This week: info pillars, black children, and Picasso

In The Grid:

• You’ll never guess what’s become of Pages Books & Magazines’ former home on Queen Street West, unless you guessed “condo sales centre,” which is frankly the first thing someone would probably guess.
• Astral Media’s new “info-pillars”—only 14.3% info and 85.7% advertising—aren’t exactly well-loved in Toronto, and last weekend one of them got two blackboards draped overtop of it, complete with chalk, as a kind of make-your-own protest. I found the people who made it and talked to them about it, while The Grid’s commenters offered some very reasonable suggestions for metting out an appropriate punishment. *

Here:

• “There was one black boy in the school but nobody picked on him.” I talked to my grandmother about growing up in Toronto in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s.
• If you want to prevent me from ever having been born, this might be the guy you have to go back in time to kill. Please don’t harm my grandma, though.

Elsewhere:

• My City Lives interviewed me and a few other local media types who know a thing or two about transportation, and they produced this video about how to save transit in Toronto out of it.

(* means an article or a version of it appeared in The Grid in print; otherwise, it was online-exclusive.)