Crack has never gone away since the cocaine derivative's deadly arrival in the mid-'80s. But it's certainly being discussed more right now than anytime in recent memory thanks to the since-denied allegations, published in the Toronto Star and Gawker, that Toronto mayor Rob Ford was seen on a...

Whether you're down in the dumps or as happy as a clam, you need to watch this video of Will and Monifa Sims singing karaoke at a gas station pump. Yes, you read that right. And yes, this is part of a "Pumpcast News" prank on Jay Leno's "Tonight Show,"...

The all-star cast assembled by Jay-Z for "The Great Gatsby" movie soundtrack got us wistfully thinking back to the days when movie soundtracks were a big deal.

Sure, "The Hunger Games" soundtrack — produced by rock legend T-Bone Burnett, and featuring Arcade Fire, Taylor Swift, Neko Case, Miranda Lambert and...

UNICEF released their Innocenti Report Card 11 last month, cataloguing how kids are doing in rich countries. Canada did not do very well.

Much of the media attention was on the news that Canada claims world-champion pothead status with 28 per cent of our young people...

The Junos used to have something of an inferiority complex about their American cousins, the Grammys. That constant seeking of U.S. validation was what prompted the feud between the Junos and the late, great Stompin' Tom Connors who, on his deathbed, requested there not be a tribute to...

Every morning last week, as I brought my three-year-old son Emile to daycare, we walked past pink posters adorning the windows, doors, and hallways of the elementary school. Made by tiny hands in arts-and-crafts class, they bore slogans like "your difference is your specialty," "include everyone no matter what," and...

A Coldplay concert tends to quickly turn into an audience singalong, essentially crowdsourcing the crooning to create an inspirational, moving moment. The Brit band is now taking that notion to another level with their latest project, a collaboration with Oxfam that pairs an exclusive acoustic version of the...

When the Flaming Lips performed at Spinner's free NXNE show in Toronto before 30,000 odd fans last summer, little did we know that it would be the last time the Lips would play their famously celebratory streamers-lasers-stage-props live show in North America. Following a subsequent Australian tour, Wayne...

Easter and Passover usually land pretty close on the calendar, which makes sense considering Jesus' Last Supper happened to also be a Passover Seder. This also makes sense for my family because I was raised Jewish and my wife was raised Catholic...

Justin Timberlake's not-so-secret Myspace show at SXSW had many attendees of the 27-year-old South-by-Southwest music festival wondering if its indie-centric soul had finally been crushed -- as if Public Enemy performing inside a gigantic Doritos vending machine earlier in the week hadn't already done that.

But it...

"My wristbands are getting in the way of my guitar," griped a bemused Wayne Coyne at the Belmont's outdoor stage in front of a few hundred very lucky people.

"SXSW problems," bandmate Steven Drozd quipped back.

Coyne also snarked that the crowd was "cooler...

There’s a kid-culture Cold War going on in hot Orlando.

The latest salvo comes courtesy of Walt Disney World’s December launch of New Fantasyland, an expansion of the Magic Kingdom’s most popular section, which doubles its size while finally giving Disney’s uber-popular princesses their own homeland, highlighted by "Little Mermaid"...

Technology giveth and taketh away, that was the essential gist of this year's SXSW Interactive, the premiere intellectual gathering of the world's technological community (and which inspired over a million social-media mentions). One might expect such a conference-slash-festival to merely proselytize about the marvels of modern tech, and that...

Techno icon Richie Hawtin noted at the beginning of his "in conversation" SXSW panel with EDM superstar Joel "Deadmau5" Zimmerman that they were both Canadians, but then they proved it when asked what it was about Canada that had resulted in two of the biggest names in electronic music coming...

When is a gun not a gun? According to 25-year-old Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson — the “wiki weapon” guy about whom you will one day be hearing a lot — that would be when it’s a file, even if that code can be downloaded into a 3D printer that...

Once upon a time, the success of Canadian indie musicians at SXSW music festival in Austin, TX was news. The rise of Broken Social Scene, The Constantines, Metric, Stars and their ilk was often traced to a series of hype-building showcases down south that introduced our northern rockers to the...

"I would like to die on Mars," billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk told an audience last week. "Just not on impact."

During his opening keynote at the SXSW Interactive tech festival, the co-founder of PayPal, who is also behind electric car company Tesla Motors and energy outfit SolarCity, said he went...

The highlight of the SXSW film panel on co-ed cult film "Spring Breakers" came at the end, when the actresses Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine were "pressured" into singing Britney Spears' "(Hit Me Baby) One More Time," recreating an already infamous scene from the tail-end of the film...

Splitting the difference between SXSW's film and music streams, Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle and longtime collaborator Rick Smith of Underworld held an "in conversation" panel, a good deal of which centered around their first and most famous work, "Trainspotting," which rode the ecstatic wave of dance anthem "Born Slippy," making...

"Downloaded," the first film selected by SXSW thanks to its perfect intersection of the festival's three themes of music, film and interactive technology, opens with the squelchy crunch of a dial-up modem, a sonic signifier of just how far we've come since 1998. The film by Alex Winter,...