My guest on this episode is Josh O’Kane. Josh is a reporter at the Globe and Mail whose first book, Nowhere With You: The East Coast Anthems of Joel Plaskett, The Emergency and Thrush Hermit was published by ECW Press and was a Canadian bestseller. Josh’s most recent book, Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, was published by Random House Canada in 2022. It was a national bestseller and a finalist for numerous Canadian and international literary awards, including the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, the National Business Book Award, the Ontario Speaker’s Book Award, the Heritage Toronto Book Award, and the Best in Business Book Award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. It was named one of the best books of 2022 by The Globe and Mail, CBC, The Hill Times and more. The book was also adapted for the stage by Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre and Michael Healey as The Master Plan. Margaret O’Mara, author of The Code, called Sideways “a thrill ride of a book, revealing what really happened when Google tried to build a city and Silicon Valley’s magical thinking fell to earth.”

Josh and I talk about the extremely unequal distribution of wealth in arts and culture (one his main beats as a reporter), the strangeness of seeing your deeply reported journalistic work become a hit play that features a talking tree, and the wait for the next big book-worthy idea.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.