Service Delays, Missing Money, and Robot Butlers
Plus: Failures of justice
Illustration by Sébastien Thibault
Attention, Ottawans: you can expect service disruptions and delays on the O-Train this month due to extension work and the installation of new equipment. If you’ve experienced problems outside of scheduled service work, than
Brett Popplewell has the story for you:One of the costliest errors in executing that launch was the decision, made by city officials against the advice of industry experts, to approve a train design that had never been used anywhere else on the planet. The city had made several demands of the LRT vehicle. Aside from wanting it to be accessible, fast, and zero emission, they also needed a system that could fit the already-decided station length, which meant the trains would have to be longer than those in any other LRT in operation in North America. … By insisting that they be given a train that didn’t yet exist, Ottawa’s leaders guaranteed that the city’s residents would serve as test subjects on board what the public inquiry would call “unproven technology.” [Read more]
A man convicted in an “unusual and extraordinary” sexual-assault and revenge-porn case will soon face sentencing after a three-year-long trial.
explored why it’s so hard for women to get justice within the courts:As Elaine Craig points out, it is the role of the defence lawyer to defend their clients, no matter the charge, in order to ensure that the state has proven its case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The defence lawyers she interviews view their ability to embarrass and bully complainants, to delve into their sexual history, to rely on tropes of loose, promiscuous women, simply as tactics they use while doing their part to uphold the rule of law. In effect, however, as Craig shows, they are often standing in the way of the law by making it unnecessarily difficult for victims to complete their trial. [Read more]
Last year, millions of dollars in Canadian music funding disappeared.
tells a different heist story in “The Death of the Middle-Class Musician” and looks at why working artists are missing out on money:While Spotify paid out a record $10 billion (US) in royalties in 2024, fewer than 1 percent of artists made more than $6,000 from the platform. In 2021, according to SOCAN, the average Canadian songwriter earned just $67 from streaming that year. Yet artists have no choice but to obsess over their streaming numbers. Talent buyers and festival programmers largely decide who to book based on Spotify’s “monthly listeners” metric. [Read more]
A Jetsons-esque existence just got closer to reality with UC Berkeley engineers releasing “an affordable, open-source humanoid robot.” Michael Harris explored a Canadian company’s big bet on creepy machines, in “Hello, I’m Phoenix. Would You Like Your House Cleaned?”
Built by the Vancouver company Sanctuary AI, Phoenix is racing to become the world’s first general-purpose robot with human-like intelligence—a machine capable of understanding the real world and executing tasks previously done by us. It is an embodied AI. Its intelligence does not merely flash inside a server but reaches out and acts. Like a wide-eyed toddler, it gains facility as it explores and practises. [Read more]
Check out our books podcast, What Happened Next, hosted by Nathan Whitlock. This week’s conversation is with Michelle Good, about her recent fiction and nonfiction.
Read a poem by Alexandra Oliver: “Best Practice”
Read a short story by Georgina Beaty: “Shelter Seekers”