threw their lawyers for a loop:

Howie Mandel bumps a fist with Just For Laughs. The comedy festival, whose founder Gilbert Rozon hastily exited following unspecified abuse allegations, now belongs to a partership involving American company ICM Partners and the glove-loving comic. Mandel is dedicated to keeping the festival's base in Montreal, but he believes the JFL brand can be globally recognized for reasons beyond filming those silent pranks on the street.

Hotel X sells a better skyline. The long-delayed “urban resort” at Exhibition Place is now open after a few years of bewilderment about how something so suburban ended up being built there. But the interior looks sufficiently luxurious. Plus, the rooms come with a view guaranteed to never include Hotel X:

The history of a new Rexall is at a different intersection. While the drug store taking over the Brunswick House came with a "curatorial statement" about the property's musical legacy, less preservationist pomp surrounds the chain's new location at Spadina and Dundas, which was previously a Royal Bank. The building was originally a Yiddish playhouse called the Standard Theatre. It was converted into The Strand movie theatre and then the Victory Burlesque—then it transitioned in 1975 to screening Chinese cinema as the Golden Harvest. The contrast between shapes of two of the building's former signs is the subject of Shellie Zhang’s artwork, A Place of Wholesome Amusement, in the window of 402 College:

Faith Goldy didn’t have to open her mouth to be heard at Laurier. “Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European Canadian Identity” was the announced topic of Goldy's talk. She had been invited to speak by the Laurier Students for Open Inquiry, a club headed by WLU’s most famous student, Lindsay Shepherd. A pulled fire alarm forced everyone to leave—but Goldy vows to return. Before that, she might be stripped of a U of T student award she won in 2012 for supporting "social justice causes."

Word of the moment

LORD OF THE FLIES

A parent applied this literary reference to the chaotic lunch scene at Regal Road Public School, where a pair of 6-year-old boys recently went missing for half an hour.




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