A brunette with perfect winged eyeliner gestures to a single clothing rack beside her. I only wear 32 items of clothing, she tells the camera proudly. All year.

The ensuing video consists of short clips of her modelling each item. A pair of tan culottes from Everlane. A single set of black Aritzia leggings. A taupe cotton maxi dress from Reformation (ethically made! she chirps).

She showcases the clothes in front of an impeccable backdrop, which is apparently a corner of her actual home where she lives. Against the crisp white walls are two plants, one placed on the floor…

As vaccinations roll out, my concerns about the pandemic have gradually started to ease. For the first time, I can imagine a world in which we can go to concerts again and throw parties and sip on draft beers in crowded bars. Man, I miss draft beer.

But as my pandemic anxiety has started to subside, another question has risen up in me, involuntarily like a tablespoon of bile creeping up my throat.

Do I still have friends?

It wasn’t an important question to consider for most of the pandemic. When I was locked down at home, I was concerned…

In my first year out of university, I lived in a student neighborhood. It wasn’t intentional — in fact, I didn’t know enough about the city to know which neighborhoods were for students.

It worked out, because I still felt like a university student. I was freshly 23, fairly broke, even with my new grownup job, and I lived in a shared apartment with two strangers and no air conditioning to save money. What is more student life than that?

Over that first year, friends and I checked out student bars in the neighborhood, motivated by a search for cheap…

We’re coming up to a year since the first Covid-19 lockdown, which means it’s also been nearly a year since I was laid off. I lost my job, along with hundreds of my non-profit colleagues, back in March, when we all still thought the lockdown was just an extended spring break.

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t blame the organization that let me go. As the markets crashed, donations dried up, and my marketing job was considered non-essential for the charity’s operations. But losing my job was — unsurprisingly — the worst. The moment I got my termination…

I’ve only been a vegetarian for a couple years, but already, I’m so accustomed to living without meat. It’s funny how quickly it happened.

There are a handful of meals I miss sometimes. A steaming bowl of pork belly ramen in a rich, meaty broth. A toasted bacon avocado sandwich to cure a Sunday hangover. A junior chicken sandwich on a late-night McDonald’s run with friends.

But for the most part, I don’t think about meat. I love what I eat. My main sources of protein are tofu, chickpeas, lentils, and eggs, and I complement those with an array of…

If there is one itty bitty silver lining to everything happening right now, it’s that we are seeing more people engaging in social justice, especially online. And they’re taking concrete action. Across my social feeds, I’m seeing more people than ever asking their friends, family and colleagues to sign petitions, call their local representatives, attend protests, or make donations to a cause.

It’s encouraging to see people taking concrete, meaningful action at times like these, instead of stopping at a vaguely supportive social media post. Donations, calls, petitions, protests — these are the activities that catalyze change.

That said, for…

When I was an activist, I got used to being told I was wrong.

We were doing anti-sexual violence work on our university campus, and it felt like all the forces in the world were working to shut down our efforts. Our cause was straightforward. We wanted better sexual violence prevention programs in place at our university, more supports for survivors of sexual assault, and better policies to handle sexual misconduct when it happened.

Campuses are hotbeds for sexual violence, and most university administrations do little to nothing to address the issue. The majority are much more concerned with the…

I can remember the first time I felt it — the itch to shop. It was in fifth grade, when my friend Kaitlin strolled onto the playground in a brand new pink floral rain jacket and matching hoodie. Everyone ooo’d and ahhh’d and admired the set, which was the height of elementary school fashion.

I spotted the same jacket in a store window when my mom and I were at the mall the next week. To my delight, I saw that it came in orange too, and I suddenly wanted it more than anything. …