Captain John’s has been at the foot of Yonge Street, floating in the waters of Lake Ontario, for 42 years now, and for 30 of them, John Letnik has called the ship his home. Now, as Karon Liu writes in his cover story about the floating restaurant in this week’s edition of The Grid, that’s all about to change: ”citing owed back taxes that exceed $500,000, the city has shut off the water supply to both the restaurant and [Letnik's] upstairs home. The port authority has detained the ship, meaning it cannot leave the harbour. On June 26, Waterfront Toronto, the group that owns the land where the neon red Captain John’s sign once hummed so brightly, gave him a month to clear out.”

As Liu writes, Letnik is “staying on this sinking ship as long as he can”—but his month is nearly up, and Letnik is about to find himself, for the first time in nearly a half-century, without a ship to command. Earlier this week, I talked with Liu about the end of Captain John’s, and asked him what it means for the 73-year-old man who’s given his life to it.

Listen below, or get the MP3 right here. Want to make sure you don’t miss the next podcast? Subscribe to it via RSS, or get it from iTunes.

The Grid Podcast is produced and edited by David Topping, with music from The Elwins.

Who needs a big lawn, anyway? In this week’s cover story of The Grid, Edward Keenan writes about being a Toronto dad; on the podcast, we talked about what’s so great about cities for kids, and what’s not so great—“disastrously bad,” even—about the suburbs.

Listen below, or get the MP3 right here. Want to make sure you don’t miss the next podcast? Subscribe to it via RSS, or get it from iTunes.

The Grid Podcast is produced and edited by David Topping, with music from The Elwins.

There’s no other place in Toronto quite like Comedy Bar. As Lara Zarum writes in the May 31 cover story of The Grid, the Bloorcourt comedy venue, opened in spring 2008 by comedian Gary Rideout Jr. and then-banker James Elksnitis, has welcomed all comers, from really, really long stand-up routines with lots of Kevin Sorbo jokes to Kevin Sorbo himself. As Pat Thornton—who, along with Rideout Jr., is a founding member of the sketch comedy troupe that calls Comedy Bar home, The Sketchersons—told Zarum, “the community has a clubhouse now.” In this week’s episode of The Grid Podcast, I asked Zarum what goes into making that clubhouse work, and why it’s so special.

Listen below, or get the MP3 right here. Want to make sure you don’t miss the next podcast? Subscribe to it via RSS, or get it from iTunes.

The Grid Podcast is produced and edited by David Topping, with music from The Elwins.

In your 20s or 30s? Neck-deep in debt? You’re not alone: Canadians owe $150.60 for every $100 we make, and young people seem to be especially bad at spending way too much and saving way too little. In this week’s cover story, The Grid associate editor Carley Fortune writes about the rise of “premature affluence,” and on the podcast this week, I asked Fortune what the hell is wrong with us, whether we’re doomed, and whether we can blame Toronto for this.

Listen below, or get the MP3 right here. Want to make sure you don’t miss the next podcast? Subscribe to it via RSS, or get it from iTunes.

The Grid Podcast is produced and edited by David Topping, with music from The Elwins.

Rufus Wainwright is all grown up, or something like it—he’s a new dad to a year-and-a-bit-old girl, Viva, and he’s about to get married to his partner of almost seven years, Jörn Weisbrodt, who Viva’s birth announcement named as the baby’s “Deputy Dad.” (The mom is Leonard Cohen’s daughter, Lorca.) But what’s even more out of character for the Montreal-bred Wainwright than having a kid and getting married is that he’s settled in Toronto, a city he’s on the record as hating. In The Grid this week, associate editor Sarah Liss writes about the rock star at 38; on the podcast, I asked her what brought Wainwright here, whether he’ll ever really love us, and what’s changed about the man and his music in the last decade and a half.

Listen below, or get the MP3 right here, to find out. Want to make sure you don’t miss the next podcast? Subscribe to it via RSS, or, as of this week, get it from iTunes.

The Grid Podcast is produced and edited by David Topping, with music from The Elwins.

It’s the inaugural episode of The Grid Podcast! This week, I talk to senior editor Edward Keenan, who wrote our March 29 cover story about two groups of people who pay attention to City Hall but never really talk to one-another: AM talk-radio hosts and their listeners, and Twitter users and their followers. If you’re not listening to talk radio, what are you missing? What’s Twitter got that talk radio doesn’t? And how can Toronto’s LRT-loving progressives hope to change the hearts and minds of average subway-loving Joes from Scarborough?

Listen below, or get the MP3 right here, to find out. Want to make sure you don’t miss the next podcast? Subscribe to it via RSS.

Music featured in this episode: “Stuck In The Middle” by Toronto’s own The Elwins. The podcast is produced and edited by David Topping.