The Rundown

With a wave of recent cyberattacks on hospitals and other infrastructure, will these disruptions become a regular occurrence? Cybersecurity experts discuss what's happening, whether the attacks will be more frequent, and what we can do to adapt.

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The pandemic and lockdowns we've heard many times have created a "mental health tsunami." But a new study that looked at 31 different countries showed the mental health effects of the pandemic were minimal. How is this possible? The Agenda examines this study with two of its authors, Brett Thombs and Danielle Rice, and the University of Toronto's Kwame McKenzie.

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Generation Squeeze founder Paul Kershaw got a rise out of Baby Boomers recently, by stating the generation didn't pay its fair share of taxes. He joins Steve Paikin to defend his stance.

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Financial planner Shannon Lee Simmons provides insight into how to prepare for a recession from a personal finance perspective.

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Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist at OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has said today's technology might be "slightly conscious." Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that Google's AI LaMDA was "sentient." Is it? Could AI become conscious in our lifetime? And beyond if we can create AI sentience, should we? MIT's Max Tegmark, author of "Life 3.0," and others, debate the future of AI.

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Not every regime achieves democracy through its collapse, some do so through strength. And in his book, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformation of Modern Asia," Joseph Wong argues that the latter might be more likely for regimes like China. He discusses what the West gets wrong about democratization in Asia, and what the transition to democracy could look like in modern authoritarian regimes.

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Milestone timelines are changing and even disappearing, If the standard life-stage achievements for graduation, career, marriage, children, homeowning, and retirement created predictability and comfort, what happens when people don't meet those marks? Does it negatively affect their sense of self? Or are the outliers the new normal? How much does technology, religion, gender inequality, racial inequity, and a changing economy play into those milestones. What would it take to bring our ideas of social norms into the 21st century?

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Justin Davis spent his childhood climbing the rungs of hockey in Canada. He made it to major junior hockey in the OHL. He won a memorial cup with the Ottawa 67s. He played professionally overseas. In his book, "Conflicted Scars: An Average Player's Journey to the NHL," he writes, "the game of hockey is broken, it leaves scars inside us we keep hidden., From the Kyle Beach sexual assault settlement with the Chicago Blackhawks to Akim Aliu's memoir, confronting discrimination in hockey, Davis reflects on the moment hockey culture is being faced with and how a lifetime of hockey left its mark on him.

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Loneliness isn't just unpleasant. It turns out it's also bad for your health and for social cohesion. What may have been a taboo topic prior to the pandemic is now higher on the list of social issues to solve. For some insight, we welcome Pete Bombaci, founder and executive director of the not-for-profit GenWell Project, that aims to be a Canadian-led, global human connection movement;
David Kepes, CEO of CompanionLink, a registered charity that connects isolated people, particularly seniors, with volunteers for social connection; Miriam Amdur, founder of the 52 Friends Project, which is on a mission to reduce the stigma around loneliness and prioritize friendship; and Steve Joordens, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

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Fear, jealousy, anger. Name an emotion, and you can find an evolutionary reason why it exists. But why depression? What role does it play? Is it an adaptation that helped our survival, or is it a disorder? For insight, we welcome: Randolph Nesse, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, and author of "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry; Maryanne Fisher, professor of psychology at Saint Mary's University in Halifax; and Paul Andrews, professor of evolutionary psychology at McMaster University.

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