Don’t be fooled by the near-blizzards we’ve endured in recent weeks. The vast, white fields of snow that blanket Canada each winter are shrinking, particularly in Quebec, due to climate change.

I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged on Sunday from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to … germs. The former Princeton University undergraduate and Afghanistan counterinsurgency instructor said, to the mirth of his co-hosts, that he hadn’t washed his hands in a decade. Naturally this germ of misinformation went viral on social media.

Olga Perlmutter was in her mid-20s when the Nazi regime captured her family, killed her siblings and forced her into slave labour at Auschwitz. Yet, looking back over the past century, she sees a life full of blessings. "All my life, I have had miracles," she said, surrounded by her devoted friends who all survived the same concentration camp and now visit her Côte Saint-Luc condo to play cards four times a week.

Authors have many images to describe distorted mental states, but that of a glass enclosure, which warps vision and sound, is among the most common. In his searing essay on the loss of his daughter, Aleksandar Hemon uses the metaphor of an aquarium to describe the detached sensations caused by profound grief. Sylvia Plath’s titular bell jar is her symbol for the airless perceptions of suicidal depression.

The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be. But if we're going to have that, we do have to go out into the solar system. You have to capture more of the sun's output, and we have to use all of the resources that are out in space, in terms of minerals and not just energy. And that's very doable, but we have to get started.

In retrospect, yes. I was always questioning things, and had a very keen sense of justice and injustice. I would never let an argument drop, and was generally quite annoying. My parents certainly weren’t surprised that I became a philosopher.

I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons.

Jen’s story is like a lot of people’s stories. She’s 35 years old. She and her sister were the first in their family to go to college. She emerged from undergrad with $12,000 in debt, and even though she was making just $30,000 a year at her first job, she made her standard monthly loan payments on time. In 2008, when she was laid off into the depths of the economic crisis, she decided to do what so many other people did then: go back to school.

In 2018 Apple became the first company to reach a market value in excess of $1 trillion. In the same year, the company's shares dropped 30 per cent. Josie Cox explains how it got there and where it's going next.

The thing about telling people you’re going to interview Daniel Radcliffe is that everyone, from journalists who have interviewed him to producers who have worked with him to fans who have accosted him for a selfie on the street, says that he is the nicest celebrity you will ever meet. He did nothing to refute that open secret—how lovely for Hollywood to finally have a positive one—when we met in New York City to discuss his next project, the high-concept TBS comedy series Miracle Workers.

In November 2017, a provocation appeared in the Facebook feeds of 3,000 Mormon parishioners. It was a sponsored post crafted in the gauzy style of one of the Mormon church’s own Facebook ads, but addressing a seldom-discussed truth about the early history of the church and its founding patriarch, Joseph Smith. “Why did Joseph marry a 14 year old girl?” the post asked.

How might human civilization be recorded in a galactic encyclopedia? Encyclopedia Galactica is the compilation of a series of paintings by award-winning artist Jon Lomberg, in collaboration with the late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan. Below is the story of Encyclopedia Galactica, told by Jon Lomberg himself.

Viktor Frankl is the founder of logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy that he developed after surviving Nazi concentration camps in the 1940s. After his experience in the camps, he developed a theory that it is through a search for meaning and purpose in life that individuals can endure hardship and suffering.

For two years, in the early 1990s, Richard Palmer served as the CIA station chief in the United States’ Moscow embassy. The events unfolding around him—the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia—were so chaotic, so traumatic and exhilarating, that they mostly eluded clearheaded analysis. But from all the intelligence that washed over his desk, Palmer acquired a crystalline understanding of the deeper narrative of those times.

The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.

One day, as a small child, John Allen Chau was rooting through his father’s study when he found something curious and alluring: an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic story of a sailor shipwrecked on a deserted island. “After struggling my way to read it with early elementary school English,” he later told a website for outdoors enthusiasts, “I started reading easier kid-friendly books,” like The Sign of the Beaver, “which inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks”.

At the Spokane women’s march this year, as women paraded through the eastern Washington city in pussy hats and pink tees, a skinny, bespectacled man marched alongside, clutching a voice amplifier and brandishing a poster of a giant, bloodied fetus. “You are marching for your own personal convenience, your own personal beliefs,” the man bellowed into the amplifier. “But what about the millions of children who have been murdered by abortion since 1973?”

In May, 2017, a twenty-two-year-old Dutch entrepreneur named Boyan Slat unveiled a contraption that he believed would rid the oceans of plastic. In a former factory in Utrecht, a crowd of twelve hundred people stood before a raised stage. The setting was futuristic and hip. A round screen set in the stage floor displayed 3-D images of Earth; behind Slat, another screen charted the rapid accumulation of plastic in the Pacific Ocean since the nineteen-fifties.

Before I declined the arranged marriage proposal from my first cousin, I almost accepted it. This story is about the almost-acceptance. It’s about the social pressures which nearly buckled me into a ‘yes’, before I resisted and reclaimed my right to say ‘no’. It’s about the cultural codes of honour, perceptions of duty, and the deeply entrenched values of allegiance to kin which underlie the custom of cousin-marriage in Pakistan, my country of birth.

When I was a kid, 1999 was a year of a far-off future where we’d have flying cars, robots in every home, and of course, moonbases. It was a year that seemed poised on the cusp of greatness. One of the most popular songs when I was in high school was “Party Like It’s 1999,” from the late pop star Prince (still sad that I have to say ‘late’). It was a year that promised much in a shiny new millennium.