Sure, Louis-Philippe Loncke has crossed Australia's massive Simpson Desert alone, on foot, but it takes a special kind of mettle to answer slightly more than Four Questions. Loncke stared fear in the face and answered a fifth question, just to prove he could. He talks to Thought Out Loud about why he ventures, the final frontier (it isn't space!), the benefits of solo travel, and giving out chocolate on Everest.

Six years after Canada afforded same-sex couples the right to legally marry, our social mores have remained intact. Despite some dramatic predictions from naysayers, Canadians have not started embracing bestiality and paedophilia, nor have heterosexual unions suffered (although, as the author points out, how gay marriage might have hurt conventional marriages is pretty unclear).

I needed to feature a palette-cleansing story to calm my violent urges after reading pages of ignorant rhetoric spouted by proponents of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, and here it is: introducing PaperPhone, in all its high-tech, futuristic glory!

Then there are the societal oddities. It’s not clear why Callenbach thought that a progressively ecological society would bring with it so much sexual liberation that not only would polyamory be encouraged, but monogamy discouraged.

In part two of her three-part analysis of nuclear power around the world, Kate Gilbert turns her attention to Canada's nuclear projects.

A few days after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan's eastern coast in March, 2011, Thought Out Loud's Kate Gilbert analyzed the threat of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima I.