Maclean's November 2025

I confess: I sometimes stand in line at my local coffee shop, looking incredulously at younger customers’ elaborate beverage orders and wondering how they can afford to drop $10 daily on grande iced matcha lattes. I’m a Gen X mom who drinks regular drip coffee with milk, usually brewed at home. Other people’s impulse buys bring out my judgmental side. But I know I’m falling into a trap. Matcha lattes are the new avocado toast—the big consumer trend that symbolizes a generation’s wasteful habits, at least in the eyes of the over-40 set. Young people often complain about the rising cost of living, so it’s tempting for the rest of us to criticize what looks like profligate spending. Matcha is mocked as a drink Gen Zers love for its colour…

CRASH LANDING Our September cover story on the Canadian condo crash detailed how the country’s biggest cities are filled with tiny units no one wants. A sizable chunk of readers expressed unbridled schadenfreude for the builders and investors left in the lurch. When people buy property expecting to flip it for profit, they’re the problem. It’s good that condo prices have cratered if it means these greedy idiots are bankrupted out of the market. It would also be good if condo values fell so low that people could afford to buy and live in them. A lack of regulation by our spineless governments has allowed homes to be commodified. It’s good when things conspire to push out individuals who are only interested in homeownership to suck profit out and make…

WHAT DONALD TRUMP WANTS, Donald Trump must get. This past April, perhaps noticing his 51st-state critical-mineral grab was failing, he loudly issued an executive order expediting permits for companies to commercially mine far-flung seabeds rich in nickel, cobalt and other metals—demand for which is set to quadruple by 2040 to power the clean-tech boom. There’s just one problem: those seabeds belong to everyone, sir. That didn’t seem to bother Gerard Barron, CEO of the Metals Company, a Vancouver-based sea-mining firm. Its American subsidiary seized on Trump’s mining zeal to stake out the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a four-and-a-half-million-square-kilometre oceanic expanse between Hawaii and Mexico. Barron’s billion-dollar goal for the coming years? Step one: slurp millions of metal-heavy nodules off the Zone’s floor using underwater vessels (picture remotely controlled Dysons). Step two: refine…

BACK IN 2016, I JOINED the University of Toronto’s student aerospace team with my friends Ayaan and Shayaan Haider. We’d build our own makeshift drones then make them square off in silly competitions, like seeing whose model could fly eggs a few kilometres without cracking them, or deliver cans of beer to frat houses without shaking them up. We noticed our fellow students were ordering items from Amazon Prime that they could easily get from local corner stores, so we created a delivery app, programming our drones to zip around buildings and other city structures to drop off orders. Creating flight paths that drones can navigate autonomously isn’t as simple as plotting routes on Google Maps. When you look up, you may see clouds, telephone wires, maybe a few birds.…

THERE WASN’T a single moment when I knew I didn’t want to be a mother. If I had to explain it, it felt like waiting for an important phone call that simply never came. The go-to term for women like me used to be “childless,” which suggests a lack of children, and maybe even a longing for them. I prefer the term “childfree.” In 2023, Statistics Canada reported that one-third of Canadians between 15 and 49 years old planned not to have kids. Fertility rates have declined across every childbearing age group over the past decade, except for a slight uptick among women aged 35 to 44. The overall Canadian fertility rate in 2023 was a record low of 1.26 babies per woman, compared to 1.55 in 2003. My own…

CREATED BY IMAGINE LIVING with a debilitating neurological disorder that affects every aspect of your daily life. For more than 10 million Canadians living with conditions like Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, chronic pain, depression and other diseases and disorders of the brain, this is a harsh reality. Globally, the total burden of these conditions is more than that of cancer and heart disease combined. Enter the team at Canada’s largest research hospital, University Health Network (UHN). At UHN’s Krembil Brain Institute, one of North America’s largest neuroscience units, experts are driving innovations in neurosurgery to treat brain diseases. One area is neuromodulation—more specifically, deep brain stimulation (DBS). DBS involves a specialized team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuroradiologists, technologists and nurses who undertake a complex task: implanting tiny electrodes deep into the brain…