Unpublished Newswire

While working at Calgary’s CFAC-AM in 1958, on-air personality and country singer Stu Phillips ducked down to the building’s coffee shop one day. He was young, brightly talented and restlessly ambitious. On a whim, he had his tea leaves read by a woman.The beverage-based prognosticator told him that within three days he would meet a blond man who would change his life forever. He laughed and quickly forgot about it, but some 72 hours later, his manager called him into his office to meet someone.

In my first year of high school, all of my friends lived in my phone. It was the first full school year affected by COVID-19, which meant we were at school in person one day—only taking one four-hour class while we were there—and online again the next. I’d been swept into a friend group practically by accident through class group chats or face-masked icebreakers, and once we’d formed our little group, we stuck together like it was life or death. We texted constantly: while our cameras were off in school Google Meets, as we sat two metres apart in socially distanced classrooms, and in the...