ARTMUSEM

Even as the “whale tail” was gaining notoriety in the early aughts, few TV shows dared to incorporate the style on-screen. Degrassi: The Next Generation , however, wasn’t like other shows — and Manny Santos (Cassie Steele) wasn’t your run-of-the-mill high school character. Almost twenty years ago to the day, viewers witnessed Manny’s metamorphosis before our very eyes. In the third episode of Season 3, which premiered on Oct. 1, 2003, she shed her innocent persona and discovered the truly transformative powers of the visible thong . Titled “U Got The Look,” Manny made a declaration that teens ’round the world could relate to. “I wanna be hot. Not cute, not adorable. Hot,” she pronounced. And the tool she utilized to up her hot-o-meter? A slinky bedazzled thong she found at a kiosk in the mall. With a new look and newfound confidence, Manny strutted down the Degrassi hallways with the swagger of Bella Hadid on a Versace runway . In the scene, she wore a lace-up, off-the-shoulder ...

When Polygon most recently spoke to showrunner David Jenkins about his big gay pirate show Our Flag Means Death , it was in part to talk about where season 2 of the series seems to be headed. While season 1 was about the hapless crew of the pirate ship Revenge finding their feet as pirates and finding unexpected emotional connections they often don’t know how to navigate, season 2 brings in a new sense of outside pressure against the central characters in the form of a military assault on piracy. “I think there’s a story of this way of life coming to an end,” Jenkins told Polygon. “There are strong forces that are going to crack down on everything, and will the family survive? Is the thing they’ve built strong enough to survive?” Much as Our Flag Means Death ’s central story about “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and notorious killer Edward “Blackbeard” Teach is drawn from real history , Jenkins explains that season 2’s outside threats are also part of history, from the end of the ...

Taylor Swift and Hayley Williams have never been in “Misery Business” together. During an Oct. 6 interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon , Paramore’s lead singer revealed the surprising way that she first met her good friend and future tour-mate: through Swift’s mother. As Williams explained to Fallon, she and Swift got started in the Nashville music industry “around the same time, and around the same age as well,” but only came into contact because Paramore and Swift were both nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards in 2008. The late Amy Winehouse ultimately won in that category, but they both ended up with a good friend instead when they were connected at an after-party by none other than Swift’s mother Andrea. “It was actually Timbaland’s GRAMMY party, [it was] huge, I was very nervous,” she recalled. “But a woman came up to me and she said, ‘I’m Taylor Swift’s mom and, you know, Taylor doesn’t have a lot of friends her age that do music. And I would ...

With serious investments needed to address Canada’s housing crisis, a top economist suggests a collaborative approach is required to make homes affordable. A recent report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation found the 3.5 million additional new homes needed to make housing affordable in Canada by 2030 will cost an expected $1 trillion on top of what’s already planned. “The idea is just to convey to people the scale of the challenge, that we need fundamental reform, we need systematic change, we need change by governments and the policies, but we also need a lot of change by the private sector,” Aled Ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist with the CMHC, told BNN Bloomberg Wednesday. “This is all hands on deck.” Ab Iorwerth said further tax breaks on construction are needed, such as the federal government’s previously announced plan to remove the GST from new rental builds. “There need to be incentives and encouragement to the private sector to put that money at work in...

The Quebec government has introduced a bill that would allow it to join a proposed class-action lawsuit against more than 40 pharmaceutical companies accused of downplaying the harmful effects of opioids. The lawsuit application, launched by the British Columbia government in 2018, seeks $85 billion in damages to compensate Canadian governments for health-care costs linked to opioids. B.C. alleges that drug makers misrepresented the risk of opioid addiction and failed to mention side effects and withdrawal symptoms. Quebec’s bill would allow the government to sue opioid makers, wholesalers and consultants for health-care costs resulting from their alleged failure to warn the public of the risks associated with their drugs. The bill, tabled by Quebec Social Services Minister Lionel Carmant, also makes it possible for Quebec to join class actions initiated in other Canadian jurisdictions, which the province currently cannot do. There were more than 38,000 deaths linked to opioid ...

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dave Pearson, who survived a shark attack in March 2011 off the coast of New South Wales, Australia, and founded the survivor group Bite Club. It has been edited for length and clarity. I had actually purchased a new surfboard the evening before I got bit, and was looking forward to testing it out. So me and a few mates headed out to the beach and had a normal afternoon surf, as we do. I’d only been out in the water for about five minutes, and I was on my stomach paddling back out after my third wave. I was looking over my left side at my mates when all of a sudden, the whole afternoon changed and a shark came up from just off to my right-hand side. Its nose hit my head and its bottom jaw hit my board. It flipped out of the water with my surfboard and my right arm stuck in its mouth. We tumbled to the ocean floor, but it left me alone pretty quick, and I was able to get back down on my board. When I looked down at my arm I ...