The Rundown

Hamilton-Niagara Hub journalist Justin Chandler met up with landscape architect Lesia Mokrycke to find out about her quest to catalogue the trees that have been around longer than Hamilton itself.

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Best-selling novelist Tom Perrotta has been called an American Chechov. He's won a Peabody Award, is a screenwriter, and his works have been nominated for Academy Awards. He talks to Nam Kiwanuka about his new book, "Tracy Flick Can't Win." It returns to the character played in 1999 by Reese Witherspoon in the novel-turned-film, "Election."

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It's fairly easy to plant a tree when purchasing products or donating to tree-planting programs. But when done poorly, tree-planting can hinder biodiversity and harm the planet. When does tree-planting becoming green-washing? What's the relationship between land, species, and technology when it comes to global tree-planting?

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One of the biggest arguments against time travel is the issue of consistency paradoxes - a popular trope in movies, where people go back in time to change the past, only find the future dramatically altered. But what if changing the past creates a new parallel timeline in which changes are reflected, leaving the original timeline intact? Dr. Barack Shoshany, physics professor at Brock University, has done the math. He talks to Nam Kiwanuka about why the existence of multiple histories may help resolve one of the biggest barriers to time travel.

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By day, literary agent Brian Wood represents nonfiction sports writers. By night, he writes poems that demonstrate a reverence for a traditional, classic approach to the artform, distinct from today's post-modernist and experimental poetry. He chats with Nam Kiwanuka about his third poetry collection, "Zen in Beverly Hills."

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After winning the largest majority in 35 years, an emboldened and more experienced Premier Doug Ford is now laying out his plans for Ontario for the next four years. "We have a big agenda to fulfill and keep our promises," he has said. But he is staring down a 40-year- high inflation rate, a buckling health-care system, and tense labour negotiations with teachers. On the day the Progressive Conservative government delivers its Throne Speech, we discuss what lies ahead for Ontarians.

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During the Spanish Civil War in 1936, some 1,700 Canadians volunteered to secretly travel to Spain to fight and possibly die for the Republicans. Ardent Canadian communist Edward Cecil-Smith was one of them. In his book, "Not for King or Country: Edward Cecil-Smith, the Communist Party of Canada, and the Spanish Civil War," author Tyler Wentzell tells the story of this ?violent pacifist."

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Author and activist Habiba Cooper Diallo discusses her memoir, "Black in School," documenting the stereotypes, microaggressions, and system racism she experienced at a Halifax high school known for its diversity. Then, how did two Norval Morrisseau paintings that went missing in Thunder Bay in the 1980s get recovered?

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In her book "Stories I Might Regret Telling You," singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright reflects on her place in a famous musical family, and what it took to find her own unique voice.

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The singer-songwriter goes beyond being a boldface name, a performer, a member of a famous family and opens herself up in a searing and moving memoir, "Stories I Might Regret Telling You."

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