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Before a room full of employees ever sat down, the fear was already there—from leadership, from participants, and from the equity-seeking groups watching to see who this session was really for. Here's what happened when we stopped trying to convince people it was safe, and started meeting them where they actually were.
Read MoreAlick Mac is a hip-hop artist who makes music about how hard it can be for men to open up. His music video "Phone Tag" follows a text exchange between two young men who keep trying to say something real, then deleting it. This fall he brings his one-man show "Boys' Club" to Fringe festivals in Nanaimo, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
We asked him about the story behind the video, what shaped it, and what he hopes people take from it.
Read MoreI have spent the last four years of my life working on the protection of boys from sexual violence. I literally travelled across the world to learn from front line practitioners how to protect boys and transform their understanding of what it means to be a boy and a man. From Bolivia to Cambodia, then from Namibia to France, I had the privilege to see how these amazing individuals engage with boys and support them in ways that not only protect them, but also liberate them from rigid ideas of masculinity.
In my travels, I could also see how that same rigid idea is engrained in boys’ minds from a very young age. I have seen how social workers, teachers, community educators, and others, had to come up with new ways and constantly be creative to reach out to boys and show them that an alternative existed. That boys could be vulnerable, that boys could ask for help, and that boys could care
Read MoreThe manosphere is free, available in the middle of the night, and designed to be found by boys who are already vulnerable. It’s hard to compete with that. A teacher sees a kid for 50 minutes at a time. A coach sees him three times a week. A parent sees him between homework and screens.
But you have something the algorithm doesn’t. You know him. You’re real. And over time, that can become a sustaining anchor for boys as they become young men navigating the choppy waters of growing into adulthood.
Read MoreYesterday, two things happened that made me empathize with boys and men who are drawn to the manosphere.
The first was that I had a friend – who I’ll refer by the pseudonym Hayden, for his privacy – disclose an instance of sexual harassment that happened to him in a place where he normally feels very safe.
The second was that a staff member at a residential therapy program for children who have been sexually abused told me that they have had multiple boys come through their program who idolize manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate.
Read MoreNew research shows that more than one in three boys between ages 11 and 17 is already gambling—and sports betting is just one part of a much larger ecosystem of products designed to exploit boys’ and young men’s desire for belonging, independence, mastery, and purpose.
Read MoreLast week I was listening to The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast and heard something that got me thinking.
Amanda Askell works at Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. She's a philosopher, and part of her job is shaping Claude's personality. She was talking about a problem they're running into. Claude is learning about itself from the internet. And a lot of what it's reading is negative.
Read MoreDuring 2026’s World Economic Forum, Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Davos, Switzerland, and did something that caught my attention. He quoted a Czech dissident from the 1970s to talk about the future of global power.
Read MoreKids don’t expect you to know everything. What they’re really looking for is a safe adult—someone who listens without judgment, tells the truth without shame, and makes it okay to be curious. The conversation about porn isn’t just about screens or sex acts; it’s about the bigger things: values, relationships, respect, and safety. It’s a chance to help your son understand the difference between performance and connection, between what he sees online and what he deserves in real life.
Read MoreIn honour of a seventh grader I know whose friends just accompanied him to his first-ever Pride parade, here are are the four best films from the last few years telling the still-emerging story of young queer masculinity.
Read MoreWhile Adolescence is telling a devastating story, it is also telling a limited one. We see adults acting professionally and adults falling apart, but this show doesn’t show us what curious and compassionate adults look like in the face of boys’ pain and harm. We see angry boys and hurt boys, boys carrying fear and boys bluffing with bravado, but we don’t see the thoughtful, clear-eyed and gentle masculinity that is already being championed by boys who will become the next generation of men.
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