Can you avoid bed bugs?

I’m planning a trip to Paris in the spring, so a few weeks ago, when everyone was talking about a bed bug outbreak during Paris Fashion Week, I started to panic. Did I really want to lug my suitcase into a hotel knowing I might bring back a collection of blood-sucking bed bugs? Ick.

Turns out bed bugs are just as likely to wander into my house in Toronto. According to University of British Columbia entomologist Yasmin Akhtar, they’re pretty much everywhere in big Canadian cities: on subway seats, in the second-hand items we purchase online, and even in public library books. She says we’ve been suffering from an outbreak for two decades, since bed bugs began developing resistance to insecticides, but that the spread slowed down during the COVID years. Now that we’re back to travelling and hanging out in each other’s homes, we’re noticing more infestations.

Is there anything you can do to avoid inviting them into your home? Akhtar offers some practical advice in her Q&A with Maclean’s. Don’t lay your clothes down on your bed, she says, after you’ve returned home from being out and about. Wash stuff you get from thrift stores right away. Be really careful with items you buy off Facebook Marketplace. And when you travel, keep your luggage away from your bed and inspect it when you get home. Advice I’ll definitely use this spring in Paris.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

In our special AI issue, Nestor Gomez, chief technology officer at the Canadian Food Innovation Network, writes about how AI will optimize our food systems. “For the past decade, farmers and grocers have already been using AI’s predictive and analytical prowess to figure out what and how we eat,” Gomez writes. Soon, machine learning will detect missing nutrients, improve plants’ resilience to disease, and more.

The day Frankie Nelson’s baby was born, he felt pure love and joy—and the moment, which he shared with his husband, BJ, was captured in a photograph. But in 2016, Frankie and BJ found out that the photo had been featured in an anti-LGBTQ campaign in Italy. So they began a lawsuit that ran for seven years. “It’s an incredibly difficult and dangerous time to be an LGBTQ+ family. That’s why it’s important to us to be visible and vocal and show that families like ours exist,” says Nelson.

REAL ESTATE

For years, the neo-Gothic St. Mary the Virgin church stood empty on Toronto’s Westmoreland Avenue. But where most people saw a derelict building, developer and architect Asen Vitko saw an opportunity. Around $16 million later, he’d filled the church with 16 townhouse-style units, many of which have two or three bedrooms and exposed brick, stained lancet windows and rustic wooden ceilings.

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