Lately, we’re feeling nostalgic for the Y2K era. The glitter-slathered techno-optimism of the millennial moment continues to shape our darker present. Our guest, author Colette Shade, has written a 2000s nostalgia fest. Y2K: How the 2000’s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) is a memoir and a cultural critique of an optimistic era that ended with a financial crash. She joins the show to talk about the end of history, inflatable furniture and chatroom usernames. Also, Vass and...
Feb 28, 2025•33 min
Lately, the video games industry is in turmoil. The rise and fall of Blizzard, the trailblazing and toxic studio behind World of Warcraft , shows us why. Our guest, Jason Schreier, is an investigative reporter who covers the video game industry for Bloomberg News. His most recent book is the best-selling Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. Jason shares his years-long reporting on the frat-like culture at Blizzard, the scandal-plagued games developer that Microsoft bou...
Feb 21, 2025•32 min
Lately, millions of Canadians are unpartnered. Business and tech companies are rushing to meet the needs of the new me-market. For Valentine’s Day, we’re asking: “Is this actually a great time to be single?” Our guest, Yuthika Girme, is the director of SECURE , the Singlehood Experiences and Complexities Underlying Relationships Lab, at Simon Fraser University. She joins Lately to unpack anti-single prejudice, the four archetypes of singletons, and explains how this growing demographic is shapin...
Feb 14, 2025•34 min
Lately, our bosses are going further than reading our emails. New technologies that can track our motions and our moods are ushering in a new age of workplace surveillance. Is this productivity hacking, or counterproductive micromanagement? Our guest, David Murakami Wood, is the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies and a professor at the University of Ottawa. He joins the show to walk us through recent mind-blowing advances in employee tracking technology and wheth...
Feb 07, 2025•33 min
Lately, the internet has broken the White House. Influencers and tech CEOs now have unprecedented access to the Trump administration. How will the “broligarchy” change our world? Our guest, Taylor Lorenz, covers the influence of influencers on User Mag , her tech and online culture Substack. The former Washington Post reporter literally wrote the book on how the internet took over politics: Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. Lorenz weighs in on the ...
Jan 31, 2025•33 min
Lately, we’re sharing our darkest secrets with robots. The market for AI mental health aides is booming but how does it actually feel to bond with a therapy bot? Our guest, Graham Isador, just started his job as The Globe’s new Healthy Living reporter. Traditional therapy can be expensive and scarce, so Graham turned to AI and found a therapist who’s cheap, always available and not at all human. To his surprise, he kind of liked it. Graham describes his strange experience turning over his mental...
Jan 24, 2025•28 min
Lately, lingerie behemoth Victoria’s Secret is trying to claw its way back to relevance after a spectacular crash. How did a brand that once defined the culture fail to keep up? Our guests, Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez, tell the story of a retail giant’s rise and fall in their new book Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon. They chart the company’s evolution from a fledgling sex toy business to a global fast-fashion pioneer. But when social media transfor...
Jan 17, 2025•35 min
Lately, we aren’t all getting the same price for the same product. Is the rise of data-driven “personalized pricing” corporate innovation or just next-gen gouging? Our guest, Lindsay Owens, is an economic sociologist and former policy advisor to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. She’s the co-author of “ The Age of Recoupment ” in The American Prospect’ s issue on How Pricing Really Works, and the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative . Owens discusses how major retailers are using digital ...
Jan 10, 2025•29 min
Lately, we’ve been getting the news from The Decibel, the Globe and Mail’s daily news podcast. In this bonus episode, Lately’s sister pod reveals what it took for Rogers to outmaneuver the competition and buy up some of the biggest sports teams in Canada. A colossal business deal recently took place when a set of rivals came to an unexpected agreement. Rogers Communications Inc. bought BCE Inc.’s 37.5-per-cent stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment for $4.7-billion. The transaction makes...
Nov 15, 2024•24 min
Professor Timothy Caulfield researches health misinformation, especially when it intersects with celebrity culture. In the new CBC documentary Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, Caulfield takes a trip to the “manosphere” and meets the men who buy and sell the promise of masculinity in this growing segment of the $5-trillion wellness market. Caulfield talks to Lately about debunking the pseudoscience of drinking urine, how traditional masculine values can actually harm men’s health, and how the ma...
Nov 08, 2024•31 min
Lately, LinkedIn has become cringe... or cool, or more important than ever, depending on who you ask. So, is LinkedIn working well for us, or has it devolved into yet another shouty social media site? Tim Kiladze is a Globe and Mail business reporter, Bay Street veteran and LinkedIn connoisseur. He wrote a compelling report on the evolution of LinkedIn: The tone has shifted to more performative “thought leadership,” the line between personal and professional has blurred – and now Bay Street exec...
Nov 01, 2024•29 min
A bonus episode from our Globe and Mail sister show Machines Like Us. How is Silicon Valley’s shift to the right affecting the US election? The tech lobby has quietly turned Silicon Valley into the most powerful political operation in America. Pro-crypto donors are now responsible for almost half of all corporate donations this election. Elon Musk has gone from an occasional online troll to, as one of our guests calls him, “MAGA’s Minister of Propaganda.” And for the first time, the once reliabl...
Oct 30, 2024•34 min
Lately, Big Tobacco says it wants to phase out cigarettes and promote, of all things, healthier options. But can the tobacco industry actually sell wellness? And is this pivot to vapes and pouches a smoking off-ramp or just a one-way ride to nicotine addiction? Award-winning journalist Luc Rinaldi takes us behind the curtain of Big Tobacco’s machinations to report on how an industry built on addiction is looking to reinvent itself for the wellness age. His cover story " Blowing Smoke " appears i...
Oct 25, 2024•32 min
Companies in Canada are being bought up by private equity at an incredible rate. The list includes Rexall, MEC, Value Village, WestJet and Sleep Country. But it also includes local businesses: vets, dentists, retirement homes and more. Critics say it’s an unchecked shift in the economy that results in negative, often dangerous outcomes – where the profit motive can mean higher prices and lower quality of care. We’re speaking to someone who has brokered such deals: Rachel Wasserman is a lawyer an...
Oct 18, 2024•29 min
When Erika Ayers Badan beat out 74 men to become the first CEO of Barstool Sports, the company was small, dominated by brash bros, and indivisible from the controversial reputation of its founder, Dave Portnoy. But she corralled Barstool and turned it into a media empire with a $500-million exit. So where do you go after helming a culture-quaking company? Ayers Badan became CEO of the cooking and lifestyle brand Food52 – new industry, new struggles. She was hired after layoffs, terrible Glassdoo...
Oct 11, 2024•29 min
That creeping feeling that everything online is getting worse has a name: “enshittification,” a term for the slow degradation of our experience on digital platforms. The enshittification cycle is why you now have to wade through slop to find anything useful on Google, and why your charger is different from your BFF’s. According to Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the memorable moniker, this digital decay isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom of corporate under-regulation and monopoly – practices bei...
Oct 04, 2024•34 min
Tupperware just filed for bankruptcy, but the direct sales model it pioneered lives on. These days, the hustle might be candles, leggings or sex toys. You may be recruited to join via a Facebook friend, who calls it “social selling.” But really, it’s multi–level marketing – a $300–billion industry where the vast majority of salespeople make little to no money. Our guest is Peabody and Emmy Award–winning investigative journalist Jane Marie, host of the podcast The Dream and author of Selling the ...
Sep 27, 2024•34 min
Workplace productivity apps like Slack, Notion, and Trello are encroaching on our personal lives. According to a trending article in San Francisco Standard, new apps specifically for couples and families, like Lovewick and Coexist, are gaining traction in Silicon Valley. These tools promise to balance domestic labour by optimizing everything from your chores to your #couplegoals. But is life a project that needs to be perfectly managed? Could there really be an app for that? Our guest, Oliver Bu...
Sep 20, 2024•32 min
Welcome to Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping our every day. In an encore of our very first episode, we tackle the fake review economy: how online reviews got corrupted and if we can ever trust them again. Our guest is Joseph Reagle, an associate professor at Northeastern University and the author of several books, including Reading the Comments. He recently posted a positive review of a dog raincoat on Temu. Also, Vass a...
Sep 13, 2024•31 min
Shein and Temu have completely disrupted Amazon’s global domination plans by selling clothes and home goods for ultra-cheap prices, if not ultra-fast delivery – but at what cost? Our guest, journalist Louise Matsakis , has covered technology, the internet and China for The Atlantic, Wired, The Guardian and NBC News. She also writes a newsletter about e-commerce in China called You May Also Like . She dives into the secretive world of made-in-China e-commerce, the stakes for competitors, and the ...
Sep 06, 2024•34 min
Location-sharing apps are growing in popularity, not just among families and Gen Z friend groups but with investors, too. (The tracking app Life360 made its Nasdaq debut earlier this month.) If we're already passively sharing this information with companies almost all the time, why not share it with our loved ones? Our guest, Dr Katina Michael , who was on the cutting edge of building location-based services in its earliest days, says that the trust and connection we desire when signing up for t...
Aug 30, 2024•37 min
Was all this inflation really necessary? Our guest, economist Isabella Weber says no. In fact, she’s been saying no since the Omicron variant was a thing. In 2021, at age 33, Weber wrote an article for The Guardian that tied inflation to corporate greed – calling out “an explosion of profits” as a central force in driving up prices. She was vilified online, and the establishment turned her into “the most hated woman in economics.” But history has proved Isabella Weber right, and the world’s caug...
Aug 23, 2024•34 min
Everyone knows someone who is on Adderall: ADHD diagnoses are at an all-time high and trending on TikTok. Our guest, Daniel Kolitz , author of The History of Adderall for Pioneer Works, tells us about the rise of the medication, how it’s changed the way we work, and his own experience on and off the drug. Also, Vass and Katrina self-diagnose via some questionable online quizzes. This is Lately. Every week, we take a deep dive into the big, defining trends in business and tech that are reshaping ...
Aug 16, 2024•32 min
If the economy’s so good, why do we feel so bad? 84% of Canadians believe we’re in a recession right now and yet Canada's GDP actually outperformed expectations last year, unemployment is low and wages are increasing. There’s a disconnect between inflation rates and how we feel about inflation rates. Welcome to the vibecession. Our guest, Kyla Scanlon, is the author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work . Kyla coined the term “vibecession” to capture the mismatch between object...
Aug 09, 2024•28 min
We’re taking a little summer break and playing an encore of one of our most popular episodes. It’s about the crash of the online dating industry and what it means for your love life. Even though users are fleeing dating apps – they’re costly, they’re creepy and they’re exhausting – our tech-reliant mating rituals have forever changed us. And if you haven’t given up on connecting online, what comes next? Our guest is Marina Adshade, an economist who looks at how the market affects our love lives....
Aug 02, 2024•28 min
These days the culture we consume – movies, books, songs – is determined by platforms aggregating everyone else’s reviews and ratings. So, what does it mean when you say you like something in the age of quantification? And is there a way to beat the algorithm? Our guest, writer and critic Lauren Oyler , is the author of No Judgment , a recently published collection of essays. She’s a contributing editor at Harper’s , and her divisive, often viral essays on books and culture appear regularly in T...
Jul 26, 2024•27 min
The Paris Olympics are nearly upon us, and one thing is clearer than the Seine: For some countries, sports are the ultimate distraction. Dubious human rights records? Look at our athletes! It’s called sportswashing, an attempt by nations and companies to take the focus off their less-than-stellar practices. Our guest, Globe and Mail reporter Simon Houpt walks us through the long history of sportswashing, all the way from the inception of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece to the present day. Al...
Jul 19, 2024•28 min
Shein and Temu have completely disrupted Amazon’s global domination plans by selling clothes and home goods for ultra-cheap prices, if not ultra-fast delivery – but at what cost? Our guest, journalist Louise Matsakis , has covered technology, the internet and China for The Atlantic, Wired, The Guardian and NBC News. She also writes a newsletter about e-commerce in China called You May Also Like . She dives into the secretive world of made-in-China e-commerce, the stakes for competitors, and the ...
Jul 12, 2024•34 min
A bonus episode for Lately listeners, from the team at Stress Test! Just mention the word “inheritance” and people get their backs up. It’s no surprise that people are reluctant to chat about free money. In this episode, host Rob Carrick chats with Julia Chung, a financial planner, about why you shouldn’t factor an inheritance into your financial plans. We’re also joined by an Edmonton woman whose parents plan to spend every dime in retirement. And an Ontario millennial walks us through whether ...
Jul 05, 2024•30 min
Everyone loves an AI fail, like a few extra fingers on a generated image. But what happens when the flaws of this nascent technology are much more serious? For the LGBTQ+ community, the stakes are high: Machine-learning models and AI-based tech like facial recognition can promote outdated stereotypes and public discrimination. Our guest, Dr. Sabine Weber , is a computer scientist and an organizer with Queer in AI , a global group of LGBTQ+ researchers and scientists whose mission is to raise awa...
Jun 28, 2024•29 min
