The Peak Weekend Reader

Good morning. Liz here, The Peak’s freshly appointed VP of Content tasked with bringing you, dear reader, original features and editorial. I want to tell you a bit more about what we’re building. 

First, a little about me: I’ve been in the media and magazine industry for over a decade, with most of that time spent working at fashion glossies. My background is less interest rates and earnings reports and more runway reportage and think-pieces on the kitten heel. I’ve sat down with the late, great creative director Virgil Abloh and chased after Bella Hadid backstage at New York Fashion Week. During my time as a fashion editor, I was less interested in telling readers what to buy, but rather why they wanted to buy in the first place. But even a fun, frothy fashion story is, at the end of the day, a business story — which brings me to The Peak. 

That’s the unstuffy lens I want to bring to our premium content. Think: business journalism with a human heart and a bottom-line brain and stories that feel urgent, relatable and genuinely worth your time.

Our first piece (written by me) unpacks the business of bookselling in a post-algorithm age. A few other stories we’re working on — with the help of some of the country’s top writers — include a deep dive into Canada’s reverse mortgage boom, your cheat-sheet to the power players inside the Prime Minister's office, and the economics of a $30 salad at Mandy’s.

We’re proud of the work we’re doing, and we'd love for you to join us with a free 60-day trial subscription to Peak Premium and see it for yourself. Thank you for reading and supporting independent Canadian journalism.

PS: Got a topic you think we should cover? I want to hear from you! Reply to this email to let me know.

☕️ Start drinking more coffee. Debates among clinicians about the effects of coffee have been long-running, but a new scientific statement by the American Heart Association argues in favour of a few cups of joe. Per the group, downing between three and five eight-ounce cups daily (around 400 milligrams of caffeine) is actually linked to a lower risk of heart disease.

☀️ The ultimate tourism driver? The sun disappearing. On July 22, 2028, parts of New Zealand will experience a total solar eclipse. Several hotels in the town of Dunedin, which is directly in the path of the eclipse, have already sold out. It makes sense: the last time an eclipse would have been visible in Dunedin was 1163 — before humans had populated New Zealand.

🤖 This Canadian AI startup wants to get rid of CEOs. Skyfall AI — a startup from two of the co-founders of the foundational deep learning research lab Maluuba — wants businesses run “as autonomously as they can.” The company is out to prove that AI can do a better job at being a CEO than a human, and plans to acquire an existing business to act as a guinea pig.

😣 The scientist trying to unlock the secret of pain. Why do we say ‘ow?’ Science still isn’t sure. Canadian researcher Allan Basbaum has spent the past 50 years trying to track down the signal that tells the human body when it's in pain. Stephani Sutherland tells his story in this piece in Aeon, and, in doing so, presents an engrossing history of pain research.

The Correspondent did not have the makings of a bestseller: the slow-burn novel told in the form of letters by a 73-year-old protagonist was certainly deftly crafted by its author, Virginia Evans, but lacked the formula of today’s literary hits. It’s not a tradwife comeuppance story, or a sexy romp in a hockey rink locker room. It wasn’t anointed by Reese Witherspoon’s book club (in fact, it was turned down), or optioned for a film by Anne Hathaway. And yet a hit is exactly what it became. The Correspondent made the New York Times bestseller list and won its author the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. How?

Credit is due, largely, to booksellers. “The indie bookstores loved it, and the sellers started pressing it into people’s hands,” says Hilary McMahon, Evans’ literary agent. “They can be so essential to a book's success by cutting through the noise and the hype,” she adds. Booksellers working at indie stores have become quiet kingmakers of the literary world, with an ability to change an author’s career trajectory with something as simple as a staff pick or a book club. They are the sommeliers of publishing: professionals with great taste informed by passion and academic-grade expertise. Their rise says as much about how we spend as how we read.

Recent headlines and literacy stats will tell you that we are collectively reading less — one US survey revealed that fewer than half of American adults read a single book in 2022. “One woman in her 60s proudly told me she hadn't read a book since high school,” says Julie King-Yerex, co-owner of Magpie Books in Edmonton. 

And yet, the checkout line at Indigo inside the Toronto Eaton Centre often snakes 20 people long, past the high-margin keychains that say “Well Read” and towers of Yesteryear copies slapped with discount stickers. “Anywhere you look, book sales are up, and yet people are reading less,” says Paul MacKay, manager of King’s Co-op Bookstore in Halifax. “So it raises the question: what has the book become?” 

We’re living in a bifurcated world, where one half of the population seems increasingly uninterested in reading, while the other uses books not just for entertainment or self-improvement, but as symbols of identity and status. “A book shows your entrance into a specific group. If I post a picture of one, you know the image I want to present is that I’m the kind of person who reads bell hooks, for example,” says MacKay. Think of Asako Yuzuki’s misogyny send-up Butter, with its sunny yellow cover, or Belle Burden’s dishy divorce memoir Strangers. Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork has become the latest Instagram accessory for literary It girls (though the genre-bending book is a challenging text, calling into question how many of them have actually read it). These titles are algorithmically hot, propelled to the cultural fore by the intangible forces of social media and groupthink — and hardly in need of a bookseller’s stamp of approval. 

“I'm the kind of author who would pretty much be lost at sea without independent booksellers,” says Bobbi French, who describes her novels — which are set in Newfoundland and focus on ordinary, middle-aged women doing extraordinary things — as niche. French calls indie booksellers algorithm antidotes. “They don't care about matching up your taste for books with your toothpaste preference. They want you to be happy,” she says. It’s thanks to them that her “regional” novels have found fans all over Canada. “There’s no one book for everybody, but there has to be a way for people who have done the incredible amount of work to write a book to have some promotion,” French says. A chalkboard sign in front of Queen Books in Toronto’s east end echoes this sentiment in three words: “Booksellers NOT algorithms.” 

Book Bar, the newly opened bookshop that doubles as a café by day and cocktail bar by night in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, tells both sides of the story. The air inside the poshly renovated Victorian rowhouse smells faintly of carrot cake, thanks to a candle created in-house (and available to purchase). There's no shortage of buzzy, zeitgeist-y titles freshly plucked from independent and mainstream bestseller lists and housed on arch-shaped shelves or “tabled” in neat stacks. But look past Lena Dunham’s Famesick and Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men and you’ll find an eclectic mix informed by the tastes and instincts of Book Bar’s staff — who were all asked to submit a list of their favourite books to be stocked in the store so that even the bartenders can make easy, natural recommendations. There’s a section dedicated to small, local presses and two entire shelves for titles set in Toronto.

“The great thing about hand-selling books is telling someone how the book makes you feel. ‘This book reminded me of a hot summer night. It made me fall in love again. It reminded me of being 18 again,’” says Danny Roberts, Book Bar’s assistant operations manager, whose own tastes lean towards history, non-fiction, and Latin American writers. “Getting a recommendation into a customer's hands doesn't usually meet much resistance,” says Sarah Labrie, who oversees operations at Book Bar. “Nine times out of 10, if one of our staff puts something in someone's hand as a genuine recommendation, they will buy it. It’s a hugely important role,” she adds.

But under the painterly cover art of indie book darlings lies a fragile economic reality: book margins are brutal. A bookstore typically pays 60% of the sticker price you see on the back cover. "Our margins are so minimal," says King-Yerex, adding that customers are sometimes frustrated that her store can't price-match Amazon. "I do get it, but then our lights would be off," she says. Rising paper and shipping costs — worsened by a weak Canadian dollar — are only squeezing that margin further.

Thin margins don't just threaten bookstores — they impact what gets published in the first place. Easier-to-market bets muscle out the kind of quiet-hum lit-fic that made The Correspondent an unlikely success. "Books are getting shorter and more accessible, more propulsive," says McMahon. Instead of publishing and promoting new voices, attention goes to repackaging what's already proven to sell — books in the Heated Rivalry series, for instance, keep getting reissued in gilded collector's editions, as though they're Taylor Swift album variants. 

Beyond being champions of independent authors (or, to borrow French's term, "custodians of the word"), booksellers are in the service industry of vibes — the same one that gave us (actual) sommeliers for wine, "noses" for fragrance, and advisors for art collections. In each case, the pitch is the same: in a market oversaturated with choice, expertise becomes its own product. It also feels like a bet on the broader consumer mood. With affordability down and the stock market feeling increasingly divorced from most people's economic reality, a $30 paperback has become yet another facet of "little-treat" culture — and a virtuous one, at that. 

“We’ve done a lot of market research and reading is seen as an aspirational activity and people who are readers want to be known for it,” says Labrie. King-Yerex shares that her store sits on the same block as a therapist’s office and an ice-cream shop. “There are a few folks who will come after their appointment for a little pick-me-up, a little book treat,” says King-Yerex. Who needs a scoop of mint chocolate chip when there’s an escapist beach romance waiting next door?

At Book Bar, I decide to put the bookseller’s skills to the test and ask Roberts to recommend a gift to bring to a birthday dinner for a friend who’s obsessed with restaurants and moonlights as a food influencer. It takes Roberts less than a minute to suggest the memoir A Waiter in Paris. The next morning, my friend texts me an effusive thank-you. It turns out the book had been on his to-read list. A pairing no algorithm could make.

Canada opens drone marketplace for the Armed Forces. Led by the Department of National Defence and the Defence Investment Agency, the Defence Drone Initiative aims to slash procurement times by creating a pre-approved pool of companies to supply and service drones. Ottawa is bullish on drone defence technology given recent developments in global warfare. (Globe and Mail)

Canada and Ecuador sign free trade agreement. The countries signed a free trade deal that, once ratified, will eliminate nearly all tariffs on exports between the two. Ecuador is currently Canada’s sixth-largest merchandise trading partner in South America. Our main exports include wheat, lentils, and peas, while our main imports include fruits, flowers, and cacao. (Canada)

Facebook launches standalone Marketplace app. The new app, aptly called Seller, gives more in-depth tools to users who frequently list items on Marketplace. With more than 1.1 billion active users, Marketplace has become a vital growth engine for the legacy social media platform. In recent months, Facebook has released other standalone apps focused on Facebook Groups and vibecoding. (TechCrunch)

📡 What else is on our radar:

Charli XCX trades Brat Summer for something more jagged. After becoming one of the biggest names in pop two summers ago, it should come as no surprise that the ever forward-thinking artist would mix things up, but not even we could have expected a closing track featuring a spoken word outro about death from Canadian director David Cronenberg. 

This is all to say that if you press play on Music, Fashion, Film — Charli’s second album of the year following her Wuthering Heights soundtrack — expecting the dancefloor bangers of Brat, you’ll be disappointed. If you press play expecting glitchy, darkly tinted, guitar-forward bursts of energy, you will be pleased, and recognize it as another potential pop masterwork.  

🔥 What else is hot?

🎥 A Danish provocateur's first movie in a decade. Director Nicolas Winding Refn — best known for helming Drive… man, remember how cool Drive was? — is back from TV purgatory with a new movie with rising star Sophie Thatcher. Her Private Hell is a sexy sci-fi neo-noir awash in bright neon. Reviews have been mixed, but the visuals certainly look cool.

📕 A book about garbage that’s anything but. In Trash!, Canadian author and Montreal garbageman Simon Paré-Poupart dishes about his 20 years working in one of the dirtiest businesses around. This new translation brings his informative, enjoyable story to English readers.

📺 More time with some old (animated) friends. The new season of King of the Hill is out now on Disney+. In case you don’t know, the classic animated sitcom was rebooted last year and the results were shockingly good. We have high hopes the strong start will carry on in Arlen.

Each Weekend Reader, a friend of the letter shares, to paraphrase the song, a few of their favourite things. This week, our new VP of Content Liz Guber — who introduced herself up top — shares five things she would recommend to anyone and everyone.

We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider. No one writes about life — its joys, miseries, triumphs, and bitter grievances — quite like satirical cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider. He unpacks political divides, the messiness of wanting to be loved, and his relationship with his geriatric cat with brutal honesty and the kind of humour that makes you want to read entire passages out loud to whoever happens to be nearby. His second book is just as good, as is his Substack. To know me is to be forced to read his work.

Dior La Collection Privée Fragrances. One of the more glamorous aspects of my former life as a fashion magazine editor was getting to travel to impossibly luxurious destinations to stop and smell the literal roses — ones that grow in the South of France and make up Dior’s perfumes (the flower-pickers wear Dior-embroidered linen aprons, it’s wild). That experience makes Dior’s fragrance lineup feel extra special to me. My favourites are Rose Star (an otherworldly floral like you’ve never smelled before) and Cuir Saddle (smoky and musky yet somehow clean).

Xero Shoes sandals. My shoe wardrobe features two extremes: vertiginous Manolos that will give me Achilles tendinitis one day and practical, ironically stylish clunkers. These hippie sandals may be favoured by the barefoot running community, but they’re also very minimalist chic. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: the brand recently collaborated with cool-kid Toronto fashion label Literary Sport on a fancied-up (and pricier) take on its bestselling style. That collab has almost sold out, but I like the original $50 version just as much.

The Talented Mr. Ripley. This is my favourite movie of all time. It’s gained popularity in recent years, thanks largely to its peerless costumes, which are the ultimate embodiment of effortless Euro-summer style. But there’s more to this film than just eye candy (not to discount a pre-nanny-scandal and diminished-hairline Jude Law). The cast? Incredible. The plot? Completely engrossing. The ending? You’ll need to take a minute. 

Raisin. This is the app for natural wine lovers. It maps bottle shops, restaurants, and bars that are guaranteed to satisfy your craving for skin-contacts and Pet-Nats, worldwide. I love using it when I travel to find the hidden-gem spots approved by my fellow Salomon XT6-wearing, Sally Rooney-reading vibe-chasers.

Relax this morning with The Peak’s Saturday Crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who.

Then, use your lasso of truth to wrangle the fake news headline.

Keep scrolling for the answer.

Put headline #4 in the blender — it’s fake.