Tabla de contenidos para December 2025 en Maclean's

For years, the Thomson family has ranked number one on lists like these, with billions in holdings through Thomson Reuters and other investments. But big tech, crypto and other new industries are transforming everything in our society—including our annual list of richest Canadians, produced in partnership with our sister publication Canadian Business. Changpeng Zhao, who founded Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, sits at the top this year, thanks to the meteoric rise in value of BNB, the crypto coin used on his exchange. But his spot is precarious: anything can happen in the wacky world of crypto, and the Thomsons still have a massive net worth, valued at an estimated $90.2 billion. Other new names this year include Ling Tang, a pre-IPO investor in the mobile technology company AppLovin,…

CREATED FOR What does it mean to imagine a Canada where every child—no matter their postal code—has the chance to grow up healthy? In many ways, it’s a national ideal. Yet today, that vision seems to slip further from reach. Rising rates of childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes and chronic illness are colliding with inequities in food access, urban design and income—forces that threaten to shape the health of our children and all the children who come after. The data is sobering. In 2024, global health agencies estimated that 35 million children under the age of five were overweight. By 2050, one in three children worldwide are projected to be obese or overweight. Here in Canada, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes among children has risen 60 per cent in…

JEFF WALL’S LARGE-SCALE IMAGES are windows into the theatre of the everyday. In one, a man casually backflips in the middle of a legion hall. Another shows a crowd of partygoers smoking outside a moonlit nightclub. Yet another features a horseback rider hauling herself up from the ground while the horse who tossed her looks on indifferently. Wall’s images seem natural and organic, as if plucked from daily life. But the reality is that most of them were meticulously staged. He often spent months gathering props, casting performers and producing sets on location or in studio before taking a photo. Wall was raised around art, painting in his parents’ toolshedturned-studio as a kid, then studying art history at the University of British Columbia. By the end of the 1970s, he…

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EVERYONE’S SAYING IT, and I’m living it: the most educated cohort in history is also the most chronically underemployed. It can take years for new university grads to land a job in their field. And that’s if they’re lucky. I’m one of the displaced. I’m approaching 30, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Montreal with my wife, and I’ve spent more than eight years in school—all in order to break into the industry that I’m now, by every measure, more than qualified for. I have two master’s degrees, a strong GPA from one of Canada’s top universities and years of experience in finance, my chosen field. Yet, since August of last year, I’ve sent out more than 200 job applications and not one has led to even an entry-level interview…

IN JEREMY HANSEN’S OPINION, some of humanity’s stickiest problems are best solved from 380,000 kilometres away. As soon as T-minus two months from now, Hansen, a former air force pilot from London, Ontario, will squeeze his six-foot-two frame into NASA’s Orion capsule and head for the moon, becoming the first non-American astronaut in history to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. During the mission, dubbed Artemis II, the four-person crew will perform a figure-eight lunar flyby, along with rigorous tests to track the effects of space on the human body. That data will be quite handy quite soon. Hansen’s roughly 10-day excursion is just the second phase in NASA’s multi-step plan to build a habitable base on the moon—and yes, Elon, eventually get humans to Mars. Still, no one’s going anywhere without…

ONCE UPON A TIME, about 5,000 years ago in southern Iraq, there lived a king by the name of Gilgamesh. According to legend, he was sexist and classist, and he mercilessly tyrannized his subjects to satisfy a restless bloodlust in pursuit of his own immortal glory. Yet every year, my firstyear students fall in love with him and the epic written in his name. They adore his bromance with the wild man Enkidu, and they’re moved to tears over their lost friendship and the dawning of Gilgamesh’s existential angst. I see 18-year-olds get completely drawn into the king’s often-cryptic, otherworldly journey from thousands of years ago—across chasms of space, time, language and culture. This is why I love teaching the humanities. I’m an associate professor in the College of the…

CREATED BY MEDIAPLANET In 2019, Beverley Moir was given six months to three years to live after being diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Up until that day, Moir had always considered herself healthy. As an active non-smoker, the diagnosis came as a huge shock. Lung cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed and the leading cause of cancer deaths in Canada. Nearly 70 per cent of cases are diagnosed in a late stage, and fewer than 3 in 10 patients survive 5 years post-diagnosis. New advancements, including biomarker testing, are helping to change this outlook. Biomarker testing analyzes patient tissue to detect genetic mutations, proteins, and patterns that can guide treatment decisions. This form of precision medicine enables healthcare providers to tailor therapies to each patient, often leading to…

THE FIRST TIME I SAW A PSYCHIC was in the late 1990s. I was in my early thirties, living in Vancouver and newly married. When a friend invited me to get a reading with Carole, a visiting psychic medium from Ontario, I went along on a whim. Before we arrived, I was skeptical that psychic abilities were real. I took my wedding ring off on the way to the appointment so Carole wouldn’t have any clues about my life. But without knowing anything about me but my first name, she picked up that I was married, albeit unhappily. Somehow, she knew I was a writer. What really impressed me was when she channelled my deceased grandmother, telling me about her emphysema, a song she loved to sing, the name of…

ART A WHIMSICAL WORLD DAVID ALTMEJD: AGORA Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal Until January 17, 2026 MONTREAL-BORN AND L.A.-BASED SCULPTOR David Altmejd skyrocketed to art success with pieces at the AGO, the Guggenheim and the Venice Biennale. A 1998 graduate of the University of Quebec, he’s returned to his alma mater multiple times to showcase his otherworldly visions. His latest exhibit features more than 20 heads and busts of spiritual, mythological and earthly figures, human and otherwise, made with materials like bronze, quartz, coloured pencils and spray foam. Among them are Trickster (right), a dandyish figure with a sly grin, and Hare (far right), a mint-green humanoid rabbit. ART A LEGACY IN BRONZE IN RELIEF: THE WORK OF DORA DE PÉDERY-HUNT National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Until april 12, 2026 IF…